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Mr. Sistek: Thanks to the Air Force Association leadership, the organizers of this event, and the rank and file members for inviting me to speak today. I see a lot of Air Force blue shirts out there. This is my first almost-totally-Air Force presentation in a long time, so I went back and pulled out of my archives an Air Force manual to help me prepare. It's the 3rd Edition, dated August 1977. You see that it's virtually unused, and unfortunately it says nothing about PowerPoint so we're just going to have to wing that part.

What is the purpose of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA)? Or more importantly, what should it be? Today, we're going to talk about the role of perspective in veterans' matters. You have people of good faith on either side that have different views on what should be done for veterans. You have perspectives that spring from a variety of backgrounds, from a variety of pursuits.

My goal here was originally to present the flavor of what the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs does—specifically, in its oversight role—and what my subcommittee does in some anecdotes that discuss how we carry out that oversight role from a minority party perspective.

I'm the Democratic staff director. My shop is outnumbered by more than two to one on the other side of the aisle, but if you align it from an oversight perspective, I'm probably likely to point at things that the other side may not. So what I'm going to say is there's going to be a small amount of politics and intrigue that may enter into this story. You know my background. Take it with a grain of salt when it comes.

To some degree, my goal of presenting a behind-the-scenes of what happens on the committee has been co-opted by the more standard fare for a presentation of this type—to discuss the organization, the issues and the pending legislation. I will take some time to do that, since a lot of time is available. But primarily I'll present my perspective regarding veterans from that of a minority staff person on the House Committee for Veterans Affairs.

Who am I? Well, I'm an Air Force veteran. I'm a retiree. When I think of my Air Force career, I did a lot of things. What comes to mind first—that pleasant, warm fuzzy that makes me smile—is that I was a tanker pilot, a Beale [Air Force Base] Bandit out there in California refueling the SR-71. I did a lot of other things. I worked at the White house for a while while I was active duty Air Force. I carried the football for a Navy CINC with the modes and codes inside. That's my background.

Now, my subcommittee is unique. The other three subcommittees on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs principally are responsible for legislation. I'm principally responsible for oversight. Let's say that we pass a law that says the speed limit on the interstate will be 40 miles an hour. Then we don't put any policemen out there. What do you think will happen to the average speed limit on that interstate highway?

The other three subcommittees draft most of the legislation and it's my job to look behind the curtain and see if it's working the way they intended, to see if the executive branch agencies are doing with that legislation what Congress intended, to see if Congress had any sort of omissions when they put together the bill or if there were unintended consequences. We find them. We find them all the time. Then we get in an arm wrestling contest to see if we can get them corrected the way Congress intended, hopefully without going back through the legislative process, which is time consuming and does not always generate the type of product you hope it will at the end of the day.

What is the VA and what should it become? I see a lot of young faces in here that some day will be crusty old veterans with gray around their temples like me, and it's time for you to start thinking, what type of a VA should be there to support you? Do you want any sort of VA at all? How about a privatized VA? How about a VA that focuses only on one-tenth of the veteran population? And how much of this question will be answered by a matter of personal perspective or individual philosophy?

For the most part, in Congress and elsewhere in government, throughout the military and civilian world, we have people of good conscience that disagree on what exactly should be done for veterans. Today, I’d like to make you think about what your perspectives are and what value systems underlie those perspectives because there are some things that when you hear them, you're going to say, “could that happen in today's world?”

As a caveat, the VA's doing a very good job providing services, both in health care and in benefits, but there are some things that sneak through the net and we'll talk about some of those.

What are our national goals with regard to caring for veterans? How does this fit in the great sequence of priorities? VA, the organization, has its views, Congress has its views, individuals have their own views. Congress, as everyone knows, has a legislative role and an oversight role. But it's these perspectives that are always in flux in conflict.

The first few minutes of this is going to sound a little bit preachy as I talk about perspectives. It only lasts for a few minutes, so bear with me. I think I'll ask some questions that might make you think. You've got to judge for yourself if you believe there is a compact between those who have entered harm's way and the nation that they've served. Most of you in this room have been there. This question defines the angles of the prism through which you are likely to view the VA and veterans programs. As an ancillary line of reasoning, is it okay to change or diminish the promised benefits or services that you established for one generation of veterans? The conclusions you reach may be based on what you see as your priorities, your service priorities, your national priorities, and the human cause. These will be tempered by your depth of analysis into the problem and your system of values. What is okay to do to someone else who depends on you? Sometimes other issues or agendas will come into play. Sometimes they're misrepresented. Your views on veterans programs and benefits are likely formed based on where among your priorities you place veterans, how deeply you analyze the situation, and what your values are.

