No Wrong Door for Veterans Act

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak in hesitant support of H.R. 1969, the No Wrong Door Act, as amended.

This bill would reauthorize the Staff Sergeant Parker Gordon Fox Suicide Prevention Grant Program, or Fox grants, for fiscal year 2026.

As the ranking member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, one of my top priorities has been and will continue to be veteran suicide prevention. The Fox grant program is an important tool in our arsenal for this work.

Community-based programs are a crucial part of a public health approach to suicide prevention. However, I do have significant concerns with this legislation's approach to reauthorizing this program.

We must ensure that we reauthorize this program in a way that ensures it is as effective and robust as possible. I would like to take this time to highlight some of those concerns.

First, based on congressionally mandated reports that the committee has received, VA has not established enough metrics to allow Congress to monitor the success of the program. Additionally, in our view, grantees are not collecting or reporting complete data for all participants, which further limits Congress' ability to determine whether the program is meeting its intended purposes. It is clear that this bill, as drafted and amended, will not do enough to improve data collection and make clear what data grantees are responsible for collecting.

This bill would also compound this issue by requiring grantees to use the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale to screen participants for their baseline mental health when entering the program. While this scale is a widely accepted, clinically validated behavioral health screening instrument, its primary use is to measure a patient's suicidal ideation and the severity of suicidal risk at a given point in time.

VA already requires Fox grantees to screen their participants using a number of other validated screening tools, both at baseline and after connecting veterans to additional support. Each of these tools measures other upstream factors of mental health that contribute to veterans' suicide risks, such as levels of emotion, optimism, work satisfaction, and social support.

Limiting grantees to the use of a single screening instrument that measures suicide risk at a point in time will further limit our ability to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the Fox grant program on improving veterans' mental health.

Perhaps more importantly, Congress is not and should not be in the business of mandating the use of a particular clinical tool. Not only does it micromanage providers or grantees in terms of determining the most clinically appropriate tool, but it also arbitrarily limits providers and grantees from using a different tool in the future if it is determined to be more effective.

Finally, I remain concerned about language that would dramatically alter the entities that would be eligible to receive grants. Specifically, we oppose language that would add ``healthcare providers'' as eligible grantees. The Fox grant program was designed to allow community-based organizations to help address upstream suicide risk factors and provide services to support veterans' needs. It was never intended to directly provide clinical care, particularly mental health care.

Combined with my existing concerns about the bill's lack of requirements to strengthen data collection and demonstration of effective outcomes, I remain extremely concerned that opening eligibility up to new types of grantees without establishing additional definitions, guardrails, or oversight will weaken the quality of care provided to veterans.

In its current form, H.R. 1969, as amended, does not reauthorize this grant program in a way that will meet the needs of our veterans.

Just 2 weeks ago, we held a markup where my Republican colleagues rejected several amendments to improve this version of the bill, including an amendment I offered that would have at least partially addressed my concerns. Thus, the bill that we are considering today is not one that considers any of the areas of improvement that I had hoped could be incorporated into the legislation at the community level.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that Senator Warner's bill to reauthorize this program, S. 793, is a better starting place that will help ensure that we reauthorize the strongest possible version of this grant program.

I hope we will have an opportunity to engage in robust renegotiation and discussion with my Republican colleagues and our Senate counterparts to ensure we advance the strongest possible bill to prevent veteran suicide.

That said, while I have serious concerns about how this bill would reauthorize the program, I want to make clear that I understand that this grant program is a critical piece of VA's efforts in ensuring veterans receive the outreach, support, and services they need and deserve when it comes to their mental health.

Therefore, I hope that, moving forward, we can work together, along with our Senate counterparts, to reauthorize the Fox Grant Program in a responsible way and ensure it is as effective and robust as our Nation's veterans deserve.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to share my position on H.R. 1969, the No Wrong Door for Veterans Act, as amended. I will always be supportive of efforts to prevent veteran suicide, but I remain concerned that this bill does not do enough to ensure the Fox Grant Program is working as intended.

Veterans deserve our best legislative efforts, not legislation that creates more problems than it solves and that does not take steps to improve suicide prevention efforts.

That being said, I will not stand in the way of forward progress on veteran suicide prevention efforts, but I strongly urge my House and Senate colleagues to work with us to ensure that final reauthorization of this program is as robust as possible.

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