#187 Doug Collins - United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs

Spring Fest and Ego Days are here at Lowe's.

Right now, get a free Select Ego 56-volt battery

with purchase of a select trimmer, blower, or mower kit.

Plus, shop today for new and exclusive items you need for your lawn.

So get ready for spring with the latest in innovation from Ego,

the number one rated brand in cordless outdoor power.

Only at Lowe's.

We help. You save.
Offer valid through 4-. Selection varies by location while supplies last.
This episode is brought to you by Pluto TV. Pluto TV has all the shows and movies you love streaming for free.
That means laughter is free with gut-busting comedies like The Neighborhood, Key & Peele, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Mystery is free with countless cases to crack

from Criminal Minds, Tracker, and Matlock.

And thrills are free with heart-pumping hits

like The Walking Dead and Defiance.

Feel the free.

Pluto TV, stream now, pay never.

Guys like me don't trust the VA.

We just don't.

You're not going to be getting your sex changed at the VA anymore. That's not what our services are for, and everything that we're taking money-wise away to that would take away from money that I could be spending on something else that are helping vets directly, but we're not even getting primary health care.
480,000 VA employees, and there are 450,000 active duty Army. That's 30,000 more than the active army members.
I hope you're taking this in because I am the guy you're trying to reach. Secretary Collins, welcome to the show.
I'm glad to be here, bud. It's an honor to have you here.
So the new Secretary of the VA. Yep.
Lots of stuff to work on. It's a, what do you call it, target rich environment? Yeah, I'll bet it is, probably even more than I know.
So we got a bunch of stuff to talk about today, a whole lot of topics to cover. But I'm just how did how did secretary of the VA pop up on your radar? Well, I think it come about a lot of things.
You know, the president, I had known each other for a while. And when I was in Congress for eight years, especially those last few years, I was in leadership and I had to was the ranking member of the VA, not the VA committee, but the Judiciary Committee, which put me in close proximity to the president because we had to deal with the sham Russia stuff.
We had to deal with the Mueller. We had to deal with impeachment.
And so he and I got to know each other pretty well. And, you know, from my fighting, you know, during those days to keep the truth just out there about what we were seeing.
And so we just had developed a closeness and we've kept it up over the time when he was out. And when he started campaigning again, I would be out there and I'd show up.
And after a while, about a year or so ago, he said, look, I think you need to come with me. And he just said, if you've ever been around him, he's like, I just want, you need to come with me.
And this was a year out. And I said, Mr.
President, I said, let's get you elected. We'll talk about whatever you want to do.
And after that happened, we had some conversations and some other ideas that was thought about. But then I had some ideas about this, and it came about, and I said, you know, this will be a good spot.
It takes my career, takes my passions, and puts it in a position that is, as most well know, is a politically sensitive department because of Congress and everybody on the veterans. I said, I think we can manage this because we're going to have to make some change that actually matters, And I said, we're going to have to work at it hard.
And I think we can do that. So, uh, he, he agreed, uh, brought me in.
We discussed it for just a little while. And then I asked him when he said, he said, you want to do this as yes, sir.
He said, I said, what do you want me to do? I said, what, what do you want me to do, sir? And he said, just take care of my veterans. That was it.
Nice. You don't tend to do that.
You better believe it. Perfect.
Perfect. Well, before we get too far into the weeds here, everybody gets a gift.
All right. Even the secretary of the VA.
All right. There we go.
I love it. Vigilance League gummy bears made in the U.S.
And they're legal at all 50 states. I love it.
Don't worry about feeling weird after you have some of those or anything. I love it.
But, all right. So everybody gets an introduction too.

So all right. Doug Collins, secretary of the VA.
You are the 12th secretary of the departments of veterans affairs confirmed by the Senate in February of 2025 to lead the charge for our nation's veterans. You earned a degree in political science and criminal justice from the University of North Georgia.
You earned earned a master's degree in divinity from new orleans baptist theological seminary and pastored chickpea chickopea baptist church for 11 years in 2006 the people of georgia's 27th state house district elected you to represent them during your first term in the legislator, you graduated from Atlanta's John Marshall Law School and established your own legal practice. You are the U.S.
Representative from Georgia's 9th Congressional District from 2013 to 2021. You're a veteran who served as a chaplain in the Air Force Reserve, including a deployment to Iraq in 2008 with the 94th Air Wing.
You remain a colonel in the Air Force Reserve. You're a husband and a father, and most importantly, a Christian.
And some of the things that you've already done, you've already cut DEI programs and shifted $14 million to VA healthcare and caregiver support, set up telehealth and remote and rural areas, changed the flag policy to only American and POW flags, and over 1 million disability claims in 2025 already. That's two weeks faster than the normal that we've seen.
So what are some of the things that you want to change about the VA?

I have right now the size and scope of the VA.

I know your Doge advisor is here somewhere today. And so what does that look like? And a great part about it is he's my VA employee who helps me with liaison to them, which is a great thing.
because we've incorporated the whole work of what I think the president's new vision is into our organization in a way that works with us and not against us. I think that's one of the things that there's this idea out there that, you know, there's this ominous, you know, thing happening in DC.
And the truth of the matter is, no, I'm still the secretary of VA. It comes through my desk.
We make decisions and mine will always be for the veteran. And then how that works out to our VA employees.
Where we're seeing the most issue right now is, Sean, and this is something almost for any military person, anybody that wants to think about it. The first thing when you come into a branch or you come into anything, it's you're told about the culture.
The culture is this. The culture, you will be an airman.
You will be a Navy. You'll be a seal, you'll be a, whatever it is, you've got the culture.
Well, the only thing interesting is, is, is in all fairness, Sean, that's culture is at the end of the, of the pipe. It's what comes out of the pipe.
It's what goes in at the top that gives you culture. There's this idea of somewhere that you're out there that you all of a sudden, you can just pop up culture.

And that's just not true.

You've got to have people and ideas at the top that then permeate through the system,

sort of just like you were eating, and it comes out the other end.

Well, it comes out as culture.

And so really that's the first step for me.

The first step is developing a culture that says, we've done it this way for so long.

Is this still the right way to do it?

