Review of the Fiscal Year 2024 Budget and 2025 Advance Appropriations Requests for the Department of Veterans Affairs

Chairman Tester, Ranking Member Moran, and distinguished Members of the Committee—thank you. VA will be strengthened by this Committee’s work. I attach great importance to our relationship, and I pledge to each of you my candor and transparency.

Let me begin with the story of a Gulf War and Marine Corps Vet. I’ll call him Gary. Gary deployed to the Persian Gulf three times. Still, after he was honorably discharged nearly 30 years ago, Gary assumed he wasn’t eligible for VA care—not until recently, when Gary heard from some fellow Vets at his local VFW post about their positive experiences with VA.

So Gary started his claims process right away. As part of his Compensation and Pension exam, Gary had a colonoscopy that showed he had previously undiagnosed colon cancer. The PACT Act covers that cancer, along with gastrointestinal cancers of any type. As a result, Gary’s claim is service-connected. He’s covered. Most importantly, he’s getting the VA care and treatment that he needs, earned, and deserves. Gary said, “This whole process probably saved my life.”

We’re hearing from many Vets who’ve shared similar stories since we’ve implemented the PACT Act. Today, VA is delivering more care and more benefits to more Vets like Gary than at any other time in our nation’s history. Vets had over 115 million clinical encounters in the past year, with nearly 40 million in-person VA appointments, over 31 million tele-health appointments, and 38 million community care appointments.

When it comes to benefits, we set a record last year with over 1.7 million claims completed. And we’re on track to break that record this year. Since the PACT Act was signed last August, Veterans and survivors have filed over 1.6 million claims—29.7% more than the same period last year. Moreover, Vets have filed more than 550,000 claims for toxic exposure-related benefits under the PACT Act. To date, over 3 million Vets have received toxic exposure screenings. And VA has awarded over $1 billion in earned benefits to Vets, their families, and survivors who filed PACT Act-related claims.

Veterans deserve our very best. And with the President’s proposed budget, we can continue serving them as well as they have served all of us. 

This year’s budget request is $325.1 billion, the largest investment in U.S. history for Veterans, their families, caregivers, and survivors. This year alone, that will mean:

But this budget is about more than numbers. It’s about mental health and preventing Veteran suicide, our top clinical priority, which gets $16.6 billion in this budget. It’s about ending Veteran homelessness, which gets $3.1 billion in this budget. It’s about supporting health care for women Veterans, who get over $1.2 billion in this budget. And it’s about restoring VA’s severely aging infrastructure. At nearly $10 billion of investment, this budget recognizes that the traditional approach to infrastructure funding has fallen far short of providing Veterans with modern environments of care.

No investment is more critical to our success than the investments in the people we hire and retain here at VA. So we’re increasing hiring, quickly onboarding staff, and incentivizing retention. Overall, we’ve onboarded nearly 33,000 new people at VHA this year, on our way to our goal of 52,000 new VHA employees. In fact, we hired more people at VHA in the first half of this fiscal year than in any previous year. We’ve hired 6,568 Registered Nurses, 1,216 Licensed Practical Nurses, and 1,768 Nursing Assistants—more hires in these three critical occupations than at any time in the past 20 years.

Meanwhile, VBA’s been holding regional hiring fairs to interview thousands of applicants. We extended same-day job offers to nearly 1,100 attendees, putting us on track to fill all 1,871 of the authorized PACT Act positions. Those successes mean more earned benefits to Vets and new records in delivering outcomes to Veterans. Last month we completed, for the first time ever, over 9,000 claims in a single day. We completed over 8,000 claims in a day 53 different times this year, a milestone we have reached only six times in the rest of VA’s history. And on April 14^th, our VBA team completed its 1 millionth Compensation and Pension claim this fiscal year—a full month sooner than our record-breaking pace last year. That’s a testament to our incredible VA team, the best workforce in the federal government.   

I’m talking about people like Phillip Lyman. Phillip grew up watching his own father, Bennie Lyman Jr., caring for Vets at the Tuskegee Campus of the Central Alabama VA. Inspired by his father’s service, Phillip chose to follow in his footsteps. Today, Phillip and Bennie have served Vets for a combined 80 years at the Tuskegee Campus. That’s the kind of deep devotion that characterizes VA’s people. Thank you. I look forward to your questions.