We Need To Protect The Veterans Administration

On Thursday, The Epoch Times reported the following:

GOP lawmakers attempted to block the Biden administration from diverting Veterans Affairs (VA) resources to address the border crisis.

A coalition of Republican senators introduced legislation (pdf) on April 26 to prioritize the needs of the nation’s veterans over illegal immigrants. The new bill would secure the VA funds from providing “emergency assistance at the southern border of the United States resulting from the repeal of certain public health orders, and for other purposes.”

It comes as the administration is preparing an interagency response to an expected surge at the southern border as it plans to end a Trump-era immigration policy, known as Title 42, in late May.

Since being invoked in March 2020, the public health order has quickly expelled a majority of asylum seekers at the border, in a bid to minimize non-essential travel and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 at U.S. borders. Its termination was announced on April 1 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed that his department is planning to reallocate resources, doctors, and nurses from the VA system.

The article concludes:

Last week, Boozman (Senator John Boozman (R-Ark.), lead Republican appropriator for VA funding and a senior member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee) sent a joint letter to President Joe Biden, demanding not to divert VA health-care personnel away from helping American veterans and prioritize illegal immigrants, calling it a misuse of the Fourth Mission—the primary medical backup to the Department of Defense during times of national emergencies.

The Fourth Mission isn’t “a tool to clean up the mess from a foreseeable and avoidable crisis, especially while the VA is already experiencing record-high turnover rates and issues of workforce resiliency amongst its health care employees,” senators warned.

The VA is also experiencing a 15-year high turnover rate with its nursing staff and increased vacancies for a wide variety of health care professionals, Boozman notes.

This makes my blood boil. We owe everything to our veterans and nothing to illegal aliens. In 2019, there were 6,261 Veteran suicide deaths. How many of those deaths could have been prevented by better care through the Veterans Administration? The thankless attitude of the Biden administration toward our military is a disgrace.