VA Secretary press conference June 25, 2024

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary):  Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us for this month’s press conference. Before I turn it over to the boss, I wanted to just share that we just hit the 80th anniversary of the GI Bill. And in honor of the 80th anniversary of the GI Bill, we want to invite all of you to attend a celebration Thursday–this Thursday from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time in the Holman Lounge at the National Press Club here in DC for that celebration. If you are not here in DC, no worries, we also will live stream the event. And to find out how to get that link to the live stream, just give my office a call or be on the Veterans Benefits Administration social media channels and you’ll be able to find that information to join the live stream of this celebration of the 80th year of the GI Bill. With that, I’ll go ahead and turn it over to Secretary McDonough.

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary):  Terrence, thanks so much. And it’s great to join everybody. Thank you for your patience and your flexibility with me, y’all. I was exposed to COVID late Sunday night. I don’t have COVID yet, but I’m still within the window. So, I thought it made sense to not risk unnecessarily exposing you all if, in fact, I end up contracting COVID. But I’ll know that in the next day or so. So, thanks for your flexibility.

Today, our topic we wanted to spend some time on is our reaction at VA to the ransomware/cyber attack over the course of the last many months associated with UnitedHealth Group or with Change Healthcare. And we wanted to update you on the impact that we experienced as a result of that attack and then the steps that we have taken at VA to address those impacts, to mitigate those impacts, and then, of course, to constantly be learning from each of these developments so as to ensure that we are keeping our networks and therefore our Veterans and their private information as safe as possible. We’re very mindful, obviously, in healthcare, but also across VA services, but particularly in healthcare, that it’s a high risk environment. And that’s why we’ve endeavored to make sure that we’re keeping you up to date and keeping our partners on Capitol Hill and of course, our Veterans and our VSOs up to date on how we’ve been progressing against these challenges because part of our making sure that we’re doing everything we can in this very high risk area is communicating very clearly with our teammates. And so, joining me today to help us in that effort are Lynette Sherrill, who’s the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of OINT, and she’s also our Chief Information Security Officer. So, we’ll hear from Lynette first, and then we’ll hear from Ian Komarovsky, the Executive Director of VHA’s Strategic Investment Management. Lynette, over to you.

Lynette Sherrill (Deputy Assistant Secretary, Information, Security, and CIS Officer):  Good morning, and thank you, Secretary McDonough, for the time today to talk about our response to the Change Healthcare incident. First of all, I’d like to start out by saying that VA’s top priority is to ensure that our systems and data for over 640,000 end users and the 19.8 million Veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors is secure. As you all are aware, and as Secretary McDonough stated, Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, a clearinghouse for medical insurance claims transactions and their healthcare related services, notified the VA that they were impacted by a cybersecurity incident on February 21st of 2024. This incident was a ransomware attack that we’ve seen throughout the healthcare sector. VA took immediate action. Our security operations center immediately disconnected all of VA networks from Change Healthcare and completed an in-depth analysis across the enterprise for any irregularities or malicious activity related to the incident and found none. The vendor cyber incident has affected numerous VA information technology functions, leading to temporary disruptions in inbound prescription orders, configuration of some picture archiving and communication systems, and a record locator system. Additionally, it also took offline clearinghouse services that supported community care claims, revenue operations, and payment processing. While the restoration of services is still ongoing, we have restored many impacted capabilities, ensuring Veteran access to care has always been available. It is important to highlight the threat landscape that the secretary mentioned in the healthcare sector is an ever evolving and constantly increasing landscape over the past couple of years, with ransomware attacks hitting several healthcare corporations across America, as we’ve all seen in the news. And with that, VA remains vigilant and is actively monitoring as we understand the sophistication of the adversary that we’re facing. And as this outage, VA remains vigilant–apologies. VA remains vigilant and is actively monitoring for any additional threats or activity. So, with that, I would like to thank you all for your time and also now hand it over to Mr. Ian Komrowski, who’s been my partner in our VA response to this. He is VHA’s Executive Director of Strategic Investment Management and he will be able to talk about the impact to VHA operations that this incident has had. Ian.

