Hearing of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs - Evaluating the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of General Counsel

Statement

Thank you to everyone for attending today's Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing entitled, Evaluating the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of General Counsel.

Each day the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) executes laws, regulations and policies that have a profound effect on how the Department conducts its business and assists our nation's veterans. The General Counsel serves as the VA's chief legal officer, as the office provides legal advice to the Secretary and all organizational components of the Department. It is no secret that the VA's General Counsel, or OGC, plays a critical role in the decision making and oversight of the VA.

The OGC is a unique and complex office within the VA, and its full range of responsibilities, including legal, litigation, legislative and regulatory activities is distributed among seven Professional Staff Groups, each headed by an Assistant General Counsel. Each of these groups has the expertise in specific subject matter areas, and is responsible for providing legal advice to program officials, reviewing proposed regulations and directives, and handling litigation involving VA programs. Additionally, the OGC operates 22 field offices, which comprises almost two thirds of OGC's workforce. With general counsel's widespread workforce, the OGC must promote consistency and uniformity of its recommendations that lead to executive decisions that directly impact millions of veterans.

We have heard many times that the OGC has repeatedly used time extensions from the court in order to keep pace with their workload; however, the workload is so great that it continues to remain an ongoing issue. Additionally, we have too often heard from various Department entities, that documents crucial to this Subcommittee's work, are tied up with the General Counsel's office or that they are restricted by the OGC for release.

Though OGC insists that the oversight responsibility of Congress deserves respect, there is often, at times, a tension between this oversight responsibility and agencies' needs to protect certain pre-decisional information from disclosure out of concern that it could have a chilling impact on the free and open internal discussion and debate leading to the provision of advice needed by agency decision makers.

As the VA OGC deals with these challenges, they must still continue to give timely and balanced legal recommendations that will benefit the needs of our veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Determining an objective standard to evaluate a subjective trade is a challenge; nonetheless, the general counsel needs to bring reform to the VA's Office of General Counsel.

I look forward to hearing from the general counsel the challenges the office is facing, as well as solutions that are being implemented to correct long standing issues within the Office.

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