Most veterans’ service organizations have expressed concern about veterans’ health care access. Some veterans have recently faced year-long waits to get into the VA health care system. When that became public what happened to recruiting for some of our sister services? Well, it fell. Now did it fall because of the public announcement that there were problems with the VA system? Were there other causes? There hasn’t’ been a study. I'm not going to second-guess. But let's just suppose there is some sort of a correlation, somewhere between 20 percent and .02 percent. It's a fact. It matters.

Problems of this nature can be "what if'd" all day, but as I said before, we're looking at individual perspectives before we decide where the VA should go from where it is now.

Here's a question to think about: Does a veteran who was drafted originally deserve more care than a veteran who volunteered? People of good conscience will debate that either way. Does the health care or death of a volunteer matter less than the health care or death of a draftee? Instinctively, I'd say no, of course not. But yet, there are commentators all throughout the news that are suggesting that volunteers know and understand the risk of signing on the dotted line. Therefore, their loss or their suffering may in some way be different.

Now, just for the sake of argument, let me give a hypothetical example of a volunteer who we'll say died. Let's call him Casey. Not for the KC-135, which would be my initial instinct, but let's say Casey for the son of Cindy Sheehan, the protestor down in Crawford, Texas. Does assigning that name to that dead veteran change anything about your perspectives?

We can review such a situation as either a perspective in a vacuum, or we can charge it politically. A politically charged environment is where I come from now on Capitol Hill. For the little example above, we did both. Were you thinking down one track, then reverse to the other track, and then reverse again? I don't know. You know.

For me, veterans rank very highly among our national priorities. Does caring for an 85-year-old World War II veteran supersede maintaining our national sovereignty? It's a context of priorities, isn't it? Maybe no, maybe yes. It depends on how you look at the problem. Keep in mind that today as we meet there's a serious debate on the funding of veterans programs and the extent to which we fund these programs. Some have coined the phrase of “core veterans” and “non-core veterans” and opposed mandatory funding of veterans health care. How is this received by the next generation that will sign on the dotted line? If the treatment of veterans is perceived of as being shabby, who will line up at the recruiting lines?

I remember as a kid seeing the old Norman Rockwell painting, the parade going by, the veteran standing there in his dough boy uniform. He looked old, he looked lonely. But there was a dignity about him. When I signed on the dotted line back in 1977, something in my heart says that, at some subconscious level, I remembered that. He was old, he was frail, he was this manifestation of a previous era, yet he was being treated with dignity. Maybe I saw that as important when I signed up. Although if you ask my father, he'll say I watched “Dr. Strangelove” and that's why I really wanted to fly. Different story… But when you think of that Rockwell painting, you've say to yourself, “he's dignified, he's revered, maybe this service isn't such a bad deal. Maybe life after service isn't such a bad deal.”

So perhaps there's a correlation between the treatment of veterans and the willingness to serve and having a large pool of qualified candidates signing up for military service. Perhaps there's not. But if there is, then honoring veterans with actions is more important than it seems at face value. Providing those veterans of yesterday with the care that I think they deserve may impact the recruiting of the next generation. It's just a perspective for your consideration.

In the last Congress, a bill numbered H.R. 3030 sought to remove the prohibition against the concurrent receipt of disability pay and retirement pay. It had over 340 cosponsors out of 435 representatives. Over 78 percent of Congressmen were cosponsors of this bill. I don't know if you know it—there are some retirees here, there may even be a few disabled retirees—but the government offsets your disability pay with your retirement pay and it's been a bone of contention for about a century now. And to be honest, when one party's in control they usually shy away, and when the other party's in the minority, they usually push the issue. So there has been give and take since the 1800s when this came about.

