dr. petzel and that's for all medical acquisition. gloves, masks, aprons. we ought to be able to leverage that into a bulk purchase and get a good price on those kinds of things. for everything else we have an office of acquisition, logistics, and construction and we have a director who heads that office. and everything else governing acquisition is consolidated under his review. both offices work -- the work of both offices then come up to my level, to the deputy secretary as part of our monthly oversight review process. >> thank you. thank you very much. senator johanns. >> thank you. mr. secretary, let me if i might visit with you about the national call center. this is something that i think we had high hopes for. you might have had high hopes for. but i have to tell you, it's not working well. here's what we're running into. the complaints kind of fall into two separate categories. the first category would be people that call the call center and no one answers. i mean, it just rings and rings and rings and there's no one there. i will tell you in my ow

dr. robert petzel, undersecretary for health. we also have todd grahams, executive in charge for the office of management and chief financial officer, and roger baker, assistant secretary for information and technology. thank you all for joining us today, secretary shinseki. your remarks will of course appear in the record. but we welcome your opening statement. >> thank you, madam chairman. ranking member burr, distinguished members of the senate committee on veterans affairs, thank you again. and i look forward to these. this is an opportunity to extend the dialogue we have in other fora. but thanks for this opportunity to present, as chairwoman -- the chairman said, the president's 2013 budget and 2014 advanced appropriations requests for va. this committee has a long history of strong support for our nation's veterans, and i can speak to that firsthand, having worked personally the past three budgets with you. the president has demonstrated his own respect and sense of obligation for our 22 million veterans by saying to the c