Ian Komorowski (Executive Director, Strategic Investment Management):  Thank you, Lynette. Good morning, everyone. Thank you to all who are attending here in person and online. As you can see, this is a whole VA approach. I definitely appreciate, and VHA leadership appreciates, the partnership with OIT, both with their original response as well as the work that’s been undertaken to reconnect the technology and the services to allow operations to continue. I would like to reiterate for everybody that since February 21st, there remain no known adverse patient events and there’s no known impact to patients. Our care to Veterans remains active both at our VHA facilities and through our community care providers. As Lynette mentioned, there are a number of areas that this impacted. Three of the ones that are fully operational are the inbound electronic prescribing, the picture archiving communication systems or PAC systems that are in five of our VISNs, as well as the services for the Commonwealth Information Exchange Network which allows providers to see information that’s shared by some of our community care providers. In the community care space and our non-network provider space, most of our services for medical, dental, and pharmacy claims have been restored. However, due to the interruption, there had been some backlog in our claims processing and time taken underway to process those claims and the invoices that we receive from our community care providers.

I’ll start first with our prescription insurance billing service. There are actually two instances of something called Rx Connect from Change Healthcare, one of which that connects to our VistA sites. That has been restored and we have processed the majority of the prescription backlog. For the VistA sites, t was restored on May 1st. We have had originally approximately 1 million backlog prescriptions that we bill other insurance for. We expect to clear the backlog by the end of August and have the revenue from those insurance providers by October. Similar to the EHRM sites, there’s actually a separate connection where–that was restored on June 11th. There were about 35,000 claims at our seven EHRM sites and those also expect to receive the revenue for those claims from the insurance providers by October. We also act as a payer. So, when the clearinghouse was disrupted in February, there were about 6 million invoices from our third party administrators, the two vendors that we have, that were paused for about ten weeks. During this time, the TPAs actually continued to pay providers. So, Veterans were receiving care, providers were receiving payments, but we still needed to pay the TPAs. Additionally, there are some impacted family member programs such as CHAMP VA and Spina Bifida that needed a direct connection to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That was restored in late May. We are currently processing about 1.1 million claims for those family programs and expect to have those processed by the end of July. Finally, we have some providers that contract directly with VA. They were not able to submit electronically for about five to eleven weeks, depending on the type of provider. We’ve restored that connection. We’ve processed about 91% of those claims, and we will have full services and full payment operations for those providers reestablished or back to normal by February.

Finally, I’d like to close with the fact that we do not yet know the extent of the data that was extracted. We have not been informed of that by Change Healthcare. We have been informed that we are not currently an attributed entity, which means they cannot correlate the data that was extracted to anything specific to VA. So, the knowledge of data was exfiltrated is that it doesn’t fully correlate to VA. As you heard both from the secretary and from Lynette, we remain committed to being transparent with Veterans. You all in the press are part of that, and we appreciate the opportunity to discuss this incident with you and share the information with our Veterans and other stakeholders with VA. Thank you.

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary):  Thank you, Lynette. Thank you, Ian. With that, we’ll open the floor to questions. Patricia.