But in the last Congress there was a golden opportunity with all of these cosponsors to push this bill, to end the prohibition on concurrent receipt, so that if you were a retiree who was also disabled you could collect your disability pay with your retirement pay. Example: You and your twin brother signed up at the same time. You stay in for a career and your brother stays in for four years and goes to work for the post office. While working for the post office, your brother will be getting the disability pay with no offset. You, who dedicated your entire career to the military, would have your disability pay deducted from your retirement pay and therefore your brother would be getting the better deal. There's a patent unfairness there. It's an underlying unfairness.

The bill never made it out of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

Another bill was introduced that had the outer veneer of the original bill. This new bill masqueraded as or replaced the original bill, depending on your perspective, but left 60 percent of the eligible disabled retirees behind. Personally, I think a veteran's a veteran and if they're homeless, well, they get a different priority, but we don't excuse them from being a veteran. Under that new bill that everybody was really proud of—at least, my friends on the other side of the aisle were proud of it—if you had lost an eye or a foot in a military training exercise, you weren't part of that ball game. You weren't covered. And it had a ten-year phase-in. I keep wondering for the World War II retirees exactly what that ten-year phase-in means.

So when we see the press conferences with people talking about doing something about concurrent receipt, you have to put it in a valid framework. Yeah, they did. They moved the ball forward, but they claimed they made a touchdown and they really just gained five yards. The idea here is to get a touchdown.

24.8 million veterans currently are living. One-quarter of the nation's people are potentially eligible either as veterans or family members of veterans or surviving spouses for some sort of veterans program, service, care, etc.

There are five children of Civil War veterans still receiving benefits as of June 2005. Interesting story there. How does that happen? In the olden days before my time, some very, very old Civil War veterans needed someone to care for them. The convenient solution accepted by society at the time was to find a young lady who perhaps had a child out of wedlock and to marry the two of them because now this mother would have some form of pension to care for herself and her baby and she could also take care of the veteran in his later years, and then when she passed on, some of these, a handful of these, children of Civil War veterans are still alive to collect benefits. It's amazing how such a program can in such a very strange way span the centuries. It's absolutely astounding.

The organizational chart of VA. There is a central office and three major administrations in the VA, each of which is headed by an Under Secretary. There are also six assistant secretaries and a host of quasi-independent agencies which work for the VA Secretary such as the Inspector General and the Board of Veterans’ Appeals. VA does quite a good job providing for benefits and services. Once you're in the system and receiving care, that care is a very high standard.

Have any of you ever heard of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JACO)? VA received some very, very high marks from JACO across the board, probably better than most community hospitals receive. But the problem is not the care in the system, the problem is gaining access to the system.

When you look at the old movies that came out in the '70s and see what those movies portrayed as the care in the VA, I've got to say honestly as the chief oversight guy on the other side of the aisle from the folks that are running things now, this is not your father's Department of Veterans’ Affairs. There is significant improvement from two decades ago.

The VA has a number of missions not directly related to veterans. It's involved with disaster relief. Under the Federal Response Plan, it has several emergency support functions that do not directly apply to veterans. It has a wonderful medical research program. The Heart Stint is a VA program. Nicotine Patch is a VA program.

One of the amusing things we do at our hearings is we berate the VA on why—since they developed these great medical devices that are really money-making machines—why don't they own the patents for them? It could have made a heck of a difference in what the bottom line was as far as appropriations if the VA was collecting money on some of these inventions of its own. We've had several hearings on that.

There is also a myriad of other agencies such as the Department of Defense (DoD), Office of Personnel Management, Department of Labor, Veterans Education and Training Services, Small Business Administration and others that have a major part in veterans’ programs. Some states and communities have effective veterans programs. I'm sure most of you also know about the efforts of veterans’ service organizations such as American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Now I'm going to give you a 60-second refresher on the legislative process because it's germane to what happens on the committee and how the committee reports legislation…

A member of either chamber introduces legislation. In the House, the Parliamentarian determines jurisdiction for the bill. A principle committee of jurisdiction is determined and the bill is referred there. The committee usually refers the bill to one of its subcommittees. The subcommittee may have an informational hearing preceding a mark-up of the legislation and may decide to report the legislation to the full committee. The full committee, after a similar process, may decide to report the legislation to the House for action. A committee does not need to report on every bill under its jurisdiction. Often they just sit on the table. Once reported to the House and placed on the calendar, the House may vote on the bill. If passed, the Senate may vote on the same bill, and if approved, send it to the President for signature to make it law. If there are differences between the House and Senate language, they need to be resolved.

