Political Quotes

“Reserving the right to object, let me first say I appreciate the work of my colleague, the chairman of the VA Committee, where I am the ranking Democrat. Chairman Moran and I work together in a very bipartisan way on a lot of legislation. I would like to support his resolution, but we received it only about an hour ago, and so I have been unable to check with my colleagues on this side as to whether there is any objection among them. Second, although I would like to support it, I have to say no, not because of something it has but what it lacks, and that is, it fails to mention anything about the Trump-Musk assault on the VA and its workforce and particularly the negative impacts of those actions on veterans' mental health and suicide prevention. It fails to call for restoring the VA's skilled professional workforce that is necessary to provide sufficient healthcare, particularly mental health care. I should also note that prior to Secretary Collins and DOGE, wait times for care--before they took over and seized control, wait times actually decreased in 2024 while the number of new patient appointments increased by 11 percent. So this idea that somehow the VA was wholly failing before this administration is exactly the opposite of reality. The time to process each claim actually decreased. The VA processed 116,192 veterans' appeals, representing a 12.5-increase over last year's record. Those are claims for disability and compensation.…”