Appreciating Employees At the National Personnel Record Center

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, we are pretty good at attacking Federal workers around here, but we are not very good at praising them.

So I rise today to offer my profound appreciation for the hardworking employees at the National Personnel Records Center, who last week completed a huge achievement: They eliminated a large pandemic-related backlog of veteran records requests.

This is important to me, so I have been monitoring the situation closely. Veterans and their families rely on these records in order to access all the benefits that they have earned, as well as critical services, including housing and healthcare.

Due to restrictions in place to protect worker health and safety during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Personnel Record Center amassed a gigantic backlog of tens of thousands of unfilled veteran record requests.

Last Congress, as a consequence of bipartisan oversight and urging by leaders in the House, employees at the National Archives came to implement several critical new steps in order to address this backlog, including enhanced and reorganized staffing levels, technology updates, and digitizing millions of paper records.

We owe great thanks to the employees of the National Personnel Record Center for a job well done and for their great commitment, their passionate hard work, and their unswerving devotion to eliminate this backlog for America's veterans. It was a true success story of Federal workers.

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