Very few bills that are introduced ever become law. They just lie dormant, asleep on the table in the committee room.

The Veterans Affairs Committee. Four subcommittees, each responsible for legislation and oversight in the areas indicated. My subcommittee, the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, has jurisdiction and oversight over veterans’ matters generally nationwide. Our subcommittee is also unique among all the other oversight subcommittees in Congress in that it can report legislation to the full committee. Most other oversight subcommittees in Congress just don't have this authority.

The committee members, the Congressmen. There are 16 slots for the majority party and 13 slots for we Democrats. They have three vacancies for an active membership of 13; we have one vacancy for 12. They're having problems filling their vacancies. We have people lined up on problems with the decision-making process in the leader's office.

Now the proportion of Democrats and Republicans on the committees is determined by their ratio throughout Congress. It's not a homogeneous mix. Some committees, the more important committees, will be stacked, such as the Rules Committee. There are, last time I checked, about 13 Republicans and five Democrats on the Rules Committee because if you can make the rules you can do whatever you need to do to get what you want done. But they have to make up for this balance on other committees, and some committees come a lot closer to a 50/50 spread.

The staff breakdown's a little different. While the actual members on the committee are closer, the staff breakdown is two-thirds and one-third, and we Democrats are on the losing side of that.

Another interesting part about this to think about it from an oversight role... I was an Inspector General for a while and traveling to a unit for a no-notice inspection was an important part of what I did. Although we all know the old saying about “we're glad you're here and we're here to help,” we weren’t always well received. But the minority party must ask the majority party for permission to go look at something and for travel funds if they wish to use committee funds.

So if there is a problem, such as there was in Kansas City a couple of years ago where comatose patients were having larvae growing in their sinuses, some people might not want that brought into the public and would interfere with your oversight role in getting there. Actually, in 2003, our committee had zero dollars for travel. We could travel, but we could only travel through VA funds and that made matters difficult, particularly if you wanted to do a no-notice.

How do you do a no-notice under those conditions? A little bit sneaky, I guess. You advise the VA you're flying into Sacramento. You fly into Sacramento, do a scheduled evaluation of the Sacramento VA Medical Center. Then you ask lots and lots of questions about what Palo Alto is like, who is the director there, and how many beds are filled now, and all those questions. You take your rental car and you drive to Reno and you do a no-notice of the Reno hospital. That's really the only way you get things done in a true no-notice fashion. But soon, they're onto you. If I fly into a city they alert everyone in a 300 mile area, so you can't win, can you?

Some other things... We have volumes and volumes and volumes of regulations to deal with. Veterans go into nursing homes, and we all have someone, a family member, an aunt, who may at some point or another have been in a nursing home. On one trip I took to California, looking through the reams of data that they provided me to try to put me to sleep, I noticed that they had not canceled a single contract for nursing home services in the previous three years in a big chunk of California, so I had to ask the question. Why? The answerer went off on a tangent. Well, because the California laws make it difficult for nursing homes to stay in business and therefore we don't want to lose any that we have.

So I'm sitting around the table with a bunch of contracting officers and clinicians and social workers, all of who oversee these particular nursing homes. I asked them the question. I said, “let's take this nursing home on the middle of the list. How many of you personally know it?” Hands went up. “How many of you would put your father in that nursing home if your father needed to go in a nursing home?” Not one person raised their hand. That's what the oversight role really does. You stop that in a hurry.

If the people who are running the VA are putting our veterans in places that they don’t think are good enough for a family member, you've got to fix the problem. You fix it any way you can. You fix it with legislation, you fix it with a letter to the Secretary, you fix it with a press release, which unfortunately sometimes is our strongest argument. But you fix it. Doing anything less is a disservice to those who served in previous generations.

I guess I need to get candid here. What's the atmosphere like on the Hill on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs? There are some committees on the Hill that no matter who's in power, what the distribution is on the Hill, who's in the White House, they're always contentious. Ways and Means perhaps is one such committee, the Rules Committee, sometimes even the Committee on Standards tends to be a little bit overly politically laden.

The House Committee on Veterans Affairs has ordinarily risen above that over the decades. I've been on the Hill for five years. When I arrived there, some of the old-timers told me that it was the worst they've ever seen it in terms of the cooperation between the two parties on the Hill. I guess I didn't see it that way. We were getting things done. We had a Chairman, Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, who didn't mind sticking his neck on the chopping block for veterans. The Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Tony Principi, who spent a lot of time as a staff director on the Hill, at one point even challenged the White House. He got hauled to the woodshed, but veterans’ programs survived because of it.

