>> good afternoon, senator burr, on behalf of am vets, i appreciate this opportunity to share recommendations to you. the main focus will be the veteran's administration operation. the single most important -- veteran who is so nobly served in this nation's armed forces. these acts of self-sacrifice by our veterans on gait america to not only preserve but to rehabilitate and expand our national cemetery system to meet the needs of american veterans. these spaces are part of america's historical culture. they are fields of honor and hallowed grounds and they deserve and require our most

respected steward ship. the tradition of our national -- earliest military graveyards were sich waited at-batal sites and at former prisoner of war sites and since that time, more than 3 million burials have taken place in the nca system. the nca maintains steward ship of 131 of our nation's cemeteries as well as 33 soldiers as of late 2010, there were more than 20,003 acres of -- of the roughly 4 .2

veterans alive today would choose a national cemetery as their final resting place, with the transition of over 1 million service members into veteran's status over the next 12 months, this number is expected to continue rising until approximately 2017. in fy 2011, the nca, which is the nation's largest cemetery system invested an estimated 31 31.49 million in order to improve the appearances of our national cemetery. aside from the -- $280 million for the nca's operations and maintenance budget in fy 2013 with an annual increase of $20 million until the national shrine commitments operational

standards are reached. finally the ibo asks the administration and congress to provide the resources needed to meet the sensitive and critical -- to all veterans who have served their country so honorably and faithfully. that coffin clouds my statements, i'll be happy to take any questions. >> ranking member burr, on more than 2 -- thank you for the opportunity to testify today. in partnership with the iv, it's vfe's -- every effort must be made to ensure that the facilities are safe, utilization has grown from 80% to -- this is

having an impact on the delivery of health care, to determine and monitor the condition of the facilities, an assessment was made of building systems, such as electrical, struckally. from an a to c is -- an f means the condition of the facility requires immediate attention. to correct the deficiencies of the ds and fs, the agency will have to testify $400 million. leaving well over $5 billion remaining to partially funded projects dating back to fiscal

year '07. these projects include spinal cord injury centers, including a trauma mind rehab as well as expanding mental health facilities. this request is too low to support the ever growing needs of the veterans, therefore we ask that congress provide funding of $2.8 billion. this will include all major seismic kr seismic corrections. although va's funding request for minor construction account is lower than the iv's request, this funding will allow the va to fund more than 120 projects. even though nonperforming maintenance is made through the general facility's account, and not through the va's account.

to keep pace with need and reduce the backlog of nrn, $2.1 million is needed. we're pointing out the actual need to reach vas -- that's the amount needed to meet va's strategic goals. although enhanced use lease could be used for a wide range of activities, the majority of these revolve in housing and living facilities. va has 19 buildings or parcels of land that are planned for enhanced use lease. however this authority has expired and we ask the congress to authorize this enhanced lease.

that congress clouds my comments. >> senator burke and members of the committee thank you for allowing me to testify and represent iea's 2,000 supporters. my name is tom tarantino, i'm a deputy policy director, i spent 10 years in the army. although my uniform is now a suit and tie, i am proud to work with this congress to have the backs of america's veterans. the va needs increased resources for iraq -- we believe that va health care must be fully funded to recommend a 2013 budget. the proposed va budget does -- it is still more than $4 billion

less than what the independent budget recommends. i'm also deeply concerned that congress has not passed a regular budget in what actually is years. fortunately congress has maintained va funding both current and advanced in the resolutions. however we are concerned that if this irregular budgeting process continues and the security that advanced funding is meant to provide for the va health care may erode. in political concerns and dangerous brinksmanship threatens the va, it's the veterans and the service members who can least afford to bear the burden that get the impact. we are the critical juncture of the department of justice and veterans. the workload on the va system is only going to increase. so failing to fully fund the va

or appropriate the funding in advance will inflict pain and hardship on thousands of veterans, among the most useful programs given by the va is the education, they have furthered their education, increased their jobs. one of the single greatest drets to success is the lack of state approving agencies to prevent fraud particularly in the realm of for profit schools, the majority of profit schools are an honest -- however as pointed out in the independent budget, many for profit schools are just not holding up their end. for profit schools carry a third of -- it does not appear that we

are giving veterans the tools they need to seek a valued education. first we must collect useful data on both student and institutional success. without mandatory uniform data collection across the board, private, public, for profit, not for profit, we will never be able to give the veterans the information on the choices they have to make. having data on schools is useless unless we can present it to students in ways they -- commitment to increase and cut education counseling for veterans, and finally, we have to ensure that the free and open market can weed out poorly performing schools, by changing the 90/10 rule to include va

benefits as government funds because they are. all of this must be executed with one goal in mind and that is to preserve the gi bill. it should be a top priority. it not only pro-vids upward mobility for those that use it, but it benefits the nation as a whole in the long run. the post-9/11 g-i bill -- the original world war ii -- like then, the post 911 gi bill is threatened. their whole existence ask separating veterans from their hard earned benefits. america's newest veterans also