And look, I'm running against people who don't want to change.

I'm running against people who don't want to change. I'm running against, you know, media, union bosses, members of Congress and the Senate who just, you know, they've put in, here's the problem.
They've invested so much in a system that's not working that now it's hard for them to admit, maybe we need to do something different. So, you know, all the things we're going to talk about today is going to come back to that culture issue.
So that's why I'm out here talking to you. That's why I've been on social media, Twitter, anything else I could find.
Just tell the truth. And I fought back against the lies.
I think the sum up my first five weeks is you may have been able to be, the VA may have been a whipping post for a long time. Some of it, I'll agree with you, probably needed to be, but nobody's ever stepped forward to fix it.
So here's my thought to everybody. We're not going to be your whipping post anymore.
I'm going to tell you the truth and I'm going to give you the answers that we need to do. And I'm going to take care of our veteran, number one, and I'm going to make sure our VA employee is the best that we can.
So it's a lot goes into it, but it's culture that has to start at the top and also has to filter down and buy in. And that's what I'm fighting the most right now.
Yeah. I've got a whole slew of complaints about the VA and it's funny, but it's not.
I mean, I haven't stepped into a VA. I got a hundred percent.
I haven't stepped into a VA in almost 10 years because my experience has been just atrocious. It was, here's these pills, we can't see.
I mean, I remember just going to my, I can't even remember what they call the appointments, where you go in and you get checked out. Your consultations.
Yeah, the consultations. I'm having doctors come to me.
They don't even know what a Navy SEAL is. They're asking me why I didn't go to medical when I'm attached to a FOB base.
They don't understand what combat is. My doctor shows up in a sweatsuit, barely even speaks any English.
And it's just time and time again. And then if you know anything about my show, it started with all special ops combat veterans.
and everybody has the same complaints and the same issues and and it it is created look i don't know any any one of my friends and i have friends with the top war fighters on the planet none of them have a good experience at the va none of them have anything positive to say VA. None of them trust the VA.
And that's why I quit going. I mean, I have more friends that have died of suicide and drug addiction and depression and PTS.
And everybody's struggling with, especially the special operations guys, with the traumatic brain injuries. And we just aren't getting any answers at all from the va and so and then it's just created this distrust so what i do with my check is i i buy my own health care instead of use the va because i just i don't trust the system i don't like the system i get treated like shit when i go there it's like like um it's like i'm faking an injury or something and and so i just got to the point where i just threw my hands up and i was like man fuck this i'm not doing it i will i will personally pay for my own health care on the civilian side which is much much better than anything i've ever had in the va and so and then and then you see a lot of these therapies, and I want to dive into this too, but I mean, I'm just going to share my experiences with you because I think you need to know.
And I mean, I just talked about traumatic brain injury. I mean, these guys have been breaching doors with high explosives for 20 years.

They can't remember where the hell they are. They can't remember what they're doing.
The short-term memory loss. They drive somewhere.
They're driving their kids somewhere. They forget where the hell they're going.
When I say they, I mean we. We're temperamental.
We're quick to fly off the handle. There's chemical imbalances.
There's the burn pit shit. And now All these different

I mean

It's across the board. I mean, you're seeing all these nonprofits that are stood up by veterans and they're the ones that are actually taking care of us.
It's not the VA. And psychedelic therapy is one of the big ones that we've seen a tremendous amount of benefit from, especially with traumatic brain injury.
I mean, Stanford did a study, fly these guys down. They do a brain scan.
They fly these guys down to Mexico, do an Ibogaine treatment. My friend Trevor's, he's Ambio Life Sciences.
There's all these black holes in the brain, you know, on the brain scan. They go down there where their brain's not working.
They do the Ibogaine treatment. They fly them back up to Stanford.
Oh, magically, the entire brain is lit up. I just want to, I have to tell you some of this stuff because it's important.
One of my best friends of friends of all time i've known him for probably at least 15 years we contracted it at um cia together retired green beret sustained one of the biggest blasts i've ever seen somebody walk out alive from uh massive traumatic brain injury then he gets shot in the head. His wife calls.
He's been hiding this stuff. His wife calls me, and she's like, Sean, he's bedridden five to six days a week.
He can't walk without a cane because he has vertigo. He can't go outside even on a cloudy day without his sunglasses because the light sensitivity is so bad.
He can't, we haven't had sex in over two years. He goes down there.
Nobody can help him. Nobody at the VA can help him.
He goes down there. He does the Ibogaine treatment.
He leaves his cane there at the facility. He comes home, doesn't need, he doesn't need the cane anymore, doesn't need the sunglasses, is not bedridden at all anymore.
All the vertigo is gone. And then he goes home, has sex with his wife.
And that was probably nine months ago. Same.
It was like one week to fix that. And I don't even, I don't know.
I mean, like I said, I haven't stepped foot in the VA. I just gave up on it.
Yeah. But why aren't they looking at stuff like that that actually works instead of doing the same old shit? Oh, here's some pills.
Here's this. Let's go do a brain scan.
Oh, we don't have any answers. And it's discouraging.
And, you know, that's not the only nonprofit. That's VETS that I'm talking about, Veterans Exploring.
I can's vets right vets.org but but um treatment solutions but why isn't the va getting i mean and then we have the the veteran suicide epidemic and the numbers are all over the board they say 22 a day i hear reports that it's actually 40 a day when you start looking at the at the overdoses and stuff like that. I mean, so what's the plan here? The second half of basketball season is here and the race to the playoffs is heating up on prize picks.
With over 10 million members and billions of dollars in awarded winnings, prize picks has made daily fantasy sports more accessible than ever. It's simple.
Get the app, pick two or more players across any sport, pick more or less on their projection, and you can win up to 1,000 times your money. Don't miss your chance to cash in as the league's best fight for playoff positioning.
Join PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app available to play in more than 40 plus states including California and Texas Download the PrizePix app today and use code SRS to get $50 in bonus promo funds instantly when you play $5 That's code SRS on PrizePix to get $50 in bonus promo funds instantly when you play $5 Win or lose, you'll get $50 bonus credit just for playing, guaranteed. PrizePix, run your game.
Must be present in certain states. Visit prizepix.com for restrictions and details.
Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses. That's right, more than 40 free online courses.
Learn about the works of C.S.