Some of you may remember a fairly recent incident where the VA came hat in hand to Congress saying we're $1.5 billion short. Anybody remember that? No. Nobody's seen that in the news? One head in the back is shaking and yawning. Okay. It happened. It probably happened because of the contention between the two philosophies, one of which is lets fund veterans’ programs to the extent they need to be funded to provide all services because a veteran's a veteran; and the other one which says let's just fund core veterans, those people who are homeless or 100 percent disabled. Perhaps they're spinal cord injuries, perhaps they're traumatic brain injuries. Let's just watch out for those folks and let's take the money we save and put it elsewhere. And I'm only going to say this once, but if you listen to any presentation like this from a Member on my side of the aisle, they're going to use the dreaded tax breaks for the rich as the priority that the other side falls on. That's the only time I'm going to say that, but it's there, it's real, and it's impacting programs.

We appropriated—once we found out how bad it really was with the VA funding, that they were going to run out of money before the end of the fiscal year—we appropriated $1.5 billion to carry them over and then immediately began quibbling over what's needed for '06.

When we get to the point a little later on where I talk about the oversight role and some of the oversight issues, I'm going to talk to you about management efficiencies. Yeah, we're a couple of billion dollars short and if you look at the VA budgets for the last three or four years you're going to see about $4 billion worth of claimed management efficiencies. That's really wonderful, isn't it? If you could get that up to $60 billion you wouldn't have to fund the VA at all, would you?

So in a number of letters we said, “Mr. Secretary, please itemize your list of management efficiencies.” We posted their first response on our internet site and their second response was almost identical to the first, and as a result of their non-responsiveness, the General Accounting Office (GAO) audit team will go in this week to see how they've tracked these management efficiencies. Why is it important? Because one billion dollars in claimed management efficiencies directly offsets one billion dollars in VA health care. It's a one for one. If they're wagging the claim, veterans are coming up short.

A lot of folks want to know what the personal relationships are like on the Hill between the members of the two parties. Just about the same as you in your office. There are some Democrats and Republicans that are good friends. My boss, Lane Evans, from Illinois, in dealing with Chris Smith would often say, “you know, there's friendship and there's business. Chris and I are friends, but this is business and we take a different stand.” We would buttress our perspective as best we could.

Things have gone downhill in the staff relationship world. I’m probably closer with the Senate Republicans now than I am with the House Republicans. It's just a matter of perspective. When they had some leadership changes they came in like gangbusters. We stood our ground, nothing happened, and then when we first started working together things started to happen, so they've let up a little bit. It started off bad in January. It's getting a little better each day. So I guess that's optimism for you. The trend is good.

There's also a relationship between the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Committees on Veterans Affairs, both in the House and the Senate. This, too, has suffered a little bit since January. When the Democrats exercised the oversight control in previous Congresses, the VA would usually respond with simple requests like data and public information very quickly. White Papers on issues, which we expected to happen, would be a little bit skewed. Those who write their own history are usually a little better off. But the information in those White Papers always tended to be useful. Only when we dug into an area that would demonstrate that a management decision was unfounded or wasteful did we ever get stonewalled or to some degree misled perhaps by this executive branch agency. That usually, but not always, was short-lived because Mr. Principi would get involved. He'd take a deep breath, take accountability, and fix the problem.

In recent months, requests for factual data and sometimes even public documents are encumbered by a detailed and slow approval release process at the VA. Let me give you an example.

In Los Angeles, we had some calls from veterans groups seeking care in one of the Los Angeles veterans’ facilities. They were saying, “every time we go to use this facility, as is our right, there's a film crew there.”

Now the VA has the right to contract out with film companies for their unused space on a non-interference basis, whenever they get an option to do this. They make some money out of it. It's a good deal for you, the taxpayer. But these veterans groups weren't saying they were using under-used buildings, they were saying they were getting kicked out of the gymnasium, that people who needed rehab treatment were being displaced so that some film crew could go in and store their stuff.

