Jon Tester

Well, I appreciate all your work. Just a closing comment, and this is not why I came here at all, but the Census figure because of technology should be going down, not continually going up.

Taking the taxpayers off the hook and getting it out of conservatorship is really important.

Move it to April 15th.

The Black Feet Tribe just declared a state of emergency because they received five feet of snow last night.

I say to Senator Durbin, there has been a lot of talk about the fact that the number of Cabinet appointees were much higher in the Obama administration than they are now. Could you take us back 8 years ago? I mean, we just confirmed a lady…

VA job applications are down by about one-third. Is that correct?

Do you believe that beating the hell out of the entire VA workforce is productive?

There has been some concern by some folks who are paying attention that the VBA side may suffer with you as Secretary of the VA.

The third-party administrators are worse, truthfully, at least in our case.

What can we do to hold them more accountable for their contractual obligations to the VA and to the taxpayer and to the veterans?

There should not be a lot of intermediary steps there.

I mean, that makes no sense whatsoever.

What we really want to do is make sure that the veteran can get to the services that they need in health care in a timely fashion.

Thank you. David, we look forward to working together to make this confirmation happen as quickly as you can get your stuff in.

I do not want any veteran in this country in harm.

You will have to choose whether to pursue what you think is best for veterans or what the President tells you is best for veterans.

If anyone wants to extend the life of that program, without also taking the steps needed to make it work better for veterans, you are going to have to go through me.

The wait time scandals that arose from Phoenix, back in 2014, were something that none of us could tolerate.

I appreciate you accepting the responsibility that comes with the duties of the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

We need to get rid of the bad [employees] and get them out of the system.

There are a lot of folks that are going to be really in life-and-death situations.

I look forward to working with you on these issues. I think they are critically important.

If they do not have the dough, what other options do they have?

If you want to talk about at-risk kids, they are all Native Americans----

I am willing to listen to ideas and try to move forward.