Lewis, the stories in the book of Genesis, the meeting of the U.S. Constitution, the rise and

fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of the ancient Christian church with Hillsdale College's

free online courses. I've talked pretty openly about my return to faith on the show, and Hillsdale

offers some incredible courses to help discover the Bible's profound lessons about fatherhood, the nature of sin, and the consequences of sin on both a family and a nation. Their online courses are self-paced so you can start whenever and wherever.
Go right now to hillsdale.edu slash srs to enroll. There's no cost and it's easy to get started.
That's hillsdale.edu slash srs to enroll for free. Hillsdale.edu slash srs.
Yeah well look Sean you've expressed as you were doing there what you're seeing with your friends you're seeing with everybody else and I think it's the battle we face okay when I was in Congress we'd have I think the interesting part is one of the things I told all the the senators especially going through confirmation which I had to go through to get this I said 60 percent of your uh constituent calls in other words 60 percent of the calls to your office for help in some way involve the VA either VHA our health benefits or benefits, or their other benefits, disability benefits, other things like that. 60%.
Some of them looked at me like, no. And it was interesting, the staff would be sitting in the side going, 60% of what? 60% of all their calls.
So like a phone call to a congressman or a senator. I need, I'm having trouble.
60%. Okay, then that's and some would actually be higher some actually maybe a little lower so just average out around 60 like i said some of the members were like oh i don't know but yet their staff was sitting there and said yeah it is it is because i hear it all the time think about that for a second let's just ponder for just one second that that many people, and we're talking thousands with each congressman, each senator, a year calling about a organization that is supposed to be already set up to give them what they have earned, to give them the benefits that they have earned through Congress action.
This is none just dreamed up by a president. This is all from statutory law, but yet having to call them because they can't get the help they need.
Only in Washington, D.C. do we call that normal.
Only in Washington, D.C. do we call that okay.
I call it failure. And I've called that out since the day that I got sworn in, that we're not going to allow any more this discussion, that it's okay to have to call for what you should be getting already.
Now, if you don't want it, don't take it. That's why we have choices.
That's why we have other things to do. But when it gets into the stuff that you're talking about, this goes back to that culture argument that I was talking about to start with.
It gets into the situation where we've just sort of done it this way. And the argument at the VA is, well, everybody complains.
Everybody does, rightfully so. Even if they're new employees, they get, well, the VA is awful.
And there's been a lot of problems and probably a lot of stuff to back that up. I'm not going to disagree with you.
But there's also a lot of times when you've got the ones who are trying to do it or getting bogged down in the people trying to get in a system that is broken. So it'd be like me.
I do a lot of counseling. I have for years, of course, when I was pastoring in a chapel and everything else, I'll count.
And if you, in a relationship, the relationship starts, let's say, with a man, you know, husband and wife and a member, it doesn't matter if they're military or not, but if they have a relationship and they have an issue in which one does not trust the other, and you come into that position, then they've now developed into a problem where they don't talk, they're fighting, they're maybe going to get divorced or breaking up, whatever. And then I walk into the room and I say, I want to help you, but the only thing that I can give you, the one thing you got to have to fix the relationship is the one thing that's broken.
To fix the relationship, you got to have trust. If you can't have trust, you're not going to fix the relationship.
You can smooth it. You can paste it over.
You can do whatever you want to do, but you got to have trust. In the VA, we're a similar situation in a sense that people have for so long said, I have to do it by this prescribed method, by this prescribed way,

or there's going to be a congressional person say something or do something,

or I'm going to get complained about, or we're going to do this,

or the union says we've got to keep your job,

so you just keep doing whatever you're doing.

We'll protect your job and go forward.

So when it comes to new ideas,

there's some good things that you would never hear about, but when it comes to ideas such as you're talking about with a new generation of warfighter this new generation of warfighter doesn't come that they're starting to come to the va if they have issues of prosthetics they have issues of you know they've lost limbs they've done stuff like that um because there's some of that we do well, if not better, than most anywhere you're going to find. But when it comes to other areas like the traumatic brain injury, to like the issues of sleep deprivation, the issues of addictions, we're stuck in a system that is not allowing.
Now, in the Bronx, there's a clinical study on psychedelics that we've actually been a part of, and it's working. We're seeing tremendous change.
Bobby Kennedy, who's now the new HHS Secretary, Health and Human Services Secretary, he and I sat in my office two weeks ago and talked about this very issue and how do we get it incorporated in. Some of it, we're bound because we're actually a healthcare, actually hospital healthcare organization.
We're bound by some of the laws that Congress has made that have bound us into what we can use and what we can't use. I'll use a big example there is marijuana.
Marijuana has always been a fight treatment in some areas, and you've had a lot of congressmen say, we're not going to do that. We're going to keep it where it's at.
And so that it binds us a little bit. But in one of the areas I'm looking at to get what you're talking about is a number of years ago, Donald Trump actually promoted a thing called right to try.
It was legislation in which if you were dying, if you had other issues, why not let you try something? What are we hurting here? You know, and if it works, then it's a miracle and we're good. We're actually exploring right now, among the many things that I'm shoveling as fast as my shovel can shovel, is to see, is there ways under right to try that we can expand some of those programs right now into psychedelics, into others, treatments, you know, from, range from hyperbaric to everything else that says, is this working? You know, is it working? How do we expand it out? We know from case to case, like what you just talked about, that it is working.
We know from experience that in some people this is, you know is it working how do we expand it out we know from case case like what you just talked about that it is working we know from experience that in some people this is this is you know a dead-on treatment for what they need but i've got to get a mindset change that says and this is what i'm facing almost all the time is well you can do that but there's a risk sean getting up out of bed in morning and going to the bathroom and taking a shower is a risk. I'm going to fall and bust my head and die.
That's a risk. Getting up and walking and getting in a car is a risk.
I want us to help the people who need help. But then there's also another generational issue we're having right now.
And the generational issue is something that's going to be a little bit harder for me to tackle. Because it's not just the VA assimilating itself to the younger warfighter, the GWAT fighter, my generation fighter, your generation fighter, who are not joiners.
We don't join Kiwanis. We don't join Rotary.
We don't join, you know, for most of this generation, they don't join the VFW. They don't join the American Legion.
They don't do those things. They go with their buddies.
They're drawn to nonprofits who are actually doing something on 10% margins instead of the opposite way around. 90% of what they do is going to fixing something instead of 90% going to fix the organization.
10% may be helping. These are kind of things that we got to deal with.
So now I've got to get them back just like you to say, what can I do inside the VA to make enough change that I can get another shot? That I can get another shot to say, look, if you want the care here, fine. But if not, we're going to pay for it in the community.
See, that's another issue that the previous administration, the last four years have been horrific for expansion of care, which Donald Trump promoted in his first term. And I voted for when I was in Congress, they just went away from it, Sean.
They just, because it's a mindset, you've got to understand the mindset of the VA and the mindset that the Biden administration and the previous administration spent tens of billions of dollars, well over a hundred billion and tens of thousands of employees, well over 50,000 in the last four years alone. Four years.
And you know what? Our metrics have either just stopped or they've actually went backwards. So all these people that are screaming that you can't cut anybody, you can't change it.
Well, you've tried that now for the past 10 years. And you know what GAO says, Government Accounting Office has said, you're on the high risk list.
VA has been on the high risk danger list of race, fraud, and abuse, and poor quality healthcare in many of our facilities for 10 years. That's just unacceptable.
But yet the past three or four weeks, if you've watched any of the headlines,

