September 4, 2007
Statement
Floor Statement Supporting Our Veterans and Military Personnel
MR. REED: Mr. President, I am pleased to bring the fiscal year 2008 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and related agencies appropriations bill to the Senate. This is a unique bill for many reasons, not the least of which is it is the first appropriations bill that will be considered under the requirements of S. 1, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. On August 2, 2007, the Senate approved S. 1 by a vote of 83 to 14, clearing the measure for the President's signature. When signed by the President, this ethics reform legislation will significantly improve the transparency and accountability of the legislative process.
Although the White House has requested the Senate not submit the legislation to the President until he returns from his overseas travels, I wish to assure Senators we intend to abide by the requirements of S. 1 during the consideration of this bill. The legislation requires that the chairman of the committee of jurisdiction certify that certain information related to congressionally directed spending be identified and that the required information be available on a publicly accessible congressional Web site in a searchable format at least 48 hours before a vote on the pending bill.
The information required includes identification of the congressionally directed spending and the name of the Senator who requested such spending. This information is contained in the committee report numbered 110-85, dated June 18, 2007, and has been available on the Internet for over 2 months.
In addition, pursuant to the standards required by Chairman Byrd and Senator Cochran, letters from each Member with a congressionally directed spending item in this bill or accompanying report are available on the Internet certifying that neither the Senator, nor his or her spouse, has a pecuniary interest in such spending item.
I am submitting for the Record the certification by the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Senator Byrd: I certify that the information that will be required by S. 1, when it becomes law, related to congressionally directed spending, has been identified in the Committee report numbered 110-85, filed on June 18, 2007, and that the required information has been available on a publicly accessible congressional website in a searchable format at least 48 hours before a vote on the pending bill.
MR. REED: Before yielding to Senator Hutchison, I would like to thank Chairman Byrd and Senator Cochran for their leadership in bringing this bill to the floor. Also, I would like to thank the ranking member of our subcommittee, Senator Hutchison, for her support and assistance, her knowledge and experience on the subcommittee, and her dedication to veterans and the military have been tremendous assets in developing this bill. I am particularly pleased to bring the bill to the floor today in anticipation of welcoming Senator Johnson back. He is our subcommittee chairman. He will return tomorrow. This bill is a testament to Senator Johnson's tenacity in the face of adversity and to his leadership, even though as he recuperated, he was involved in the process and proceedings and he too shared the deep concerns of the Nation's military families and our Nation's veterans. I am deeply honored to be managing this bill on the floor for him.
I yield to the Senator from Texas.
…The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island is recognized.
MR. REED: Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the substitute amendment be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as thus amended, be considered as original text for the purpose of further amendments; and that no points of order be considered waived by this agreement.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
MR. REED: Mr. President, I commend Senator Hutchison for her hard work and that of her staff. She has been a very positive and laudable member of the committee. She has vast experience, having served on the committee many years, and has made a major contribution to this legislation, and she should be acknowledged for that contribution.
Mr. President, this is a critically important piece of legislation, and I hope that the Senate will act on it expeditiously. Both the Department of Veterans Affairs and the veterans service organizations have urged prompt action on this bill, and the President himself has cited the importance of not delaying crucial funding for our Nation's veterans and military forces.
The Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations bill funds urgently needed investments in the facilities in which our military forces and their families live and work and train for battle. It also provides funding for the benefits and medical care acutely needed by our Nation's veterans.
The bill before the Senate today provides a total of $109.2 billion in funding, including $64.7 billion in discretionary funds. In all, the discretionary funding is $4 billion over the President's budget request. As Senator Hutchison said, the President is prepared to sign the legislation as it is.
Funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs totals $87.5 billion, of which $44.5 billion is for mandatory programs and $43 billion is for discretionary programs, an increase in discretionary funding of $3.6 billion over the President's budget request.
We have independently determined additional needs for military construction and veterans affairs, and we found a responsible way to meet these additional needs.
More than 70 percent of the increase--$2.6 billion--is for the Veterans Health Administration. This increase will allow the Department of Veterans Affairs to dedicate additional resources to deal with spiraling health care needs for veterans, including the urgent needs of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. Chief among needs, in terms of widespread impact, is the treatment of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The extent of these problems among returning veterans--and the strain that the treatment of them is placing on the Veterans health care system--is only now coming to be fully understood. The Defense Department estimates that as many as 30 percent of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans suffer from traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder--or both. This is a startling statistic and a looming crisis that needs to be addressed immediately.
The urgency of this problem was among the top findings cited in the report of the President's Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors, better known as the Dole-Shalala Commission. The commission's report, which was released earlier this summer, spotlights the need to aggressively prevent and treat post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, including preparing for the long-term consequences of these injuries.
Many of the veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan will require years, if not a lifetime, of medical care from the Department of Veterans Affairs. And this new influx of veterans is occurring at a time when the veterans from previous wars are aging and requiring substantial increases in medical services as well as long-term care.
It is vital that the Department of Veterans Affairs have adequate resources to address these emerging and unanticipated requirements without draining funds from other needed and high priority programs, such as long-term care for aging veterans.
Unfortunately, for too long, the President's Office of Management and Budget has ignored the financial impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the Department of Veterans Affairs, and has continued to penny pinch the Department's budget.
As a result, the Department of Veterans Affairs has struggled over the past several years--often unsuccessfully--to keep pace with the rising demands for veterans health care. It has been Congress that has had to lead in providing the resources to bail out the Department when its projected health care costs fell abysmally short of the mark. And it has been Congress that has led the effort to provide the Department with more resources for mental health care programs at a time when the requirement for such services is soaring.
