Jim Inhofe: “let me mention something that is very significant to me personally. I remember it was 2 years ago today that I picked up…”

“let me mention something that is very significant to me personally. I remember it was 2 years ago today that I picked up USA TODAY, and in a USA TODAY article, they singled out my State of Oklahoma and said that we are not treating our veterans right. We were in shock at that time. In fact, the article detailed some really appalling things that were going on and were not going on in my State of Oklahoma. There were things the inspector general reported during the Obama administration that we had no way of knowing about. We seem to have more veterans per capita in Oklahoma. One of the reasons is we have five major military establishments, and Oklahoma is a great place to live, so a lot of them retire there. They were not getting the help they need, and they were not getting the treatment to the highest standards that were available. This isn't how we take care of veterans in Oklahoma. Senator Lankford and I and two of the House Members worked on this and talked to regional Veterans' Administration leadership. We talked to the veterans. We talked to whistleblowers. And we identified three key problems that we needed to fix. This is interesting because these are three problems in my State of Oklahoma, but they would be the same thing in Nebraska or any other State because it is not just in our State of Oklahoma. The first one was that the VA couldn't fire bad employees. This is always a problem.…”