Patricia Kime (Military.com):  Thank you all for doing this. Mr. Secretary, I actually have a question about the caregiver program. It’s my understanding that the proposed regulation was posted or sent to OMB in February, but then it might have been pulled back, and I’m trying to find out, like, where it is in the process and sort of the content of a meeting that was held June 13th about the new policy. Can you give us a timeline for when we’ll see the new policy and, you know, whose desk it’s sitting on right now and why the holdup?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary):  Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much for the question. Obviously it’s a major priority for us, as it has been throughout, especially now that caregivers for every generation of Veterans are now qualified for the caregiver program. I’d have to refresh my memory about a meeting on June 13th, but I can tell you that the program itself has been the subject of active deliberation going back to when I first arrived here, frankly, but also in particular going back to the two falls–two autumns ago when we said that we would suspend any further characterizations of new membership or suspensions of existing memberships of Legacy participants until we’re able to review the whole program with a timeline of fall 2025, which is obviously next fall being when we begin that process again. So, we’re still on that timeline. A meeting on June 13th, again, I’d have to refresh my memory what that meeting was. For example, did I participate or who did participate? I’ve been an active participant in many meetings on this over the course of the last several years, so it wouldn’t surprise me if I were. And then in terms of where precisely–sorry. Just some additional things we’ve done is, we’ve also subjected the various courses of action that we’ve considered to a kind of review by a panel of experts, for example, for them to give us reaction to that range of proposals that we’re considering. And so, whether it sits on a particular desk at the moment, Patty, I just don’t know the answer to that, but I’m happy to own responsibility and accountability for getting that done on time and consistent with the Administrative Procedures Act, and done in a way consistent with, as we’ve been trying since we began implementing the expanded program, consistent with the intent of Congress and the intent of the president, that as many caregivers as possible can participate in the program.

Patricia Kime (Military.com):  Just a follow-up to that. We’re on kind of a tight timeline for that, and it’s my understanding that everybody who’s involved will be assessed. But the hiring pause or whatever it is, I understand the caregiver program is among the list of things that cannot replace people or hire new people. Are you going to be able to process all the assessments and all that stuff on the same timeline? Like, are you facing the October 25 timeline, and do you feel like that’s something you can handle?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): Yeah, if we have any instinct that we’re gonna change that timeline–again, we’re still deliberating, I think, on the final contents of any proposed rule, and then we’d obviously put that out pursuant to the Administrative Procedures Act. And that’s why I think you’ll see us all be very careful in not characterizing the content of that, any proposed rule. And so, if we have any instinct that the timeline is going to slip, we’ll obviously communicate that with you guys in the press, but obviously communicate

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary):  You there, Ellen? We’ll come back to Ellen and–

Ellen Milhiser (Congressional Synopsis):  I am. Sorry, having difficulties. Hi. Thanks for doing this. Back to the Change Healthcare issue. Community providers in general were complaining that they were having a hard time keeping their doors open while the payments were being held back. Has the VA done anything to help any of their community providers stay financially solvent, like paying ahead? And have you all had any providers who’ve had to stop seeing Veterans as a result?

Ian Komorowski (Executive Director, Strategic Investment Management):  Yeah. Thank you for the question. We are not able to pay ahead, but one of the things that we’ve been able to do is able to triage payments and the priority of them. So as providers have reached out with questions and concerns, we can resequence the payments, particularly for those that are the non-network providers. So, I think–so beyond that, we haven’t been able to–

Ellen Milhiser (Congressional Synopsis):  Are you aware of any providers that have had to go out of business or anything?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): Hey, Ellen–

Ellen Milhiser (Congressional Synopsis): Or are just no longer available for Veterans. Yes, Secretary. I’m sorry.

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): I think one thing that’s worth keeping in mind is, as Ian briefed in his opening comments, we were in a position, you know, he just highlighted the non-network providers, right. And that system has been the one that’s been back online the longest, and we’re working through those. And I forget the timeline that you gave us, Ian, as to when those would be completed. Remember, though, that overwhelmingly, the biggest amount of assist–of community care referrals are through our networked providers. And there, in our–in the cases of networked providers, our third party administrators, there’s two of them, they split up generally speaking, the five regions that we have, they were able to make payments throughout. So, and we are now catching them back up. So, when Ian briefed the catch-up that we are, we have been able to successfully do, and the work that’s yet to be done, that is not to the community–that’s not to the community providers. That’s actually to make the TPAs, the third party administrators, whole. So, while I don’t, you know, Ian can give us a sense as to whether we have any evidence of any of our providers in the network or even non-network providers having to stop seeing Veterans, my general sense is I have not seen that feedback in my ongoing close kind of consideration of this issue going back to February. But Ian, do we have any evidence of either non-network providers who are not able to meet payroll or meet revenue issues? Or network providers?