I am pleased to report that the bill before the Senate today corrects the deficiencies of the past and provides the necessary investment to guide the Department into the future.
And there is more good news for veterans in this bill. This legislation provides $1 billion over the President's budget request for minor construction and nonrecurring maintenance of veterans hospitals and clinics. Last February--after the President submitted his fiscal year 2008 budget request and after the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center were revealed--the Veterans Affairs Department released a report identifying roughly $5 billion worth of deficiencies in its facilities system-wide. If we do not want to see another Walter Reed horror story in veterans' facilities, we need to move aggressively to correct these deficiencies, and the funding in this bill will allow the Department to do so.
The bill also includes $131 million to hire at least 500 new claims processors to reduce the growing backlog of veterans' disability claims. The Veterans Benefits Administration currently has a backlog of almost 400,000 pending claims, with the average claim taking almost 6 months to process. In testimony before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in March, the GAO highlighted the need for the VA to take steps to reduce the existing backlog of claims and improve the accuracy and consistency of decisions. This bill takes dead aim at correcting those problems.
I know, as all my colleagues do--because we get the calls in our State offices from veterans who need help and have an unusually long time in which their claim is being processed--that sometimes the claims are rejected and have to be resubmitted or are pending appeals. All of this is going to be corrected, and it is going to help the people who need help, veterans who need access to the veterans system quickly and efficiently, and we hope this bill will do that.
On the military construction side, which is the other major provision in our legislative agenda, the bill provides $21.2 billion. While this is a substantial increase over last year's funding level, it should be noted that more than half of the budget request was to fund the 2005 base realignment and closure program and the President's Grow the Force Initiative. For military construction associated with conventional mission requirements, the budget request, following the trend of the past 5 years, was basically flatlined, but we have two major initiatives--the BRAC of 2005 and the new initiative of the President to increase principally the size of the Army--and those initiatives have required additional funding.
The Senate bill fully funds the President's $8.2 billion request for BRAC 2005 and for his Grow the Force Initiative, and it increases funding for the regular military construction program by nearly $400 million over the President's request. Especially in a time of war, we must not skip on funding the basic infrastructure needed to support our men and women in uniform.
The Senate bill also provides $320 million--that is $100 million over the President's budget request--for the BRAC 1990 legacy program. This goes back to the prior BRAC in 1990.
It is important that the Government keep its commitment to the communities affected by prior BRAC rounds and ensure that environmental cleanup of closed military installations is completed as thoroughly and rapidly as possible. Although it has been nearly 13 years since the last round of closures under the previous BRAC rounds, the backlog and environmental cleanup remains at $3.5 billion. At the current rate, it will take decades to return some of that property to a safe and usable condition. In the meantime, affected communities cannot use much of the land on which these bases sit.
I am particularly pleased that this bill adds $234.6 million above the President's budget request for Guard and Reserve military construction projects. The Guard and Reserve are central components of our Nation's military forces. Yet the President's request for military construction to support these components has been steadily declining. The Senate bill corrects that deficit.
Because of the enhanced scrutiny of earmarks under the requirements of S. 1 and the guidance of Chairman Byrd and Senator Cochran, it is important to understand how the military construction portion of this bill is funded. The vast majority of military construction funding is project based. That means Congress cannot correct deficiencies in the President's budget request simply by increasing the top line of individual accounts. Military construction funding is allocated by project and by law. Each and every major construction project must be individually authorized and individually funded. The President's military construction budget request is composed primarily of earmarked projects, and congressional increases to the budget request must also be earmarked for specific projects.
The 2008 Senate bill includes 665 individual earmarks, of which 580 were requested by the President. The staff of the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Subcommittee worked diligently to identify every earmark in the Senate bill. Every Senator was required to submit to the committee both a written request and a letter of financial interest before a request would be considered. Moreover, the military construction title of this bill is developed in close coordination with the Senate Armed Services Committee, and every congressionally directed project in the appropriations bill is authorized in the Defense authorization bill. The process could not be more open and aboveboard.
It has been reported that the Senate bill harbors $6.5 billion in undisclosed earmarks, which comprises the funding for construction projects in the BRAC 2005 account. This characterization reflects an unfortunate misunderstanding of the BRAC account which I am pleased to clarify for the record.
Unlike the regular military construction program, the BRAC account does not require line-item authorization and appropriation for individual projects. Instead, the account receives lump-sum funding from which the Defense Department develops a spending plan to implement the recommendations of the Base Closure and Realignment Commission. Neither Congress nor the Defense Department has the authority to deviate from the Commission's recommendations. It is the policy of this committee to not earmark or accelerate funding for specific projects within the BRAC account because of the complicated domino effect of closing and realigning facilities among installations. Thus, each of the BRAC 2005 projects identified in the committee report was determined by the administration, in accordance with the BRAC law. The account includes no congressional earmarks.
I regret that due to a lack of understanding of the BRAC process, the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs appropriations bill has been used as a poster child for undisclosed earmarks. Such an assertion is inaccurate on its face, but to correct any lingering misconceptions, I have prepared a list of the 189 BRAC 2005 projects that were published in the report accompanying the bill, annotated to show that each project, since it was funded through the President's budget request, was requested by the President.
I ask unanimous consent to have the list printed in the Record so there can be no question as to the origin of these projects.
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