Steve Buyer: “I am disappointed that coming out of the conference with the House and the Senate, the language that the House adopted…”

“I am disappointed that coming out of the conference with the House and the Senate, the language that the House adopted has in fact been changed. We were seeking to have an independent commission to review what I find to be the very poor culture that is in the Nation's second largest agency, that of the VA. There is not any Member of this House that has taken on the issue of race and gender that I have over the past year with what occurred at Aberdeen in sexual misconduct in the military. When we turned our eyes upon the VA itself, we began to see a culture problem within the VA, a system whereby the victims were being revictimized through the Office of General Counsel. We saw individuals in their leadership kind of give a wink and a nod to a hostile workplace.”