Ian Komorowski (Executive Director, Strategic Investment Management): Yeah, we have no evidence of that either for the community care network or the non-network providers. And as far as we’re aware, all Veterans have been able to see their community providers.

Ellen Milhiser (Congressional Synopsis): The payments back to the TPAs, does the government pay interest on that?

Ian Komorowski (Executive Director, Strategic Investment Management): I would have to take that back.

Ellen Milhiser (Congressional Synopsis): Okay. Thanks. Thank you for the answers.

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): Thanks, Ellen.

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary):  Orion.

Orion Donovan-Smith (The Spokesman Review):  Thank you, Terrence. Ms. Sherrill and Mr. Komorowski, I’d like to ask you first, just to make sure I understand the difference between the VistA sites and the EHRM sites with respect to Change Healthcare. I remember you said payments would get to the EHRM sites in October. Is that right? And could you just remind me what the VistA sites would be.

Ian Komorowski (Executive Director, Strategic Investment Management): So, there’s one real uniqueness between the EHRM sites and the VistA sites, and that’s with the Rx Connect Service. So, for our VistA sites we directly utilize that service. And there were, I believe I recall, about one million prescription claims that we’ve now almost caught up billing other health insurance for. Oracle Health directly contracts with Change Healthcare for a separate instance of Rx Connect. That was connected later to the EHRM sites, but the prescription volume was significantly smaller. It was about 35,000 claims. And we also believe that the revenue for those prescriptions will be recovered or received by October.

Orion Donovan-Smith (The Spokesman Review):  Okay. And will it or has that difference caused any difference in patient care between the two sets of facilities?

Ian Komorowski (Executive Director, Strategic Investment Management): No.

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): Okay.

Orion Donovan-Smith (The Spokesman Review):  Thank you. Mr. Secretary, if I could ask you, I hope you keep feeling well and appreciate you being cautious there. It’s funny not having you in the room, I don’t know where to look. But I just want to make sure I understand the timeline–the latest timeline on the EHRM rollout resumption. I know you’ve said in congressional hearing that there would be discussions by the end of this fiscal year. We’ve heard that perhaps sometime next fiscal year is when that would resume. How precisely can you forecast that for us?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): Yeah, thanks for the question. I don’t have any new timeline verbiage to give you. I just repeat what I said in public testimony and the team continues to work on that.

Orion Donovan-Smith (The Spokesman Review):  And is it accurate for me to say that the plan at this stage is to resume the rollout sometime in fiscal ‘25?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): I think again, I want to not go farther than I’ve gone in public testimony on this, Orion. And where I’ve gone and what I’ve said to you in the room as well is that, you know, we have every anticipation that we’ll be in discussions about getting out of the reset by the end of this fiscal year.

Orion Donovan-Smith (The Spokesman Review):  Getting out of the end of it by the end of this fiscal year. Okay.

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): I want to be careful. I want to make sure I’m not saying something different. I’m trying to pull up precisely what I said.

Orion Donovan-Smith (The Spokesman Review):  Okay. I’ll refer back to–

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary):  What I want to say is precisely what I said in the public testimony.

Orion Donovan-Smith (The Spokesman Review):  Got it. Thank you. And one other question on that. I just wonder what the–if you can tell us which sites might be first. I know the plan prior to the reset was, I think, Saginaw. Is that still the plan for the next go-live?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary):  I don’t have anything for you on that. And I know one of the things we’ve been working on is making sure that as all this comes into sharper focus based on the experience of our great providers and based on the experience of our Veterans in the go-live sites, that we’ll give you that full briefing then. But I don’t have anything to front run you on that now.

