A key Senate appropriator on Thursday criticized the Department of Veterans Affairs’ request for billions of dollars in additional funding for 2017, despite failing to fully resolve several major problems at the agency even after Congress has already boosted the VA’s budget in the last few years.
“The answer to every VA problem is not, ‘give us more money, give us more flexibility,'” said Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., at a hearing on the VA budget. “We need to fix the VA’s corruption culture and its all to often poor business performance.”
“We also need to talk about accountability, and veterans first, and not bureaucrats,” he added.
That was Kirk’s message at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on military construction, veterans affairs and related agencies, at which VA Secretary Bob McDonald testified.
The VA has been under siege for the last two years, after it was revealed that the VA was systematically denying veterans health coverage, and covering it up by manipulating documents purporting to show how long veterans were waiting. Congress passed a law aimed at making it easier to fire the officials involved, but very few have been officially fired, and many more have been allowed to retire or more to other VA locations.
The VA has also mismanaged construction funding, and continues to allow employees to claim performance bonuses and even six-figure moving allowances despite complaints that the VA is not fixed yet. Whistleblowers who have tried to alert Congress to these and other problems have been targeted for retaliation, and in some cases have been subjected to monitoring at VA headquarters.
The VA’s budget in the current fiscal year is $163 billion, and the Obama administration is proposing an increase of nearly $20 billion, to $182.3 billion.
McDonald said that proposed increase, which is unlikely to be approved by Congress in full, would increase discretionary spending by $3.6 percent, or nearly 5 percent.
