OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Protecting Our Veterans

Floor Speech

Date: Oct. 25, 2021
Location: Washington, DC

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Mr. CLYDE. I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Keller), my good friend and colleague, for yielding.

Madam Speaker, veterans and their families have made many sacrifices for our great Nation. Through their service, these men and women have earned numerous benefits, and those benefits are validated by the member's individual service record.

The repository for those records is the National Personnel Records Center. The center is behind in its work. With the pandemic, the backlog to obtain military records jumped from 56,000 to over 500,000 requests. That is a tenfold increase.

That is 500,000 veterans and their families who are waiting on documentation that they need to apply for and receive benefits that they earned, including the GI Bill education benefits, VA loans, medical benefits, disability compensation, life insurance, and even burial benefits for their families.

When these issues were first reported last year, the National Personnel Records Center stated that the pandemic prevented their employees from being able to process record requests in a safe environment. As such, Congress appropriated additional funds to address the center's concerns and to help expedite the digitization of records.

However, the center did not grant its employees the proper technology to work from home during the pandemic until early 2021, nearly a year after the pandemic began. This choice by the center only compounded the worsening backlog.

Also, the Archivist of the United States, who oversees the NPRC's operations, noted in his latest correspondence to Congress that he expects the center to eliminate the backlog of veteran requests by the end of fiscal year 2022. That means this time next year, a whole year. This is simply unacceptable.

Each Member of this body has at least one veteran in their district impacted by this backlog, probably many, many veterans. It is time for all of us to step up to the plate to demand results. Show us that these record requests are being processed in a timely manner.

I commend Representative Keller for spearheading this tonight to fix this issue. Part of that is through the introduction of his bill, the RECORDS Act. I appreciate his efforts very much, and I am proud to join him in this fight. I thank him for the invitation to participate.

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