Cliff Stearns: “all of us know that here on the Republican side we are trying to fight to increase the amount of money we give to the…”

“all of us know that here on the Republican side we are trying to fight to increase the amount of money we give to the Veterans Administration because the President's budget was a flat line budget which did not provide enough money and particularly the fact that there are many more cases of hepatitis C. And we hope to increase cost of living for a lot of the employees, but I wanted to call my colleagues' attention to a GAO audit that was performed on the Veterans Affairs on July 22 that found over the next 5 years as much as $20 billion could be wasted. And I think that is a concern for all of us here in Congress. The Veterans Health Administration is spending one of every four medical care dollars just caring for buildings that are old and obsolete. They spend it to operate and maintain these major delivery locations, but these locations have very low occupancy and a lot of unused space. So as I mentioned earlier, there is $20 billion that could be saved over the next 5 years.”