I'm being skewered and pillared by some of our VSO community and some of our members of the Senate and House that you can't change. You're going to hurt wait times.
You're going to hurt. You've done that already.
Our wait times are not where they need to be. Our backlog is too high.
It was was under 60 000 when trump left office it's over 225 000 now and that's with all the numbers i just told you this is just bull crap okay we can't keep doing the same thing the same way so really what those folks on the hill and some of those outside and outside agencies and groups are saying is the va oh yeah we know it bad. And you just got to keep throwing stuff at it because it protects our jobs, protects our workers, and protects the system.
See, that's what I see. I see a bunch of bureaucrats that don't actually give a shit about veterans.
They only give a shit about the VA. And not that the VA is actually doing its job.
I mean, I've got a stat written down here. There are 480,000 VA employees and there are 450,000 active duty Army.
Yeah, that's about right. And veterans all over the country have been dying, waiting to get treatment, commit suicide, dying, you know, because they can't get.
So with 480,000, that's 30,000 more than the active Army members. How can't they, why can't they get in? Or why couldn't they get in? Well, because a lot of it, think about about that organizational structure where is most of that organizational structure going you know i've been told since you know we started the confirmation process and we started asking these questions well pact act did this pact act forced us you know and by the way that was biden thought of it at state of the union a few months acted it not really thinking about cost and by the way when the house and senate i speak hill because i was up there for a long time here's what you do you want to make somebody think you're doing something you pass a bill you leave a lot of the stuff in the middle either unfunded or open-ended you get the president to sign it and then you declare it a victory never mind going to the actual agency that's going to have to to to do this and give them and on how to make it happen.
But I was told that was why the monies and everything increased so much. Well, I've asked, where are these employees that were hired for PAC-TAC? I mean, if we've hired all these employees to do PAC-TAC, where are they at? And only get one-off answers like, well, we've had to do something here.
We can't. All right, I come here to share the truth i i'm just not bs anymore i mean i just can't i don't know whatever but i can't tell you where all 480 000 those people are i can't tell you now here's the interesting is you you were in the uh military you were in the sealAL team.
If you went to your commander or you went to your headquarters headship, they could actually look down a list. They could pull every base.
They could pull every unit. They could pull everything and by the line item tell you who was assigned where and what their billet number was, what their pass number was and everything else.
You would know exactly where they're at. I do not have an HR system that allows me easily to do that.

Think about that for a second.

Let that. Think about that for a second.
Let that sink in when all these other issues we're talking about is out there. So I can't even, at this point, now I'm working on it.
That's been one thing where I've already hit the ground running. I've got some people that are helping.
We're going to try and fix that pretty quick. Because if I don't know where they are, then this organization is functionally not ready for action.
It's just not. And you've got a lot of things.
I mean, we've had organizational structure. Cutting bureaucracy in the management level in Washington and across the plains is going to be something that was one of the first looks we're going to be.
I don't need six people. I mean it'd be like I'm trying to put this in maybe ways that your guys and fucking gals would understand

why the planes is going to be something that was one of the first looks we're going to be. I don't need six people.
I mean, it'd be like, I'm trying to put this in maybe ways that your guys and folk and gals would understand and watch this podcast. And listen, it would be almost like having in one unit, having six from Air Force, having six shirts in one unit.
Which one do you go to? Who answers to who? And then also having two or three chiefs above the six shirts to say well go get that approved go get that approved go get that approved go get that oh and then by the way we'll have to go find the uh we get the wing commander to sign off so from an air force potato it's just bureaucracy layers some of these were started for real reasons you know that hey we need to manage our our like central our visiting care which is our division but they were supposed to have 20 and 30 people now some of them have three and four and 500 they just grow for the sake of growing but not nobody has called it like i'm trying to call it now in a real sense of a way is to say what is our return on investment are we helping a veteran veteran? Is the veteran being helped? Not a press release from the Hill, not a bill that says you think you're doing something, but are we actually doing stuff that allows the veteran choice? By the way, the Mission Act, what we talked about, is to let you go out in the community. We're going to pay for that because you've earned the benefit.
We're going to make it where you can go out into the community and get the care you need. But over the last previous administration there was we have documented it we're going to be rolling out more of this where we saw basically an a turn toward de-incidivizing and actually keeping veterans from getting the care they need even if it meant waiting longer sean this is it's this the more i dig the worse it gets and we're just we're right now making sure that we're starting to get out so that we can have a whole new culture shift to help the people we're supposed to be helping.
How is that going to work? How do I do that? How do I use the VA to pay for my community health care in the civilian market? If you meet certain criter like distance and time, what it was designed for is especially those who are away from a VA health clinic or a center where they can get it quickly. What they can do is a real simple checklist to see, you know, do you qualify that? And most you do in different areas, especially specialty care.
And then here's where I don't like some of this, and I've not liked it for years. One, we have a third party administrator, which we're actually looking at.
Anytime you put another third party anything in there, it tends to bog the system. They're supposed to be finding community doctors.
They're supposed to be finding the system where we send them to. The VA technically still has a sign off right now where you see a VA dot and then I said, yeah, agree and then you send them that's becoming a little bit of a problem because we're seeing we've seen some issues in which the furrows were not happening okay so again i'm digging into this it's not everybody but i'm seeing it enough to develop a pattern here you see it you know randomly you might think no but when you start seeing it enough there's a pattern the of of call abuse of the law, basically.
So you get that, and then you go, and then it's turned in. It's paid for just as if you were going to through the VA system itself.
So these are out there. These parts have been there.
Mission Act gave that. It expanded that.
But you've got to also use it. I mean, I can give you the best rifle in the world, but if you don't use it, it's just useless to you.
Well, I think a lot of people don't know how to use the VA system. I'm one of them.
Yeah. I mean, and I want to get into this later, but I mean, even just to get the initial, to get the benefits, to go through the doctor's appointments, to, you know, oh, my shoulder's messed up.
I got tinnitus. I got TBI.
Whatever. All those, what do they call those, the initial appointments? The consults, yeah.
Yeah, the consults. The consults, yeah.
You know, a lot of vets, they don't even know how to get into the consults. Or then you get in the consults, and it's almost like a damn interrogation.
And it's like, I'll give you an example. They denied my tinnitus.
I'm a Navy SEAL. I shot a lot of guns.
I blew a lot of shit up. I've seen a lot of combat.
I have fucking tinnitus. Sorry, lady.
I don't know, like, what the hell you're talking about. You can't even test for that.
Just give me the tinnitus. Look at my service record.
They deny it. You know? And then I got to go find...
Then I got introduced to this woman peggy matthews veterans advocacy services she's like probably 80 years old runs it up is like an angel to me and my guys because she's the one that can right take our package turn it into something and somehow some way she gets it fast-tracked through the VA. But for us to try to navigate the Veterans Administration, it's impossible.
Why should we have that, Sean? Think about that. That's what I'm asking.
But I'm also bringing it back. Look, looking ahead, in five weeks of sitting here doing this job, I have been seeing the exact same, asking the exact same questions and say, why is it you have to have a VA whisperer, so to speak, to get what should be honestly yours to stake and to take part in? Okay.
You're exactly right. I mean, right now, as we look at this, this is the concern that a lot of us are having.
But how many government agencies are like this?

Think about it.

You're supposed to pay your taxes. I'll just use another.
The IRS, you're supposed to pay your taxes. But yet you call the IRS hotline and they can't answer your questions.
The very ones who will put you in jail for not paying your taxes can't answer some of your basic questions about how to file your taxes. Well, as we get into the process of the VA, and I was just with a local vet center here, and one of the things I asked him, I said,

tell me something. Start telling me, getting up to me.
Tell me things that hinder veterans

from getting the benefits or being a part of this system. Tell me what in our paperwork process,

what in our setup is causing us problems, Because here's what we are seeing though. To those, unlike some experiences you've had, especially a number of years ago, but what we're seeing today, there's been an improvement, is that once they can get through the system, we're seeing general satisfaction rating among veterans of different generations saying, okay, this may not be, you know, they like the care.
They may not be what I want. It may not be for everybody, but 80, 90%, you know, saying, hey, this is, this is okay.
I'm getting what I need or the benefits they're getting their package, but getting to it has been our problem. Getting it through that front line to say, this is an agency that is open.
Look, I don't have my phone with me right now but if i had my phone with me right now i bet your private insurance i know my i know my health care with my wife who i've been on state health in georgia forever i can right now pull up on my phone all my prescriptions my doctor's appointments i could talk to my doctor if i wanted to we don't have that well why is the large and here's the other thing, we're the largest healthcare system in the country, by far, by far. Now, there's a couple of privates that like to say they're closed.
I have 170 hospitals, over almost 1,500 clinic, CBOX clinics, and that's not counting the mobile stuff we do and everything else. That's how massive this organization is.
Okay. And they've all run on siloed issues.
I heard an issue today that was about, you know, just simple things as transportation. Well, and when they were asked for help, they said, well, that's not a VHA issue, which is our health side.
That's a VBA issue, which is our benefit side. Well, I'm here to say, I'm the secretary of all of you.
We're going to start acting like we're one company and not three companies working in the middle. And we're going to, but again, Congress has facilitated this.
Some prior administrations have facilitated this because here's the thing, Sean, how many times do you run across somebody who wasn't a veteran? And especially in public life, if they're not a veteran and they run for office there, it's hard for them to have honest questions to a veteran or to veteran service organizations, which may or may not have the interest that they need to be promoting or another organization. And they say, well, and I had a gentleman on the floor of the house one time and good friend, good guy, never served.
And there was an issue on the floor and it was wrong. It was just wrong.
I mean, we should be doing it differently, okay? There's a budget item. And I said, you know, and I went to this person and I said, because they're very vocal, I said, you know, this is wrong.
We shouldn't be doing it this way. This should go into the budget.
It shouldn't be done separately. This is the way we should be done.
And I'll never forget, and it just floored me. The person looked at me and he said, Doug, I know that.
He said, but I'm not a veteran. And he said, I can't have somebody attacking me as being against veterans.
Sean, think about what he just said. He was willing to make a bad vote because he was scared of the political fallout of being seen as against veterans.
We've seen this consistently with policy that comes out of Congress for the VA. We've seen it consistently in situations where the VA, they will pass budgets and then complain about it.
Because that's the way you do it. We have veteran service organizations that honestly at times seem more at war with me and the VA than they do their membership.
Now, they're good people. I'm not trying to throw them under the bus.

That's not what I'm trying to say here.

But if your only way that you satisfy your membership

is to say, we fought the VA and won, huh?

We're on the same page.

We're supposed to be on the same page here.

We're trying to help veterans too.

