Establishing Veterans Economic Opportunity and Transition Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. BILIRAKIS. Madam Speaker, I rise today to strongly support H.R. 2045, the Veterans' Education, Transition, and Opportunity Prioritization Plan, or the VET OPP Act of 2019, which would create a significant structural change at the Department of Veterans Affairs to better align and specialize economic opportunity for our veterans, our true heroes.

As ranking member of the VA Economic Opportunity Subcommittee, I know this committee understands the importance of prioritizing veterans' education, workforce training, transition, and vocational rehabilitation programs.

However, the way the VA is structured, under the current system, it puts all benefit programs under one roof at the Veterans Benefits Administration. While I certainly understand that the VBA focuses a significant amount of time on processing disability claims and working to decrease its backlog of appeals, as the doctor stated, my colleagues and I on the committee have concerns that this has led to an imbalanced amount of attention away from other benefit programs, like the GI Bill education benefit and the employment programs, such as the vocational rehabilitation and employment, which is so very important as well.

I fear that this lack of attention was fully realized last year, again, as the doctor stated, as VBA failed to properly implement sections 107 and 501 of the Forever GI Bill.

This failure by the VA to update their IT systems caused massive delays in processing GI Bill claims for thousands of student veterans last fall, many of whom rely on their payments as the only source of income. And sadly, it was not the first time that the VA has failed to provide GI Bill payments on time. Hopefully, it's going to be the last time.

To help solve this inequity, H.R. 2045, the VET OPP Act, would create a fourth administration at VA called the Economic Opportunity and Transition Administration, led by the new VA Under Secretary appointed by the President of the United States. This new Under Secretary would be tasked with managing all education, home loans, small business certification, transition assistance, and vocational rehabilitation and employment benefits within the VA.

This bill is a smart, commonsense policy that will allow VA to improve outcomes for our Nation's veterans seeking better economic opportunities.

Finally, the bill will allow Congress to provide significantly better oversight and accountability of those running these programs.

I want to thank the sponsor of H.R. 2045, Dr. Brad Wenstrup, for introducing this legislation this Congress.

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Mr. BILIRAKIS. Madam Speaker, I also want to thank the chairman of the subcommittee, my good friend, Mike Levin, who is doing an outstanding job for co-leading the bill with us.

I urge my colleagues to pass H.R. 2045, as amended.

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