Press Releases

After Acting Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson told the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that VA needs approximately $17.6 billion in additional funding for the remainder of Fiscal Year 2014 through Fiscal Year 2017, Chairman Jeff Miller released the following statement:

“I am committed to giving VA the resources it needs to provide our veterans with the care and benefits they have earned. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last few months, it’s that we can’t trust VA’s numbers. That includes the $17.6 billion in additional funding Acting Secretary Sloan Gibson asked for today. Given that this figure seems to have magically fallen out of the sky today – after years of assertions from VA leaders at all levels that they had nearly every dollar and every person necessary to accomplish VA’s mission – it would be an act of budgetary malpractice to blindly sign off on this request. VA has had hundreds of millions more in medical care funding than it could spend every fiscal year since 2010. So if VA truly needs this additional $17.6 billion, that would mean the VA administrators involved in past department resource allocation decisions are either incompetent, disingenuous or both.” – Rep. Jeff Miller, Chairman, House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs