Sen. Ruben Gallego to block VA nominations until plans to cut staff are dropped

Senator Geiger, thank you for sitting down with us. You're on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee

You're a veteran with a pretty prominent voice, and I know this week you came out and said that you have

a lot of concerns with what's going to go on with VA, some of these proposed cuts

You actually have put a hold on all nominees at the Department of Veterans Affairs

Why the reason for that? What do you think that's going to do here

Well, look, simple reason, you know, being in the veteran community, talking to friends that I served with

going back to Arizona, people are afraid, I want to say people, veterans and their families

that these cuts are just arbitrary. They have no clear intention. It's potentially going to harm

services to people. And if you want to improve the VA, I think there's a way to do it. But just

take an arbitrary cut out of nowhere and saying that you have to fire 88,000 people without any

real plan. How is that going to affect services? How is it going to affect our veterans? And I don't

believe it's possible. In Arizona, they just told my VA hospital, the Phoenix VA hospital, they have

to get rid of 15 of their workforce by June This is the Phoenix VA that had problems in the past because of lack of staffing And now all of a sudden they going to just start getting rid of 15 of their workforce And talking to people that use the VA I actually have used the VA in the past too talking to current workers there is no way they going to be able to cut 15 of that staff without it actually affecting veterans And I just not going to let that happen I going to try to slow the process as much as possible So at least we could save a lot of these workers and more importantly potentially save

veterans' lives. So VA has said that they want to do a review before they go into some of these

cuts, and they're going to look and see where there's efficiency and everything. But they've also announced that number, that 80,000-plus number. Right. Where did that number come from

Yeah. And in Arizona, they just sent out a notice starting in April that they want the Phoenix VA

to identify the 15% of the staff that they want to get rid of by June. Where did that review come

from? Right. This is real people's lives. Veterans will die. There are going to be lack

of services, lack of mental health services. There's so much work we've been doing to turn around the VA

And some 22-year-old Silicon Valley boy is coming up with an idea of what there should be cuts to the VA

has zero comps about the VA