Well, the first thing you do before you fly out there and look at this is you get a hold of all the contracts. Three requests, no contracts. A little firmer request, we finally got the contracts, but the dates on the contracts didn't match the dates that the veterans’ groups gave us. It took about three or four tries to get something that should have been easy, that should have been a matter of public record and in no way, shape or form should have been something that the VA wanted to hide from us. If they were doing something wrong, they just simply needed to fix it. Unfortunately, I needed to travel to Los Angeles to personally look at the problem.

When I get back to the office, since it's probably beneath the level of writing legislation for, we'll do a letter to the Secretary. If that fails to work, watch the Los Angeles Times because we will put a press release in there, to discuss it. That's about the only leverage we have. We don't have subpoena power.

They can do this because they know they can ignore minority party requests when they own everything.

Now I'll talk about a few of the legislative initiatives that have occurred this year. Here's the website: www.Veterans.House.Gov/Democratic/LegislativeUpdate/July2005.

Health care funding. The $1.5 billion that I just talked about. What is amazing here is that everybody who looked at the numbers knew that they'd be $1.5 billion short for over a year and yet we got into a crisis situation before we could fix it.

H.R. 1588 is related to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Mandatory funding for veterans’ health care is Mr. Evans' personal war. The goal is to remove health care from the debate and argument process that goes on every year and make it mandatory, just as social security would be. I know you grimace when I say that. It's sometimes like choosing between the lesser of two evils, but our analysis shows that it's best for veterans if we go that route.

Very recently, Hurricane Katrina, the relief bill. That legislation focuses on those veterans impacted in the Gulf states. This is new, hot off the press. VA has a portfolio of houses that were recouped when people defaulted on VA home loans. They own these houses. Can we put Katrina victims there and cut through the red tape? Non-profit emergency grants. Use underutilized space elsewhere. Other emergency grants to providers of care for homeless veterans. I anticipate the quarterly update real soon.

Oversight issues. Lab security. How many of you remember the anthrax letters that arrived on the Hill? Did we just end there? Do we just quit with, “hey, the Hill got some anthrax letters.” It was on CNN. End of issue.

VA had a number of level-three laboratories which had select agents. When the first anthrax letter broke on the press, I called the Secretary's office and said, “do we have an accountability for all the select agents that are in your level three labs? Do we know who has access to those? Who accesses the VA level three labs?” Well, mostly it was graduate students, a lot of foreign graduate students. That's fine, but do we know the backgrounds of these folks, if we're going to let them into the freezer units that have anthrax and tularemia and all that other neat stuff that you read about in comic books?

The Secretary took about three seconds on getting the word out that this could be a problem, put the Inspector General out into the field on top priority, and took a full accounting of what went on with lab security.

If you're doing oversight, you just cannot accept the fact that because there's a brief rise in interest and then everybody goes away that the problem is going to stay fixed. So I took a trip to a level-three lab dressed in my golf shirt and jeans, stood outside the door with a clipboard, looked very irritated. I was there for about two minutes. Someone opened the door to that lab, let me in, apologized for letting me stand there, took no ID, checked no register, and let me in the door. I was able to secure the line badges from the laboratory director off of the white coat and presented them back to him, getting him to explain why exactly the security was so lax.

It almost sounds sophomoric sometimes, but you have to make it real for folks. If it's just on paper, they're not going to follow it and you have to follow through. The problem I have is staff size. We have 1.5 full time employees on the committee for oversight. That's not very many people. The majority party has their staff. Between the two of us and all the extra folks that hang around we probably get five full time employees. Strangely enough, on oversight issues, my friend and cohort across the aisle, Art Wu, and I are usually in lockstep which makes life a little bit easier.

When I asked the VA to detail lab security issues and problems and what select agents were there, I got a sheepish grin that said, “you know we have a nuclear reactor.” What? We have a nuclear reactor. So under the Omaha VA Medical Center they had a 1950s vintage trigger reactor. It's a research reactor. And from what I know of this reactor, it was about as safe a reactor as you could possibly get. You could mail the fuel rods overseas and nobody's going to extract anything of weapons grade out of it. Nevertheless, the headline, “Terrorists Break into Omaha VA, Steal Fuel Rods,” was right there hanging in front of us. This was a couple of years ago.

