Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough continues to sound the alarm about how a full-year continuing funding resolution would impact the agency and those it serves.
“One issue I’m really worried about is the fact that it seems several members of Congress are comfortable with the idea that we’d operate under a continuing resolution for the entire 2022,” McDonough said during a call with reporters on Dec. 17.
Congress passed a measure that funds agencies under the current fiscal year 2021 levels through Feb. 18. A full-year CR without any deviations would mean that VA’s discretionary budget would be $1.8 billion less than President Joe Biden had proposed.
A full-year CR would also mean that the VA’s mandatory funding budget – which is earmarked for direct compensation and pension benefits – would be $9 billion less than what Biden’s budget proposal calls for.
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“Without that funding there’s real risk that we would not be able to make full payments to veterans for compensation and pension requirements through September 2022,” explained McDonough.
Community care funding for the Veterans Health Administration would be impacted to the tune of $941 million.
“I don’t have specific details on how we’d bend ourselves into a pretzel to operate under these limited numbers, but we’re doing that planning now,” said McDonough.
Under a full-year CR, the agency’s construction budget would take a $458 million hit and that could potentially impact a number of nationwide projects and the Veterans Benefits Administration would decrease by $259 million.
McDonough said all the budget uncertainty comes as the VA is looking to hire 2,000 additional claims representatives and get them into training programs to handle an uptick in the number of benefits applications related to Agent Orange presumptions.
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“A lot of that is with 2021 money, and we worked with Congress to make sure they’re comfortable that we used the ’21 money for that,” said McDonough.”In some ways on the personnel side, we can still hire many of those people, but we will be hamstrung on our training if we operate on a full-year CR.”
The claims backlog currently stands at around 260,000 claims but McDonough said that number could come down to 100,000 or less by 2024 if the additiohnal personnel were hired.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.