The Department of Veterans’ Affairs is facing a $15 billion budget shortfall.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-AL, has called for a hearing to investigate the shortfall, criticizing the Biden administration and VA leadership for supposed mismanagement of resources.
“The Biden administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs has been failing its core mission of providing timely and quality care to our veterans,” Tuberville said. “The Department is now facing a $15 billion shortfall thanks to poor management of taxpayer-allotted resources.”
Sen. Tuberville also questioned the tactics used by VA leadership to supposedly subvert the budget process, “The VA leaders conveniently waited until after the House and Senate both passed their appropriations bills to come forward about the shortfall. There’s no way that Secretary McDonough and other bureaucrats at the VA couldn’t see this coming from miles away. I do not believe that they just found out about this issue two weeks ago, but this administration is so used to spinning the narrative to get their way, they thought they could pull one over on us.”
If the VA does not receive roughly $3 billion in additional funding before Sep. 20, mandatory benefits — including veterans’ compensation, pension benefit payments, and readjustment benefits — will be delayed. The rest of the shortfall, about $12 billion, is needed to cover medical care for the 2025 fiscal year.
Sen. John Boozman, R-AR, the leading Republican on the subcommittee that crafts the VA’s annual funding bill has expressed a willingness among both Republicans and Democrats to make sure the $3 billion in initial funding gets through. Boozman stressed that both parties see this as “something that is going to get done — that needs to get done.”
However, Republicans who raised concerns over financial mismanagement at the VA, like Tuberville, blocked an effort to fast-track that $3 billion before Congress went on break earlier this month.
In addition, the $12 billion requested by the VA for fiscal 2025 will be an even greater headache, with the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act, pioneered by then-speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-CA, capping funding for nondefense programs at $711 billion.
With current Republican spending bills written at that level, any additional funding for VA medical will have to be taken out of other nondefense spending. But Democrats are calling on their Republican colleagues to respect a bipartisan handshake agreement that would see an additional $60 billion go to nondefense spending.
Although Tuberville and other Republicans have blamed mismanagment in Biden’s VA as the sole driver behind this unexpected increase in spending, the VA claims that it is actually the result of the bipartisan PACT Act passed in 2022.
Following the passage of PACT, enrollment in VA care has skyrocketed with more than 710,000 new veterans entering the program — over 410,000 of those joining in just the past year. This is a 34 percent increase in enrollment compared to the same period before PACT was signed.
With more veterans to provide for, the VA needs more discretionary resources than previously anticipated.
The VA’s shortfall is just one example of how untenable the Republican-negotiated 2025 discretionary cap really is. In fact, the Senate has already announced that it will be adding extra emergency funding to both defense and nondefense programs to their 2025 spending bills — a reality the House will have to grapple with as they attempt to reach a bicameral spending agreement in the coming months.
Tuberville claims that his criticisms of the VA are aimed at the administration and not veterans themselves, but unfortunately it will be veterans who will lose their access to timely benefits and medical care if the requisite funding is not provided.
If Republicans continue to halt the immediate $3 billion in additional spending, then veterans’ benefit payments will be delayed, and if the remaining $12 billion is not eventually appropriated for fiscal 2025 then the VA will need to make budgetary adjustments — adjustments which are currently unclear.