Orion Donovan-Smith (The Spokesman Review):  Great. And with the new eleven month option period in the contract, I understand that part of the changes in that contract were to ensure that Oracle Health has met certain benchmarks in terms of uptime, things like that. Can you tell us if there was any financial penalty in the prior one year period because of missed targets?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): You know, I don’t have precision at my fingertips on financial penalties in the prior year. I know there were financial penalties. So, if you don’t mind, Orion, why don’t we take that so we get you precise information on that question.

Orion Donovan-Smith (The Spokesman Review): That’s fine. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary): We’ll go to Quil. Good morning, Quil.

Quil Lawrence (NPR):  Hey, good morning, everybody. I hope you continue to feel well, Mr. Secretary. I’m just getting–getting over COVID myself. It’s going around, sleeping in the basement. No fun. Can I get you to comment on the Omnibus Bill, the Elizabeth Dole Act? You know, the Veteran Service Organizations have been very vocal about wanting to push this through, particularly what can you say to members of, you know, DAV and PVA who are so desperate to get this bill through? What, from the VA’s perspective, would this bill be damaging in terms of private care expense?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): Yeah, thanks very much, Quil and I’m glad you’re feeling better. And there’s no doubt that COVID is going around, just based on my personal experience, too. I think I just want to make sure that I’m not getting ahead of the White House because the White House generally enunciates an administration position on a bill. So that’s my first comment. My second comment is I love talking to DAV and PVA and all of our VSO colleagues, and so I won’t comment to them through you, I’ll just comment directly to them. Third, what I can say about the Omnibus Bill is something that you and I–or that I’ve said in this room or in that room last month, which is there are a lot of provisions in that bill and all of them–none of them come with new funding. And we’ve had a lot of discussions about making sure that we’re meeting all the demands for VA in the context of the budget agreement. It’s a very generous budget agreement. And, you know, I have been clear to you guys in the past that I would be concerned about a bunch of new authorizations, additional authorizations, additional program creations without additional money to help make sure that we can implement those in a Veteran centered way. So, I won’t go any farther than that.

Quil Lawrence (NPR):  Some of the VSOs are saying that there’s misinformation about this bill going around that’s leading to opposition. Anything you would like to dispel?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): I don’t know what anybody’s referring to by misinformation. And that’s why, again, I want to be careful that I don’t add anything new to the record beyond my concern about new programs that don’t come with new money. And as I said, if I know that we’re in direct contact with the VSOs, and I have been in direct contact with them on many legislative priorities, so we’ll stay in close touch with them as well.

Quil Lawrence (NPR):  Could you give me a version of what you’re telling them? They’re going to be out on the hill this afternoon. And what would your response be when I put some of their voices on the air?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): Again, I’m not going to–without knowing what they’re going to say, I generally want to just respond directly to them, Quil, and you hear my concern, which is my concern is going to be new programs without new money means we’re going to have concerns.

Quil Lawrence (NPR):  Great. Thanks a lot.

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary):  Okay, man. Feel better.

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary):  Thanks, Quil.

Quil Lawrence (NPR):  Thanks.

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary):  Jonathan.

Jonathan Lehrfeld (Military Times):  Thank you for doing this, and I hope you feel better, Mr. Secretary. And also, it’s a very strange way to look, but I wanted to first ask a question on PACT Act Benefits claims, and then also on the Change Healthcare. First, I know that a few weeks ago, earlier this month, or last month, there had been a big push to reach out to Veterans and survivors, encouraging them to complete their intents to file before a deadline later this summer. I wanted to see if there were any status updates on how many active yet to be filed claims remain–those intents to file.

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary):  That’s a good question. I don’t have an update on intents to file here in front of me, so we’ll get you that, Jonathan, and send that to you. I think it’s a reasonable question and a good question. And I do have some information in front of me about the outreach events. We can also make that available to you, but I don’t have the specific data that you’re looking for, so let us get you that precisely so you can use it.