But we can't have adversarial roles

to fix the problems that you're talking about. Because when we do that, we're just simply going in circles.
It's got to be an all-in approach. Lord willing, Donald Trump's here.
I know I've got hopefully four years to do this, but I really got 18 months. My mission is about 18 months to get in, to start making the transformational process, to take the generational change that Donald Trump said he was going to bring to D.C.
And I saw him just the other day. He and I talked last Friday.
And he said, he said, what about my, you know, and he brought up community care. He brought up all the folks being able to go out and get the choices they need.
And I said, sir, we're working on it. I said, but I got some problems.
I need your help. He said, no, whatever we do, we'll take care of it.

But these are the kind of generational change

we got to have.

And so now one of the things we're experiencing

is you mentioned how much we have.

Well, we had a across the board,

a reduction in force is what it's called, a RIF.

Now, the interesting thing is the legacy media,

liberal media, the unions are all going nuts.

How can you cut this money out of the federal government? The federal government will never survive if we cut 15% out of the workforce. Well, Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the 90s cut 13% to 14% or 12% to 14% out of the federal government.
Several hundred thousand jobs. Nobody griped.
And by the way, we're still 20-something years in the future, almost 30. The government not only survived, it got bigger again.
So what we're looking at now is how do we do this and we go into systems that are broken and take out the layers that don't need to be there, the things that are keeping veterans from getting the benefits that they've earned, keeping them from health care, keeping them from going into the community and getting the care that they need, getting access to new treatments like psychedelics or other things. We need to get that funding that's been there to fund positions and worry about funding veterans' health care and worrying about funding veterans' benefits.
If we can do that, then we've got a chance. But what we've got right now is a system.
I have actually some Republicans and Democrats and some other organizations that are simply saying, who will look on their own web pages or websites and their statements. The VA is too much wait time, too long to do this and broken.
But yet I've seen quotes and tweets. Secretary Collins needs to be careful on how he does the reorganization reorganization of the va it needs to to be more structured and more or don't or better yet some actually said we don't need to get rid of anybody at the va what that's basically saying is for 10 years gao has said we're on high risk that we can't get rid of bad employees by the way did you know that when we had the the Bill Accountability Act back at the end of his term, and we fired, there was almost 4,000 people fired at the VA for stuff like showing up drunk in the OR, doing other things.
We fired them. Guess what? The union and others had lawsuits.
And when Donald Trump left office,

basically the Biden administration

through some series of bad judgment,

just basically quit and said,

we'll bring them all back. others had lawsuits and when Donald Trump left office basically the Biden administration through

some series of bad judgment just basically quit and said we'll bring them all back and give them back pay whether they came back or not this is the kind of problem we're dealing with Sean it's not an easy just get your you know head out of your rear system we've got to actually make structural changes so that, number one, we can get rid of the bad, hire good, and put a culture in that the veteran is first. I've said it every day I have been in this office, and I'm not taking a day off really yet.
So how do you plan on leaning that process out for these guys to get benefits? It's going to be the issue. Here's where we're starting right now.
We're starting a process using career employees, others in the system to say, okay, because we're under this to mandate to get the fat out, and then we can use that money to redirect. We're already redirecting over $500 million right now that's in the process being redirected towards suicide, which, by the way, I want to talk about.
You need to hear what's going on there and you're not going to like it but you need to hear homelessness the same way we're redirecting that for prosthetic care we're redirecting toward community care we're redirecting that money all that money was sitting out here that was you know for powerpoint and meeting notes kind of stuff that we were doing is now going back to the to the veteran itself we're going to have to as we go through looking for this reduction force we're going to take out folks that are not forward-facing when it comes to veterans health in other words um it's amazing to me and i don't know if you read just recently the paper we let 2400 people go about two weeks ago three weeks ago and all of a sudden wall street journal new york times legacy media, The Hill, senators and others, union members, Collins is killing health care. Collins is gutting the VA.
Collins is calling it. And then they'll find somebody who said they had their surgery that was put off or that their appointment was rescheduled.
None of the people, the people we fired were publicists, interior designers, laborers. I i mean this is what we're talking about here how has your surgery been put off because an interior designer was laid off it wasn't it's a lie but what we have is you know what's interesting though if you'd gone back to january 15th of this year and that same surgery had been put off it would have never made a headline yeah because now we're doing something.
So now we just got to start trimming those out. Forward facing, with the healthcare, with our benefit side, that's not the areas we're looking at.
I think somebody told me the other day, think about this. We have almost 16,000 contract agents.
Contractors, all they do is contracts. 16,000? Really?

Let's take a look and see if we need 16,000 contract agents. Let's see if we need five and six levels of bureaucracy in some of these situations.
And instead, take those money, redirect it back to where it needs to go. Then you're gonna be able to get quicker access.
Then you're gonna be able to cut, oh, by the way, I'm going to look at, if there's 10 sheets of paper for you to get in, let's see if we can do that with four sheets of paper. Let's see if we can ask better questions and get better results.
Let's talk about the suicide. Let's do it.
What do you want to say about that?

