On the recordMay 31, 2012
I am not going to take the full 5 minutes. My amendment is pretty simple. It will prohibit funds from being paid as bonuses to employees that are classified in the Senior Executive Service. What we found when we looked at this, the Veterans' Affairs Committee held a hearing on this, on the budget, in February of this year. The Secretary of the VA testified that their budget request was held accountable for the program results. Of course, one of the issues that came up, Mr. Chairman, was the enormous bonuses and awards that were given out to VA employees. I think, like many of us here in the House, we are concerned about bonuses when we have so many problems in this economy, high employment, and also we have an unmanageable backlog of cases, an extremely long wait for our veterans to see mental health professionals. Of course, the VA has a history of poor contracting process and oversight. For example, at the Miami VA Health Center, veterans may have been exposed to HIV/AIDS due to poor sterilization procedures down there. Despite these poor records, they are giving out huge bonuses for simple things like suggestions, foreign language award, travel, savings incentives, referral bonuses. In fact, on recruitment and relocation retention alone, almost 60,000 recipients received over 450,000 in cash bonuses. My simple amendment is saying enough is enough. What we want to do is say all of government should make a sacrifice, particularly the VA.…
