Secretary McDonough

For over three decades now, you all have been doing a lot of heavy lifting to get services and benefits to Veterans who have earned them and deserve them. By the way, when COVID hit, County Veterans Service Officers continued to do that critical work, continued to be that critical connection.

The mission of EHRM has always been to create a platform that seamlessly delivers the best access and outcomes for our Vets, and the best experience for our providers.

Every person should have a home. Every Veteran should have a home. Veterans served this nation, made the enormous sacrifices they have made, gave what President Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion” so that no one would be homeless.

This day and this month are a celebration. A celebration of the one million lesbian, gay, and bisexual Veterans in the United States. A celebration of the nearly eight percent of VA employees who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, and the thousands of our employees who identify as transgender. A celebration of a country and VA that have come a long way toward equity and equality.

By 2040, minority Veterans are expected to represent 37 percent of the Veteran population. And by 2050, minorities will make up more than half of our Veteran population. Those numbers make clear that we must be far better prepared to answer the specific health care needs of our very diverse America.

VA education benefits like Survivors and Dependents Education Assistance, the GI-Bill, and Fry Scholarships can help with your education goals, college and graduate degree program costs, career training, certificate courses, career counseling, on-the-job training, and apprenticeships.

If we’re talking about Veterans’ legal challenges, by definition we’re talking about their health care, about their well-being. Because Veteran well-being is about more than health care. It’s about more than benefits. And as good as VA clinicians are—in fact, they are the best in the world, we’re seeing that every day—they can’t fix Veterans’ legal challenges. Only access to good legal assistance can do that.

We’ve got a lot of good ideas, a lot of good services, a lot of good programs, and a lot of good people. But what we need to strengthen is our collective effort, our collective engagement of ideas, services, programs, and people. Our goal is to continue and advance collaborative engagement unified by a single vision, strategy, a lot of heart.

We typically think of the people wounded in combat with great honor. We talk about their courage, about their resiliency, about their patriotism. They receive Purple Hearts—a medal worn with pride for the visible wounds we can see. There are no ceremonies honoring this wounding, sexual assault. There is no honor associated with being sexually assaulted, and there are no accolades for being violated. Rather, it’s a wounding that brings shame, a sense of dishonor.

Ms. Ruddock was a proud woman. She was proud of her heritage. She was proud to be an American. And she was rightly proud of her service. Once asked about her service, she simply stated—but we all know enormously understated—“I did what I was told, and I did what I had to do.”

We want and need good, strong, productive relations—open and transparent communications. And resetting means we all have the opportunity to reset our perspectives, together. That’s why we’re committed to fully implementing President Biden’s Executive Order on Protecting the Federal Workforce, an order he signed just two days after his inauguration.

With VetsInTech Academy’s free training in cybersecurity and web development, in data science and AI, in machine learning, cloud computing and more, it’s a tremendous resource for all the Veterans you’re reaching. Whether Veterans are just starting their transition or looking to join the tech industry from another sector, the Academy is an open door to a world of opportunities.