The VA worked with seven standing committees on the Hill to explore the role of select agents in government. We worked with the Nuclear Regulatory Agency Commission to decommission this reactor; the fuel rods were sent somewhere where they could be used, which was the U.S. Geological Service. It was done under the Economy Act. It saved them a couple of million dollars because they were in the process of buying fuel rods and these fuel rods in the VA reactor had been there since 1952 and had only used three percent of the uranium in there, so they were virtually brand new.

Any of you ever heard of Project Shad? Nobody. Back in the '60s and '70s, the Navy conducted a series of experiments on our own ships to see how susceptible they were to biological agents. They used a lot of safe agents when they did this because they were just checking to see what would reach the inside, how long did you have to air the vessel out, so forth and so on... But some of these tests were done without the knowledge of the men on board. Some of these men seemed to subsequently come up with a higher incidence of problems such as esophageal cancers.

In a related story, we've always asked DoD if they've outreached to everybody that's been exposed to chemical and biological weapons. Quite a few people have. They always blame DoD and DoD blames the VA, but they blame DoD for not providing a list of names. This has been going on since I've been there, about five years.

I took a trip to Dugway Proving Ground. I took a trip to Edgewood up in Maryland. I took a trip to Fort Dietrich where all of the Shad Project 112 chem/bio testing records that the Army and DoD have ever compiled reside. I came back with a list of 10,000 names, handed them to the VA, and said, “well, you said you'd notify these people if you ever got the list. Here's the list.” They were there for the taking for a number of years. Sometimes you just have to act.

Veterans’ employment issues. As veterans, you have priority when you seek federal employment. You have priority when your organization downsizes under a Reduction In Force (RIF). That's what the law says. That's what the regulation says. But the actual fact is there are so many wiggle-arounds and work-arounds here that you may or may not get that benefit that's been written into law since 1944.

A classic case ... Some agencies—I'm going to pick on my friends in the Forest Service and the Postal Service—have designed ways to avoid ever getting to the RIF procedures that would allow veterans to stay on board. What they do is sidestep it by coming up with a different system that they call a “placement system.” At one point in time, our office, Mr. Evans, had to actually sue the Office of Personnel Management to get data related to multiple certificates of eligibility which is how agencies hire people. And on those certificates of eligibility, veterans rise to the top. Or they get a quantifiable point advantage of five or ten points. But yet, when you look at the folks that have 110 points, which would be your disabled veterans fully qualified for the job, these aren't the folks that are getting called in for the interviews and getting hired. The question is why?

The result led us to multiple certificates of eligibility. They can create five or six or seven certificates by changing the parameters all for one job, and then select whoever they want, because they control who rises to the top of the list. It's not what Congress intended, which is part of the oversight role, that you go in, you ask the tough questions, embarrass people if you need to, but you fix the problem.

I want to save some time for questions so we're going to move ahead.

The Katrina update. From everything I can see and everything I have read, the VA has done an absolutely super job in its response to Hurricane Katrina. It may stand alone as an agency doing that, although it looks like DoD is coming in a very close second.

The three major administrations are progressing with their assessment and initial clean-up of their affected areas. There are a number of outpatient clinics that funnel the people who don't need some higher level of care into the tertiary care centers, but they're there when you need a prescription for Tylenol or something like that.

The fourth mission of the VA, which is tied to the Federal Emergency Response Plan, is also rolling. The VA Coordinating Center is up working the disaster medical system.

New Orleans. All 241 patients were evacuated. All the employees were evacuated. There are some stories here that are just amazing. Some units had two gallons of water for both staff and patients for a period of 12 hours, and the patients, because they're patients and some of them are sick, were consuming that. The nursing staff on some of these wards actually took to giving themselves IVs to keep themselves hydrated to give up the water for the patients. Now if that's not dedication, we're hard-pressed to find it. These are people who can look out the window of that hospital to their home district, where their house is, where their apartment is, and see the water levels rising. It's pretty amazing.

I'm sure in New Orleans the VA Medical Center needs to be replaced. Biloxi withstood the storm. One of two surviving hospitals in the area. They took in outsiders. All of the patients stayed put and are healthy and well. Not so for Gulfport. This facility no longer exists. But we got the patients out and we did it in early days of the crisis, before we had talk of which Governor said what, which Mayor said what, or which federal official said what. These folks were out of there and the VA did it almost alone, so hats off to them.

Finally, I'll take your questions.