face a tough economy and employment challenge. congress took bold action last year in passing the hire heros act. this year the va stands ready to help implement this law so that veterans can get back to work. but we also focus on those who choose not to go directly into the workforce but to go to school to get the job they want. >> on behalf of all the members of the committee, i want to thank the entire panel for your willingness to be here. let me assure you, all your testimonies are in their hands. i ask yourself to make yourselves available to all members for questions we'll follow up with. i would like to make a couple of comments and then ask one question at the end. mr. tarantino, i agree with what you just said, the data is absolutely essential to our ability to evaluate what we're

doing, but more importantly the effectiveness of what we're do. i may throw a cautionary note out. not all individuals who leave active duty are after a degree, but most are after a career. when you start looking at placement, the assessment we make about one institution versus another ibs tugs is actually reversed. that those that maybe don't do a good job of providing a degree do a great job of providing tools for a career. many of you have heard me with our colleagues at the va as i have questioned the need for our focus to stay on delivering a product to a veteran. and i will work with the secretary and his leadership team, if they need plus ups in central office, they're going to

neat plus ups elsewhere. the only way i'll sit still is if the core mission of the va is to deliver that aid to the veteran service members is being fulfilled. i'll speculate, he's doing a good job because he understands what the mission is and we have got work to do. i think he would be the first to admit it. but he's not losing focus of exactly what that threshold of accountability is going to be for him. and i appreciate you pointing that out. i think all of you have questions on sequestration, i have them. one, i don't think this should have ever been something we entered into. i think congress is here to do our job, not to leave it up to a supercommittee or a group of

individuals that then decide that we would rather pump the ball than throw it. i think that it's time for us to do our job. starts with doing a budget, required by law to do one annually, without budget it's hard to do the appropriations bills. so very simple process. carl, you pointed out dollars that had been designated as not needed. $3 billion and $2 billion respectively. i have some concern how so far in advance we can identify that. and i think if we go back, all of you when we started working on advanced operations. so i think the chairman is committed, as am i to get to the bottom, work with the va, try to understand how this happened and

quite possibly talk about different ways to reprogram muchblt i know from the standpoint of the intelligence committee, one of the agencies that's under our jurisdiction wants to reprogram money. they've got to get approval from us to reprogram that money. i think that's probably a wise thing and we'll look at any potential changes that need to be made. some of you mentioned and i'm sure all of you are concerned about construction and maintenance. i'll just make a personal observation, facilities are crucial to the access and quality of care that our veterans receive in the future. we're in the 21st century and medicine has changed. i won't comment on other states, but in north carolina, i've got two facilities that were built in the 1950s, they're not constructed in a way to put an

mri machine, much less some of the new technology that's going in. even to run a computer that's net worked means drilling through walls that were never intended to have holes, much like the capitol of the united states where we have to make the drill bits to actually drill through those. but more importantly, they're not conducive to outpatient care, you have to navigate a health care facility to find a room that they happen to be doing endo scopy. and i think it's important and the va ishood headed on a new course of creating that superoutpatient facility that can handle 95% of the veteran's needs, it will take a while to do it, but we will never get

there if we don't build that into our long-term and short-term maintenance requests, construction requests. i can question whether the total that's in the budget this year even comes close to handling just the maintenance needs that we have in existing facilities and i think, ray, you probably agree on that. those are just some of my thoughts on having your testimony and try to put it in perspective of what we have heard from the va. i would just pose one more question to each of you, if you want to respond, you can. what trends do you see that you haven't outlined in your testimony that you think should be alarming to our nation's veterans and to policymakers in washington. i'll just start down here and go down the line. >> the signature wounds in

vietnam were about ptsd and agent orange. the signature wounds in our wars today are about ptsd and -- is young woman in uniform is afraid to step forward when she's suffering symptoms. and tdi, former players in the nfl are currently suing the nfl because they're suffering from concussion that goes back 30 and 40 years, and these symptoms are now revealing themselves. what are we going to do about it today to ensure there's somebody there to take care of them. >> it's a fascinating thing, in many high schools around the country are getting a baseline that they can establish for players, so as you have

individuals who have suffered concussion, to figure out if they have had a change. novel approach. we're beginning to recognize the importance of that. maybe we will from the the standpoint of military personnel as well. >> i would frame my answers, a broad based idea about demand for health care services. while the va shows its trends in the budget every year, it seems like when they return the next year, the demand trends spiked higher than what they originally projected. which points to my concerns about how you end up with excess resources when you have a demand curve that's much steeper. as far as something to think about in the near short term, long term, with regard to demand we have to keep in mind that we basically have drawn down in iraq now, and at some point in the future, we're going to draw down in afghanistan. while there's a commonly held

