Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act,

Floor Speech

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Mr. TILLIS. Thank you, Mr. President.

I am proud to represent North Carolina. North Carolina has nearly 1 million veterans in the State. When you add to that the members of the armed services inactive and in the Reserve and the National Guard, we are over 1.2 million people. They, too, will become veterans someday. We need to fix this so that the problems our veterans are experiencing today are not experienced by the men and women who are fighting for our freedom wherever we ask them to go.

Mr. President, I know you know a lot about the lack of accountability in the VA within your great State of Colorado. We have problems. We have to increase the accountability in the VA. In 2014, in the wake of the Phoenix wait list scandal, Congress came together and demanded accountability. That is why they passed the Veterans Choice Act. When the President signed the bill into law, he stated:

If you engage in unethical practice, if you cover up a serious problem, you should be fired. Period. It shouldn't be that difficult.

Now we are hearing just recently that apparently in consultation with the President, Attorney General Lynch and the Justice Department have decided not to defend the Veterans Choice Act against the constitutional challenge from Sharon Helman, the former director of the Phoenix VA who sat on top of this scandal and was fired for her role denying veterans' access. This same disgraced VA executive also pled guilty to hiding more than $50,000 in gifts from lobbyists. She embodies the very worst of the worst of the small percentage of the VA who need to be held to a higher standard of accountability.

Then we add insult to injury. The VA decided not to use its expedited removal authority to hold VA executives accountable. Because of these actions, we are now back to square one, as if the President did not even sign that bill.

Now, I should have started at the beginning, though, to thank Senator Isakson for his yeoman's work in support of veterans. He is a fantastic chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee. He brings people together. That is why the Veterans First Act was unanimously supported in the committee. It is bipartisan on steroids. Everybody thinks that this bill needs to go into law and that the VA needs to be held accountable. We need to pass the Veterans First Act.

There are a number of things in this act that even go beyond accountability, and I note in the colloquy that other elements of this act will be brought up. I will bring up a few of them. One of them has to do with the opioid safety act. What we are trying to do is improve the safety and supervision of treatment plans for veterans who legitimately need some sort of pain medication, possibly an opioid prescription regimen.

As to the Whistleblower Protection Act, we need more people with their eyes and ears in the VA who are comfortable saying: Something isn't right here, and I need to be able to report up and know my job is not at risk because I am doing the right thing.

That is in the Veterans First Act.

The other thing we need to do is to get back to what we tried to accomplish in the 2014 bill--fire people who are not doing their job, fire people who are being unethical, fire people who are not putting veterans at the very top of the list. That is why the VA exists.

The VA doesn't exist for their own sake. The VA exists for providing the care that the veterans deserve. They should get it on a timely basis. When there are no reasonable excuses for some of these wait times and we find that it is the people who are causing the problem, those people should be held accountable. The senior members should be held accountable, and they should be able to be terminated without any sort of review subject to the discretion of the Secretary of the VA.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for us to act on the Veterans First Act. It is time for us to get back to fulfilling the promise that this President made just a couple of years ago. It is time to put veterans first.

I want to thank all of my colleagues here. I want to thank my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who I know share this view. We need to get this bill out of the Senate, to the House, and to the President's desk with the promise this time that the President will stand with us and with the veterans to do what we need to do, and that is to put veterans first.

I urge all the Members' support, and I appreciate again Senator Isakson's work to get it to this point, but now we need to get it done.

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