Jonathan Lehrfeld (Military Times):  Thank you. And then on the Change Healthcare, there have been discussion about being more vigilant to keep an eye out for additional threats going forward. Can you talk a little bit more about what that looks like, how it’s been similar or different to past approaches, given what occurred?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): Yeah. Let me let Lynette say–I think Lynette, first of all, is awesome. We got the best CISO in the federal government, so she’ll have more to say about this. But one thing I can just highlight is we’re being more vigilant about training, including very regular training of our VA personnel. I can cop to the fact here that I failed the training last week, so the shame on me, but to be honest, these constant, very regular, unannounced training challenges for each of us are really important. One. Two, we’ve been really vigilant about two factor or multi-factor authentication at VA. That, you know, these–this very–what looks like a very elaborate attack underscores the point that both Ian and Lynette made, which is that not only is it a very complex and risk–high risk environment, but there are a lot of very highly capable actors in this space, nefarious actors in this space. So, we got to be using all available tools to us. Multi-factor authentication is one of those. And we’ve just made a big push over the course of the last several months to make sure that we are up to date on that multi-factor authentication. Third, we are also now in a better way, plugged into the interagency so that we are taking full advantage of the capabilities that the interagency has to help us both test our systems to look for soft spots. They help us red team our system to look for soft spots. But then also we’re in the–at the table in the interagency on information sharing, on intelligence sharing, and on risk identification. So those are three very concrete things I’d point out, but let’s see, Lynette, you’re going to have much more interesting things to say about this than I will.

Lynette Sherrill (Deputy Assistant Secretary, Information, Security, and CIS Officer):  Well, sir, you hit those out of the park and you could qualify to be the next CISO, I think. So, we’re happy about that. I’m glad that you’re able to do that. And very specifically, let’s talk about–Secretary McDonough mentioned he failed a training attempt. Those are phishing training attempts. Phishing is the number one way that ransomware and attacks are happening across health sector. So those are the emails that get sent into your end users. They click on a link that is a nefarious link and it does bad things on their workstation or their laptop or their mobile phone even. So, we regularly test our users for that. We also don’t allow users to have administrative access on any of their devices. So, we have about 650,000 users. So, these have been consistent, but more importantly, specific to what have we been doing to be vigilant? The attacks in the health sector have risen over the past two years. That’s–HHS just released a report on that a couple weeks ago. There’s lots of data out that talks about the threat to the health sector because when they get hit by ransomware, they pay. And that’s what people are looking for. They’re looking for the payout. No different in the Change Healthcare incident. They were looking to get paid. With that, we started a couple of years ago, every time we’d see an attack, it didn’t happen at VA, it happened at Common Spirit had one. We’ve seen the numerous–we would get the indicators of compromise from those attacks through our interagency partnerships like CISA, or even our cyber response group at the White House that we participate in. And we bring those indicators, what happened there, and we bring them into our environment and we scan our entire enterprise for that same vulnerability and we eliminate it immediately, like within at least a couple of weeks of getting that indicator of compromise. And that’s no small feat. But my team is excellent at what they do, and they really have taken on that continuous learning culture of learning from every single incident. And because I’ve challenged them to say we need to be more secure coming out of a health sector incident or a financial sector incident, basically any of them, if we can learn from it and apply that learning across our enterprise, we’re going to do that. So those–that is a very concrete vigilance that my entire cyber team is working with right now.

Jonathan Lehrfeld (Military Times):  Thank you.

Lynette Sherrill (Deputy Assistant Secretary, Information, Security, and CIS Officer):  You’re welcome.

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary): Are there any additional questions?

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): Terrence, it looks like Anne Chalmers has one. She’s got her–I can see the screen here. It looks like she has her hand up.

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary): Okay. I’m sorry about that, Mr. Secretary. Well, we’ll go to Anne.

