This week, the House passed and handful of helpful bills (the Homeless Veterans’ Reintegration Programs Reauthorization Act, the Vulnerable Veterans Housing Reform Act, the
Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business Relief Act, the Ensuring VA Employee Accountability Act and the Veteran’s I.D. Card Act). That last bill has been of particular interest to veterans in our community, as it would permit the VA to issue veterans an ID card proving they are veterans. Right now, if you hope to qualify for a veteran discount, a lot of times you have to tote around a DD-214. That’s not practical.
VA funding has also done well. In the last six years, the VA’s budget has increased by about 73 percent. The funding bill we passed a few weeks ago provides $163 billion for the VA’s budget next year. To put that in perspective, Florida’s entire state budget for roads, education, healthcare, etc for the 2014 fiscal year was about $74 billion. The VA has the resources it needs. What remains is largely a question of leadership and management.
Congress allocated billions of extra dollars in the wake of the Phoenix VA scandal that was designated specifically for efforts to reduce the VA’s wait times – new infrastructure, more physicians, medical staff and so on. But on VA’s end, very little has happened. From that pot of $15 billion, the VA still has roughly $14 billion and change left to allocate. We’ve brought in the head of a Fortune 500 company to bring some private sector know-how to the agency, but still only one person ended up getting fired for the scandal about secret waitlists and records manipulation at more than a hundred VA facilities. Congress has tried to help things along some more by passing historic reforms that give the Secretary of the VA the ability to fire underperforming executives, but that authority is only worth so much if it isn’t used. Fortunately, because Congress controls the money directly, we’ve been able to put a block on bonuses within the agency.
Perhaps most crucially though, most members of Congress invest a lot of personal time and staff resources in trying to help individual veterans with specific VA problems. If we hear that somebody is experiencing excessive wait times, for instance, most of us will crack heads until that situation is resolved. If somebody is getting the run around about a benefits issue, we won’t hesitate to step in. And in a system of government where legislative victories are earned slowly over time and agencies are otherwise slow to act, being able to break the logjam for an individual or a family with a problem can often be the most gratifying part of the job.
Many of you have probably heard me say this before, but if you know of anybody who is being ignored by a federal agency, I hope you will feel free to give them my contact info. All Americans deserve a government that is as accountable to them as the Founders intended, but this is perhaps most especially true for those Americans who have volunteered to sacrifice themselves in service to the rest of us. It is an honor to be able to go to bat for you. Don’t fight the bureaucracy alone.
Congressman Rich Nugent represents The Villages in the U.S. House of Representatives.
