Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Washington Times interview with Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, the man who oversees veteran care and policies.
[SWOYER] With the ongoing government shutdown, what is the impact on veterans and employee pay? And also, of course, there’s questions about veteran care.
[COLLINS] The good part about it is over time, it’s always developed that we have, especially for our core of what we do, taking care of veterans, our health care system, all of those are open. They’ll continue to stay open. Our piece of it paid. Our folks are paid because we’re in an advanced appropriation. So those are always going to be taken care of. Disability payments are going to be taken care of, processing those are going to continue because of our funding status.
What is cut back for us is some of our outwardly folks, some of our cemetery maintenance issues we have, also vocational rehab and education. So for some of our veterans who are in training to get new jobs or to apply for those, those are going to be impacted right now. Getting some help in our regional offices are shut down because of the shutdown. So we’re about 97% fully operational. We got about 3%. But you have to understand, 3% for us is about 30,000 employees. So it’s a larger footprint that we have. So we’re very much balanced. We’re very concerned about where the situation is to not go further. The further we go, the more what we’ll call the outward-facing stuff will taper off with furloughed employees. But that’s where we’re at right now.
[SWOYER] The top Democrat on the Veteran Affairs Committee, Senator Blumenthal, has recently said things like the shutdown, “weakens veterans care.” Specifically, he talked about cuts related to life-saving spinal cord injury. What is your response to that? Is it scare tactics?
[COLLINS] Well, it’s actually worse. It’s a lie. And look, you can be a senator and you can be entitled to your own opinion. You just can’t be entitled to your own facts. And to imply that in any way that we’re cutting back on spinal cord injuries and anything else is abysmal conduct from a senator. And he ought to apologize, frankly. Especially when he’s one of the ones cutting off funding to the federal government. Our spinal cord centers are open. So it’s really, it’s hurtful to have someone who should know, the ranking member of the committee, but yet says something that shows as if he’s never heard of the VA.
Look, he’s done nothing but complain this whole year when we’ve tried to modernize our systems, how we’ve gotten better. We’ve cut our backlogs on disability claims by 100,000 almost. In less than four and a half months, we have been able to lower wait times, get better increased care, use community care. And all they’re concerned about was union employees and things that are peripheral to what we do. The good senator can have his own opinion but he can’t lie.
[SWOYER] Is this just rhetoric related to the shutdown? You’ve sat through shutdowns as a member of congress. Do you think that the Democrats are going to have any sort of epiphany soon?
[COLLINS] I think they will. But look, they’re having to play very much to a very liberal base. The Chuck Schumer shutdown should be the AOC shutdown. It is a reaction to what happened in March. Some people get upset: “Well, Doug, you know, you’re saying the Democrat shut down.” No, AP said Democrats shut down. The New Yorker said shutdown. So I’m just repeating what the mainstream media said. But it’s true because what they’ve got to figure out what is it worth and the realization of what they’re asking for. And they keep saying “we don’t want health care for illegals.” I have a flyer on my desk in this office, in New York State where they put a flyer out, for 65 of undocumented workers to get health care. Medicare. That’s federal.
So let’s just don’t play the game. The game is, is they’re trying to get something. We’ll see as they go forward.
[SWOYER] It doesn’t seem like polling really supports that. Gavin Newsom out in California actually looked at their Medicaid or what they were doing because of illegals.
[COLLINS] It is, like I said, everybody’s got to find their pressure point here. And it’s how much was the fight? How much the fight going to be worth it? I think for them, they just got to decide, is this worth putting the country through because at the end of the day, they’re going to be, they’re the ones that’s going to be keeping people military from getting paid. They’re the one that’s going to be continuing this, this painfulness of this shutdown.
[SWOYER] This is before your time here, but you might remember from your years on Capitol Hill. About a decade ago, there was news about that the VA secretly had rescheduled veteran appointments.
[COLLINS] I very much remember.
[SWOYER] I think some of them, according to an IG report, had died waiting for their appointments and for their care, for their new appointments. I know it’s been years, but are you monitoring the situation? Are there no more secret wait lists? What has been done?
[COLLINS] No, in fact, that was one of the transitional moments in VA life. I was in Congress during that time. That was in 2013, 2014 timeframe. Phoenix, Augusta, Georgia, Atlanta, this is where this was coming out of. And out of that, you got the Choice Act, and that was the first step toward allowing veterans to use community care if our wait times were too long or they weren’t able to get the care as quickly as they needed, which led into the Mission Act, which is under what we do now, they’re working on the Access Act now. All of this is designed to get the veteran the best care quickly as possible. We’ve taken great steps to make sure that our veterans are getting the quality care they need. Wait times are not the best way to judge a hospital. In fact, we’re the only hospital system it does. But the reason we do is because of what you just talked about. We had to find a metric in Congress to say, how do we hold them accountable?
Watch the video for the full conversation.
Read more: VA secretary demands apology after Sen. Blumenthal’s spinal cord research ‘lie’
