Congressman: No one wants a ‘Hunger Games’ for funding between vets’, civilian spending

What can you do right now

Do you think there are areas of easy compromise that you can work with Republicans on

And then are there areas that you think that they'll start to come around on where they'll see maybe this 80,000 cut

where they will want to have more information and they'll join you in pushing for more

Well, look, there are some Republicans that were, it was maybe, I think, 34 Republicans that voted for the PACT Act initially in 2021

But the Republican leadership opposed it, even when it passed the Senate by a huge amount

I don't want to go through the whole story, but the official, this Speaker of the House voted against the PACT Act

And Chairman Bost voted against it initially. We changed it significantly. He had an excuse to then vote for it

But they've never really liked the way we've funded the PACT Act

It's very costly. And we called it the cost of war. And it is, it's like the initial estimates by the CBO were upwards of like

I don know billion close to three quarters of a trillion dollars that was going to need it to be taken care of all this So the entire Republican Party my colleagues have never liked being on the hook for that much money

My position and the position of the Democrats has always been, hey, toxic exposure is the cost of war

It's no different than paying for someone's helmet. someone's flak jacket when they're in the heat of battle

the heat of battle just sort of shows up 5, 10, 15 years later

when all these different illnesses start to show up because you were exposed to Agent Orange

you were exposed to blasts you were exposed to burn pits and you need some peace of mind

for you and your family that you're going to get benefits and you're going to get health care

How do I know? What's the evidence for this? This latest continued resolution that we had a battle over

zeroed out the advanced appropriations by some like $24, $25 billion. Now for your listeners the VA is one of the few places where we approve how much money a year before This is the only thing this is how much political weight there is behind taking care of our veterans

But as evidence, and they zeroed it out. They said, oh, the appropriations for the next fiscal year has got zero in it

And they said, Democrats are hyperventilating, they're exact. Well, they said that they're going to come back and they're going to talk about that money when it comes to that part

But I know the tax exposure fund was designed to be guaranteed money that didn't have to do that

Now that they've made that move, do you think you're going to be able to convince them

Do you think this is just going to be more of the same fight? I think I'm going to be very successful at making it too hot for them to handle

They're deluding themselves if they think that the American people are going to want to see the hunger games created between veterans and school lunches

Veterans, we created the toxic, so we have spending we do on our defense and we have spending that we don't do on defense

They're two big categories. VA oddly enough is in the category of non spending And so we knew that toxic exposure could cost up to billion

And if you're committed to making sure we take care of the veteran, you would say, look, we don't want to make the veterans who are suffering from toxic exposure

compete with all of the other domestic proprietors or compete against our military

Right? But we've got to make this commitment to them. So we created a special fund called the Toxic Exposure Fund

Republicans never liked it. And that just essentially took everything out of the budget debate

That's right. That's right. It just said, look, it made it politically possible for us to say this is how we're going to fund it

They've zeroed that out for next year. I think that is a huge indication

of where they want to go and they're going to turn it into

a debate later on well we got to pay for it some other way we can't, this is an addition

I'm saying no you just want to undermine the PAC Act you want to renege on it

they won't cop to it but that's what they're up to Congressman you got some votes coming up

so I appreciate all the time here and I'll be talking to you about this in the months to come thank you