belief demand will reach a plateau and tail off, we don't believe we've gotten to that point yet. you can see an even higher spike in demand for services as you have these individuals that are now out of iraq and may be leaving the service and who will eventually be returning from afghanistan and leave the service as well. so we have to make sure that we're in a situation where we're able to meet their unique health care demands while continuing to meet the demand of the population of veterans of the va service today. >> when i made the skmencomment earlier to the secretary, the va took in 430,000 more claims than were decided, it's not to give the va a black eye. it's to say, let's make sure that our expectations on what we can accomplish are rational. it's hard for me to believe you can have 430,000 more claims this year, and within a three-year period we can eliminate the backlog. under my calculation, you're

going to have to process 150,000 more claims than you take in every year to eliminate the backlog. if you you just look at what's in front of us, in additional claims to come in, i'm not sure you could make a rational statement like that. i hope the dialogue we're able to get not just on the disability side but throughout the va, a rational discussion about what expectations should be. there's got to be a matrix and there's got to be accountability. >> i would like to follow up with that exact point regarding the disability claims process as you are well aware. va has a lot of parts in motion, and with a complete transformation process we're looking at over the coursed year, i would like to commend va on one aspect and that is, it's very difficult and challenging to not only transform and antiquated system into a modern

paperless system at the same time reducing the backlog. and so while they're working toward reducing the backlog, that's why we want to ensure that the focus remains on quality and accuracy, as far as a specific trend, veterans as you know, communicate electronically, the va is trying to get there with their it system, and as my comments had mentioned earlier about the vbms system. we hope it gets there as well, we don't know what the outcome is going to be. we know there's positive results coming out of it from the test stations, and we'll have to wait and see what happens when it goes out nationally. but i guess the best would be that we're cautiously optimistic about that, but veterans demand that modernized system, va's trying to get there, hopefully we can all help them get there together. >> great. i agree with you, the va deserves credit for trying something different. none of us know whether it will

work. i would only say this, in the time that we've designed this and begun to implement it, the trend that you can't ignore is that in 2008 our productivity per fte, in the claims process was 87 claims per year. today, 2011, 73.5 claims per year. it's alarming to me -- i'm hopeful the i.t. thing will be the solution. but we've taken our eye off what we're producing out of the current workforce and roughly getting 14 less claims per employee that processes claims. and when you look at that trend it's troubling from a standpoint of, if this doesn't work, we start at a new lower baseline of

productivity and it means that the ability to do away with the backlog is that much longer. >> thank you, senator burr. i appreciate your comments and i agree with all of the additional comments made by my apartmenter ins, as far as nca having any alarming issues, i don't think i have the expertise right now to speak to that, but i will be meeting with the folks at the nca and if i come up with something, i'll let you know. >> share it with us. >> thank you. >> i think my testimony pointed out, my concerns with construction, but i want to touch on another issue that we've ignored in the past that has led to lack of research in other areas of agent oermg as an example. it took us 40 years to get to the point where we're seeing

effects of agent orange. we can't let that happen to folks being exposed to burn pits. we lack the science to identify it, diagnose it and treat it. we need research dollars and we need research dollars specifically for burn pit exposure. >> i hear you loud and clear, and as a guy that's trying to get something done, i hear your warning and frustration. >> we're alarmed about the lack of clarity with the high suicide rate among veterans. we really don't have any clear idea of the suicide epidemic in the veterans population. the va does a good job or a decent job of tracking veterans within their system. in terms of oef vets, that's just over half. which means half of iraq and afghanistan veterans never set foot in a va hospital. we have no idea what's happening

in that population. when we look at the budget and increase to mental health and shock and approach to suicide prevention, we're trying to develop programs with awareness, but we're not doing it in a targeted fashion, it's one thing to increase awareness about stigma, but if you don't know where are the problem areas, what are the methodologies and what type of issues are those service members facing, then you're basically crawling around in the dark. what we're proposing, that we need to have a national effort to track veterans suicide in all 50 states. there's a couple ways to do it, i'm happy to talk with you about it offline. until we do that, we're never going to get our hand around this issue, and we're never going to solve the problem. >> i think i can speak for the chairman in saying that the committee is committed to do a much better job at understanding the problem and more

importantly, the trend we find it alarming. and to speak for the va, i think they take this very seriously. in our last hearing relative to progress we were making, one individual, and i put this caveat in, they're responsibility was the hotline. the progress is evident by the fact that we're getting more calls to the hotline. now, when you look at things from an overall architecture, you get more calls to the hotline, you get a much greater problem out there than what you might have thought. i'm -- i think we've got to connect these things within the administration to understand how to interpret something like an increase in calls. but i think we're all committed not just in the veteran's population, but in the active duty force to make sure that wherever these pressure points are, that we find a way to

relieve them long before we reach a suicidal end. let me take this opportunity -- you have been patient with us, and we had great participation from the members today. i want to thank the chairman and yourself for the awareness to be here, and for the time that you put in, to not only your testimony but your proposals. this hearing is adjourned.