Boozman Opening Statement in Hearing Examining the FY25 Department of Veterans Affairs Budget Request

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Senate Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies (MilCon-VA) Appropriations Subcommittee held a hearing examining the fiscal year 2025 budget request for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Ranking Member John Boozman (R-AR) delivered the following opening statement as prepared for delivery:

Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Secretary, good morning and thank you for coming today to discuss VA's FY 2025 and FY 2026 budget requests.

The budget requests $369.2 billion in FY 2025 for the Department of Veterans Affairs, including medical care collections, the Transformation Fund and the Toxic Exposures Fund (TEF), representing a 9.8 percent increase over FY 2024 enacted levels. This includes $129.1 billion in discretionary funds, a $5.7 billion or 4.2 percent decrease from FY 2024. The request includes $235.3 billion in mandatory funds, a $41.8 billion or 21.6 percent increase over FY 2024. Within this amount is $24.5 billion in the TEF, a $4.2 billion increase over FY 2024. The budget also requests a total of $131.5 billion in medical care advance appropriations for FY 2026, $18.9 billion more than the FY 2025 advance appropriation, and $22.8 billion in advance for the TEF. Finally, the request includes $222.2 billion in advance for veterans' benefits.

Mr. Secretary, I think you would agree that the budget request can be reasonably characterized as "tight." In my more than 20 years working on veterans' issues in both the House and the Senate I can't recall a single year when the budget request for veterans' health care went down. I recognize that VA has more funding streams than ever before, including the TEF, but nevertheless this request stands as an outlier. In recent years I've asked you about the amount of risk VA takes in crafting its community care request, but this year I will want to know more about the level of risk VA is taking across its whole enterprise. In your testimony you refer to FY 2025 planned obligations which will grow by more than five percent, even though the base request is lower than last year. I will want to hear from you about what risks this may open VA up to.

The PACT Act has certainly been a dramatic change for veterans, and I also think VA has a good story to tell about its implementation, the new veterans enrolling and the number of PACT-related claims received and processed. It also gave VA new tools to recruit and retain its workforce, and I look forward to hearing about your plans to ensure you have the right people in the right places to take care of our veterans.

I also want to note that it's been a little more than a year since you announced the "reset" in the electronic medical records program. As this "reset" continues I hope to hear more about the timeline to bring the deployed sites up to standard and when we can expect deployments to resume. DOD stumbled out of the gate in its efforts, but after a pause it successfully completed deployments throughout the country and abroad. I hope VA has learned from that example and will be able to get this program moving forward again soon. With well more than $11 billion of taxpayer money invested, it's time to start seeing a return.

In addition to updates on those big picture items, we also look forward to hearing details about the department's request for mental health services, including efforts to prevent veteran suicide, initiatives to prevent veteran homelessness, resources dedicated to care for women veteransand efforts to improve care for our rural veterans.

We look forward to discussing these and other issues this morning.

Thank you, Madam Chair, I yield back.

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Permalink: https://www.boozman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2024/5/boozman-opening-statement-in-hearing-examining-the-fy25-department-of-veterans-affairs-budget-request