Q: When you spoke about concurrent receipt legislation earlier, why didn’t you make mention of a bill that passed Congress a few years ago and expanded Combat-Related Special Compensation (CRSC)?

Mr. Sistek: That’s a different bill. There are two pieces of legislation, and I don't have the bill numbers. The one I believe you're referring to, CRSC, was the 60 percent and above disability that was solely combat-related. Anyone going to a training school would not apply. It would have to be some manifestation of combat for that to apply.

That has since, subsequently, kind of been consumed by the bill that passed last Congress that set the bar at the 50 percent disability limit and had a ten-year phase-in cycle. If you're really bored some day and want to look through the regulations to 38 CFR, you'll see what qualifies under what percentage level of a disability. When I said lose your foot, amputation below the knee, that's 40 percent. Lose one eye, that's 30 percent. There's a lot of stuff in the 30 and 40 percent range that most people would think was pretty significant that was left out.

What I've heard at a lot of hearings was, “we can't let people with shaving bumps be exempted.” Well, when you look in 38 CFR at what the requirements are for shaving bumps, it's listed there, it's a disability at zero percent, which means there's no money associated with it. But if it ever gets infected to the point where it causes significant tissue loss to the face or some neurological problem as it does in really, really bad situations—hemorrhoids is another situation like that, where there is significant bodily damage as a result of a normally innocuous beginning. Then it does move up to 20 percent or 50 percent if you lose the ability to speak because of your shaving bumps.

So what I said earlier, perspective and analysis. You really have to cut through the spin, the advertising on these things.

A number of people all jumped on the bandwagon for shaving bumps and hemorrhoids, but you know, nobody really referenced what the manual actually said. That's zero percent. Nobody gets anything for that anyway. So what difference does it make? It's just the way you look at it.

Q: Can you talk a bit about the transition for injured Guard and Reserve personnel who are coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq? I’ve heard that their situation is not as seamless as it is for active duty folks.

Mr. Sistek: Good point. Of course, the active duty folks are staying in the active duty chain. Their treatment at Walter Reed is extraordinary. These folks are getting the best of everything that America can provide. I've been through there on a number of occasions. If you're stuck with a bad situation, you want to be at Walter Reed or any of the other major centers. They're just doing phenomenal work.

Yes, we're absolutely dedicated to ensure a seamless transition. Some of these folks that come back with serious injuries—triple amputees, double amputees—they're not going to remain on active duty and we know that. They're going to transition to the VA and we're trying to make that transition as seamless and easy as possible.

You may or may not know that Congress passed a law a couple of years ago that gave a two-year window for anyone—active duty, reserve, etc.—coming back from the Gulf to seek or get their care at the VA. We had some speed bumps at the early stages of that. We had one or two medical center directors that weren't up on what was going on who actually turned away people that were seriously in need who were Gulf War veterans simply because they weren't in the system yet and they hadn't read the new regulation that had come out. There are scores of bills and regulation changes that come out every month. It's sometimes tough to keep track of them all.

Not quite as good a report card for the Guard and Reserve. The seriously injured folks are getting cared for well, but there's a lot of ‘tweeners as I call them, folks who come back that need three months of physical therapy or folks that need some sort of minor surgery. There are indications—and there has been one hearing in the House Armed Services Committee that basically brought to light—that maybe we could do a better job in this area, that some of these people were being taken off of their active duty orders before they were actually ready to go back to their home town, to the Reserves. And since some of their injuries disqualified them for duty in the Reserves, they were more or less between a rock and a hard place. We've striven to fix this as best we can, but I don't have a whole lot of data to share with you, so I'm not going to stand here and pound the table and say that it's been fixed.

When I was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, one of the things I looked at that was on the table at that time was the number of people deploying to the first Gulf War with dental problems. 23.4 percent of those people were disqualified from going overseas—Guard and Reserve—because of serious dental problems. “Well, I am the Manpower/Personnel deputy. Maybe I ought to look at this.”

So we pushed through a whole bunch of initiatives and from the paper side of it, it looked like the initiative would do fairly well. Of course there was no money to fund them. I asked for the same data for Gulf War II. What is the percentage of Guardsmen and Reservists who are getting turned away due to dental problems from their deployment? The exact same number to the decimal point came back at me. This is what I mean, just because you issue a piece of paper doesn't mean you're going to fix the problem.

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