Beto O'Rourke

The veterans whom I serve in El Paso are waiting on average 480 days to have their claims resolved.

I strongly encourage you to support H. R. 1288 and urge you to schedule a markup soon.

We must not let their efforts and contributions go unrecognized while we still have a chance.

Let me repeat that - the non-partisan CBO has scored this bill as not impacting direct spending.

I believe this is a common sense approach, and I hope we can move this bill to the Floor as quickly as possible.

It is clear that we have to do everything we can to help the VA transition into a digital format.

I find the decision that the CBO has made frustrating and inconvenient, especially for the constituents I represent.

And so we are urgently exploring options to build a full-service acute care facility in the El Paso region to serve those 80,000 plus veterans.

The removal of the money for the HC-144s represents about one-third of the total reduction in funding that we see in this plan versus the 5-year plan from last year.

It is a place that is transforming lives in our community, giving people who otherwise would not have an opportunity, the chance to succeed.

I think it is important for us to move forward with objective, verifiable data.

I appreciate your belief that this makes us more secure. The concept is a good one. But we need facts if we are to make informed decisions going forward.

Was it worth $500 million? Is it worth an additional $3.2 billion, what you have seen so far?

If we slow down already long wait times even further, with a system that doesn't work or with a system whose effect on throughput we cannot ascertain, that to me is troubling, as well.

But without any data, without you being able to give me hard numbers, how could I support authorizing another dime for this program?

Somewhere close to 99 percent of those who are crossing our ports of entry into the United States are crossing for legitimate purposes, have the appropriate documentation, and, again, are huge net contributors to our economy and to our…

How do we communicate with people who are crossing into the United States?

The people who are using our ports of entry coming into our community, the community I represent in El Paso, Texas, feel that same way.

We also have a bill that we have filed, The Faster Filing Act, that will require the VA to publish the resolution times for different methods of filing a claim.

I really appreciate your efforts and I commend the seriousness and tenacity with which you are pursuing these very ambitious goals.

I feel that you and General Shinseki, Secretary Shinseki have heard that and are responding to it and I really appreciate it.

To illustrate the problem a different way, in El Paso, the community I represent, the University of Texas at El Paso treats its students from Ciudad Juarez as though they are in-State tuition students.

We have got to get it right. We have got to address this, and we have got to address it fairly rapidly to get it right to secure this country.

It seems like there was some fundamental breakdown in the week following Boston.

I also want to tell you that I appreciate your comments about the difficulty in balancing greater scrutiny with the community policing that you must do in order to be successful.