VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence: ‘Veterans issues are bipartisan’

The department has fielded a fair amount of criticism over the transparency of those contracting decisions and some of the staffing cuts as well, especially from Democrats on Capitol Hill

But also, I think this week we saw a New York Times article saying that real questions about whether or not there were actual savings involved or where that is

Talk to me about transparency with the contracts. I know the Secretary is out there talking about it a lot, but there's a difference between talking about what he's found and actually providing the documentation to the public

So is it something that you see as a gap, and is it something that we can hope to get more information on as VA moves ahead to say

these are exactly the kind of contracts that we're looking at, and this is the broader scope of what we're looking at when we talk about saving

Certainly. Well, we try to be as transparent as possible, so that's our intention

And so it frustrates me when people say we're not or we have questions because I'm in meetings where we talk about we've sent thousands of documents to people to understand kind of what we've done

The one thing I'd ask folks to understand is contracts are sensitive documents in the sense that they reveal a lot of information

So we're probably not going to hand proprietary secrets of companies out there

So I'd ask for a little bit of understanding about how that works. But again we been very clear The secretary has been very clear Work that we can figure out how it helps veterans And so that what we really driven to in the contracts Now you can share some of that with lawmakers however

And I know when you were under Secretary of Benefits, you had some of these kind of conversations with them

Do you, again, you said you feel like it's a different relationship than what we're seeing from the public

And that's always part of the challenge with Congress. There's part of the performance and there's the actual work that's being done behind the scenes

So, again, are you concerned with the relationship with Congress at this point? Do you feel like you guys have a good working relationship with Democrats so that you can at least make your case and get out there what you need to do

I'm sort of discounting the Republicans because I've heard nothing but positives from Chairman Moran and from Chairman Bost

But Senator Blumenthal, Senator Murray, Chairman Takano have been pretty critical so far, saying that they don't feel like they're getting all the information that they want

Yeah, well, that's unfortunate. I don't know all of those conversations, but I've had great relationships on both sides of the aisle, explaining, had good conversations, even acknowledging about where we disagree

But again, we never disagreed on the outcome. We never disagreed on wanting veterans to get their benefits faster or their health care services better

We never disagreed on that. It was more how to be done. It was conversations around how come there's no more investment in the hospitals in my state? Why do the pipes keep bursting in the light

how do we work together to get more money for maintenance, for example