Anne Chalmers (The War Horse):  Yes, thank you. Long time listener, first time hand raiser. So first, thank you for making time for this every month, especially given your current COVID exposure, Mr. Secretary. My question is in regards to VA’s regulatory bar update for character of discharge determinations. Well, the updated compelling circumstances language is expected to help many Veterans access VA benefits. Can you talk about why VA retained its regulatory bar for Veterans who have an other than honorable discharge in lieu of general court martial? And do you have a message for those Veterans who can’t take advantage of this regulatory update because they have that discharge status, perhaps even just because of issues related to their sexual orientation, that they accepted that discharge in lieu of general court martial due to charges around their sexual orientation? Thanks so much.

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary): Yeah, Anne, thanks very much for the question. I do have a very specific message to every Veteran, irrespective of their kind of other than honorable discharges, which is, we want to work with you. And so, my message is, please come see us and let us go to work on this. Now, the regulatory framework update was meant to ease our ability to make changes in the character of discharge for VA purposes. This has been a major priority for us since we arrived here. I think I’ve used numbers in the past that before we started our enhanced effort to update and upgrade characters of discharge, we were working through 3000 to 4000 a year. Most recently, I think we did between 12,000 and 13,000. And so, intentionality goes a long way, and I want Veterans to understand that that intentionality is because we want to have a relationship with those Veterans. One. Two, as to the individual determinations we made in terms of what we kept and what we jettisoned as it relates to the updated regulatory framework, obviously, this was all part of, as all of our work is, at least our work in this instance, since we’re working so closely with DoD. This is a function of interagency collaboration and cooperation. And so, this is something that we debated out over the course of a couple of years with our interagency partners and where they had particular concerns, we tried to address them while maintaining our ability to do exactly what I said at the beginning, which is to upgrade and develop–to upgrade the characters of discharge and develop a relationship with those Veterans with whom we so desperately want this relationship. So, I hope that responds to the question, Anne.

Anne Chalmers (The War Horse):  Yes, yes. Thank you for that. But when it comes specifically to Veterans that are discharged in lieu of court martial, they will not be able to take advantage of this regulatory update? Is that, I mean, even if you want to–

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary):  That’s not true. Yeah, I mean, you know, the whole regulatory framework is built around sending first a clear message to Veterans that we can and want to upgrade your character of discharge for other than honorables. And we tried to put together a map to do that. Nobody is–so, we can, we retain the ability to review characters of discharge in all cases of other than honorables, including the cases that you’re talking about. How, you know, it’s just gonna–in some instances, we had hoped to, you know, one would hope that we could make it even easier than we’ve been able to make it in this case. But you know everybody–there’s nobody who’s ruled out unless you’re obviously dishonorably discharged. But that’s not who we’re talking about here. So, the character–we have statutory right to upgrade the character of discharge for VA purposes. The new regulatory framework is meant to facilitate that. But in all cases, we can review all characters of discharge, and we’re working really aggressively to do that.

Anne Chalmers (The War Horse):  Okay. Thank you.

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary):  Thank you again, Anne. Are there any other questions, virtually or in the audience? We’re seeing none. Lynette, Ian, thank you for joining us today. Mr. Secretary, I feel like Scottie Pippen up here without Michael Jordan. So hopefully you get well soon and you can join me again, sir.

Denis McDonough (VA Secretary):  Yeah, well, I think you’ve just fundamentally insulted Michael Jordan [laughter]. Listen, I love the opportunity to engage with you guys every month and as regularly as we can. So, thanks for making time. Thanks to your patience. So far, I’m COVID negative, and that’s great. Those of you who are, you know, Quil, as you’re wrestling through this, Godspeed, brother. And you know, God willing, I’ll stay COVID negative. But I appreciate everybody’s patience with us and flexibility. And Lynette and Ian, thank you all very much. And everybody should know that Terrence is the father now of a three year old. Yesterday was national Chancellor day here at VA, so happy birthday to Chance.

Terrence Hayes (VA Press Secretary): Thank you, sir. And I had a piece of cake for you last night. So, appreciate it, sir. Speedy recovery to your family and to our press, we look forward to seeing you again next month. Take care, everybody.