Whatever we have been doing for the last five years, for whatever good there was, and there's been some, explain to me how in the past five years, six years of budgets, we've spent approximately $15 billion, and the number is basically unchanged. We spend $588 million on preventive supposed suicide.
We spend $2.3 billion in what we'll call treatment of either the mental aspect, health aspect of that, issues that they've had with hurting themselves, other things like 2.3 billion. So $3 billion total roughly in suicide.
And yet our numbers are not changing, Sean. We go from a low about 63, 6400 up to almost 7,000 a year.
Now you may mention earlier of what's the real number. That's an arguable debate.
And I've heard this, you know, from others, it actually may be 25, 30, depending on how you classify overdose and how you, or also, frankly, in rural communities. I grew up in a rural community.
Suicide is something you don't talk about. And you get some of these medical examiners and coroners in these smaller counties, they'll call it accidental or something else.
So we may not know because it's just that stigma of suicide that's attached. So what I'm looking at here is what's actually working.
What we're doing, frankly, in just all fairness, ain't working. You can't do that much this long and say it's working.
So what we're trying to do now and what I'm beginning to do is I want to know what that $588 million is going for. I want to know what are we supposedly doing to, and don't just tell me you're putting a Facebook ad out there.
Don't tell me that you're, you know, running, you know, the call the crisis line number out there, you know, which are all fine and good, but where are we at actually hitting to the members who are listening to your podcast who have no want to to go to the VA. Because here's the other part of that.
Whether the number 17 or the number is 24 or even higher, the statistics are pretty good that say that 50% of those folks have never been touched by the VA. 50%.
That's just unacceptable. Part of the reason I do what I do is for my family.
I want to leave them a better country than the one I was born into. I also want to make sure they're taken care of financially.
And that's why I make it a priority to help protect the money I've worked so hard to earn and save. And one of the ways I do that is by diversifying into gold and silver.
Precious metals have been a store of value for thousands of years, and they are known as a hedge against market risk and inflation. If you're interested in learning about how precious metals can help you, you should reach out to my partners at GoldCo.
They're an amazing company, they support this show, and I trust them. Right now, they're offering a free gold and silver kit.
All you have to do is go to seanlikesgold.com. You'll also learn about a special offer to get up to a 10% instant match and bonus silver for qualified orders.
So go to seanlikesgold.com. That's seanlikesgold.com.
S-H-A-W-N-LikesGold.com. Make sure you do everything in your power to help protect what's yours.
I'm always looking for ways to make sure I feel comfortable in what I wear through the whole day. That's even more important when the weather is changing from winter to spring, and True Classic helps make it easy.
Their active wear is moisture wicking and quick drying. And for spring, they have short sleeve comfort knit button ups that look as good at the gym as they do in meetings.
True Classic makes premium clothes at an affordable price with shirts designed for your best features with a perfect fit. Their best selling t-shirts and more come in three, six and nine packs.
The more you bundle, the more you save. Plus, you get free shipping on all orders, a 100% perfect fit guarantee, and easy returns so there's no risk.
Whether you're bundling up for the cold or getting ready for spring, level up your style with the clothes that actually fit right. Just go to my exclusive link at trueclassic.com slash SRS to save.
That's trueclassic.com slash SRS. Shop now and elevate your wardrobe today.
Rates have dropped and it's time to take advantage. A lot of us are struggling to keep up with everyday bills and you're reaching for the credit cards to pay for all of it.
But homeowners, listen up. Interest rates have fallen into the fives.
That's nearly a quarter of the average credit card rate. American financing is helping homeowners like you save an average of $800 a month by tapping into your home's equity and wiping out high-interest debt.
And the best part is there are no upfront fees to get started. Credit card rates are insane.
And if you're carrying a balance every month, you're stuck in an endless cycle. Break free today, call American Financing and see how much you can save.
And if you start now, you may even delay the next two mortgage payments. Call American Financing today at 866-781-8900.
That's 866-781-8900 or go to AmericanFinancing.net slash SRS. So my, one of the things I'm starting right here with you, I'm starting with other things that we're going to be doing.
I'm trying to reach that veteran who's sitting out there who's saying, you know, screw the VA. I went over there one time and they didn't even treat me like I was human.
Or that was their perception. You know, look, everybody's got a perception.
And, you know, that may be your perception that you wasn't treated well. It may have been a bad day for them, bad day for you.
But then they're sitting in their home and they're self-medicating or they're going off doing destructive things.

They're going to end up to the point where they don't see a reason to go on.

But if they listen to your podcast, if they listen to somebody, I'm going to sit here

and say, look, folks, let's get help.

Let me send somebody.

Go to an organization you trust.

Call your battle buddy.

Call your airman.

Call your wingman, whoever it is.

We've got to get out of this stigma that we don't touch people that are saying they have problems i mean think about your friend that you just talked about he's not going to run out in the front yard and say hey i'm here i'm really not able to function today they're not going to do that but we got to find them we got to hit ways that people like his wife and others have the ability to reach out to somebody and say, here's real ways we can help. And get back to the simple fact of, hey, are we actually treating this as what it is? And that is a serious condition brought on many times by things that were out of their control or what they saw or what they didn't.
I was in Nashville today at National Songwriters Association. Some folks I've known for years who write country music, some of them write songs all over the world for stuff you hear on the radio all the time.
And there's a couple of organizations that work with veterans, American Song, there's some others where they get veterans together and who have had years of not being able to express themselves, not being able they feel isolated. And they get them down, they start talking with other veterans,

and they start writing a song.

They say, write a song.

And they show them and talk to them about how to do that.

I had a veteran today who told me, he said,

I've been married 50-something years.

He said, I was in Vietnam.

He said, my wife never hardly knew anything about what happened. He said, I just didn't talk about it.
And he said, 10 years ago somebody finally got to me and he said, I sat down and I wrote this song. He said, and it was not the song itself, it's the action of putting it on paper.
And he says, now I'm able to talk to her.

I'm able to release that. There's another gentleman, this is a Vietnam vet, there's another gentleman there who, again, his kids, and you know the saying, how many times have people

said, tell me a war story, Sean, tell me what you did, tell me what's cool. This guy was saying,

he said he didn't want to talk about it. And his kids would ask him, well, granddad, dad,

what are you doing? And he couldn't talk about it. He got in this position.
In a power of a song where he wrote down what happened to him at Tet way back when, when he saw his buddies burned up in a tank. When he saw that.
And you could see it as if it was today in his eyes but then he was able to say if you want to know it then listen to this song listen to the words that i wrote down that's a totally different way to look at this stuff we've got to reach the veteran where they are and if it's hunting let's take them you know let's match them with a with somebody that can talk to them and get them out on a a duck blind somewhere or get field. If they can't, if they want to do exercise, let them do that.
Or if they just want to sit and get coffee or they want to, you know, go have a beer, do something. Instead of just spending $588 million on programming, let's see if our program is actually being effective.
I'm just not going to sit here. I may do a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong in the next few years, but I will tell you this.
I will not sit here for the next four years and spend that amount of money and do the same damn thing. I'm just not going to do it.
How will you know if it's working? We'll see if my numbers go down. I'm going to see how many people are responding.
I'm going to see if we're reaching people that we've not reached for, because if we're starting to touch them, then we're going to start seeing them into our systems. I'm looking to use nonprofits.
By the way, I'm non-discriminatory here. I don't care if they come to the VA or not.
I want them to come to the VA because we've got resources to help. But if they're willing to go to a nonprofit somewhere, if they're willing to go down to their church somewhere, but they heard about it from this weird guy from Georgia who happens to be the secretary of VA to say, go get help.
It's okay. Then we're going to see our communities put back together better.
We're going to see people and families come back together. You're going to hear it from your buddies.
I'm going to hear it from mine because those people, we hear about them, but they're not getting help that they need because it's so quiet. I'll use an example for you.
My daughter has spina bifida.

