Denis McDonough: “We are trying to balance both of those.”

You and your fellow Senators have kept the heat on and the delegation have kept the heat on us.

We are tracking with each of our visits, at the VISN level, what their spend every month, what their enrollment is every month, and what their FTE count is every month.

We want to make sure that we compete for the veterans' care, and we can compete on quality, and we want to make sure that veterans know that we're invested in their quality.

We had a very good couple of years hiring. I just said that we hired, net, 14,000 nurses in the last two and a half years.