Blog: Late Last Night - Very Early this Morning, the House Voted on a Bill that Combined $1.1 Billion in Emergency Funding to Help Combat the Zika Virus as Well as Funding for Military Construction and Veterans Affairs (VA) Budget.

Statement

Late last night - very early this morning, the House voted on a bill that combined $1.1 billion in emergency funding to help combat the Zika virus as well as funding for military construction and Veterans Affairs (VA) budget. The bill passed 239 to 171, and I voted yes.

The bill funds the Military Construction/Veterans Affairs components of federal spending at $74.4 billion. This represents a decrease of $273 million below last year on the military construction side and an increase of $2.9 billion on the veterans side, most of which is on the mandatory side of the budget for veterans spending.

There's also $260 million for the modernization of electronic health records and restrictions on certain funds until the VA certifies that those records work with what the Defense Department uses in terms of electronic formatting. Since the VA was supposed to get this done by October of this year and they'll almost certainly miss that deadline, putting some teeth into the medical record requirement through the funding process strikes me as sensible. Notably, it also moved management of all large scale construction projects from the VA to instead be managed from the outside, and it added seventeen percent funding to the office of the VA Inspector General.

The military construction component of the budget once again prohibited the closure of Guantanamo Bay and included upgrades for MCAS Beaufort, Parris Island, and Joint Base Charleston.

The Zika provision provided $1.1 billion in spending with the spending for this year, $750 million, offset. It was committed that next year's funding would be further offset. One interesting aspect of the bill was the strong oversight funding, $2 million, as opposed to what the president had proposed. I still had some concerns about the bill, but I believed the strengths outweighed the weaknesses in this bill and, accordingly, voted as I did.

Source