She was born, she's 32 years old now. If she were to come in here and she rolled in her little chair, she would, she'll knock socks off of her.
She's got a smile. She, she's never walked in her life.
I mean, you know, I've watched her not experienced the quote normal, you know, going on dates and getting married and all that, I just, you know, I've watched it.

Broke my heart.

For her, she just gets up and goes every day. She goes to work five days a week.
She works at a hospital. But if we were to come in here or we were to take her over here to the mall, people would come up to her and they'd feel sorry for her.
They'd try to help her. They'd try to open a door.
They'd try to help her get to what she needs. But if I was to stand up in that same mall and say, folks, I don't know what's wrong, but my mind's broke.
We don't look to open a door for that person. We don't look to run to them.
Too much in our time is we're moving away from them. We've got to change the whole scenario here especially in the va and our veteran community for for brothers and sisters who we've served with they've got to know it's okay you're not gonna be wrong in reaching out and giving somebody some help and the person who needs the help needs to see somebody willing to sort of run the mile with them if we can get that that's that's how I'm going to see results.
That's how I'm going to see bottom line. That's how I'm going to see that our vet centers are getting maybe some more people.
Or I'm going to hear it in the community. I'm going to see it in our judges who are actually seeing these people in front of them because they've crashed their car while they were drunk.
They've gotten to a domestic violence situation because they didn't know who they were hitting and they were hitting their own kid. This isn't playtime anymore for me, Sean.
We've got to seriously deal with this in this country. And we've got to deal with it with our veterans.
So for me, that's the way I'm going to hopefully see it play out. Did I hear you say that you planned on using nonprofits to help? Yes.
I'll use anybody that's willing to help.

I'll use anybody willing to help. If that's a VSO or one of the big six VSOs or any of those, if they're willing to get in the game and help and try new ways, I'm ready to help.
I'm ready to use nonprofits. I'm ready to use somebody that's willing to come in and we'll work the barriers and we'll do whatever it takes to get there.
Because here's the situation. We're looking at a generation that is not functioning the way we did 20 years ago, even 10, 15 years ago.
Because they're more influencer-driven. They're more socially media-driven.
We just saw that in the last presidential election. Donald Trump won because because he reached voters who nobody were going after he was speaking to them on platforms that they had never been they never heard before so why would I not use things like this or non-profits who are you know and I could name the many but I wouldn't want to forget anybody I mean you got all a lot of them out there that are putting good money to the actual end, putting lead on the target, so to speak, downrange, and they're using very little of it for administrative cost.
And we don't do that. So if you've got organizations that have always been doing it, they want to try new ways, I'm all for it.
But you've also got to be willing to get in and dig a little bit and know that you don't always have all the answers. As far as care and some of these other treatments that we're talking about,

is there any way that the VA can partner with somebody other than, I don't know who you guys partner with, the American Legion?

We listed a whole bunch of them that the modern-day warfighter veteran does not use anymore. They're all using, we are all using mom-and-pop nonprofits.
So I brought up, you know, how are you guys going to get, how are you going to get people into the VA system and get them to their initial appointments where they get their disability? Is it going to be, it sounds like it's going to be very bureaucratic and hard to push through so is is there a way to get non-profits like veterans advocacy services some type of a grant or give the veterans some type to where they can they can hey Peggy knows the system she can get guys through she can help guys through

she can and some type, to where they can, hey, Peggy knows the system.

She can get guys through. She can help guys through.
She can, I mean, is there a way that the VA can partner with these smaller mom and pop organizations and fund them so that they can get a bigger team and to get more vets pushed through? Yeah, and look, I think one of the things here is that doing that in such a way that encourages good work. Now, look, some of our VSOs, they offer free help.
We'll get you through. And I'm not criticizing that in a situation.
But many times they're willing to go through a situation. Why are we having to use so much help? I'm actually attaching it, hopefully attacking it at a different end.
Why do we need, as I said earlier, the VA whisper? Why can't we do this easier? But until then, until then, yeah, I mean, I'll look at any way I can to help organizations that are helping veterans get the services they need without having to join an organization, without having to do anything else, just get what they have earned. And also- I can tell you why.
Okay. Because it's like I mentioned before, nobody trusts the VA.
Right. When they go to somebody like Peggy, she's like a protector.
Mm-hmm. Guys like me, just about everybody that's been on the show that's been to work, they trust her.
They know that she's going to protect them through that process. They know that if something goes bad, Peggy's got it.
You know what I mean? That's why that's happening. And that's where we've got to start rebuilding trust in a system that has – I can't explain this enough.
the frustration I have with a lot, a lot of people. Out of that 480,000, there's many, many, many, many dedicated people who want to help our veterans, period.
Okay? They are. I promised them as Secretary of VA that they will not have a better advocate for the good work that they do and to do it right to fight, to make sure we're doing what we need to do.
But I'm also not going to tolerate status quo. I'm also not going

to tolerate lower standards. We're going to have higher standards.
We're going to push this up.

But at the same point in time, it's going to take a holistic look at everything that we're doing.

It can't simply be, how do we fix the third-party helpers here? How do we fix the system itself? Instead of me having to hire a driver to get me to the grocery store because I don't know how to drive, how about we make it better to learn how to drive myself? And I think that's going to be, but again, there's going to be parties and equities that that's not the way they've done it. That's not the way they do their business model.
Because if they have people that come to them, they either get help from outside agencies or other stuff. I'm finding a whole different world that I'm just getting into the background of how we're working this stuff.
And folks, if you've earned a benefit, take your benefit. You've earned the benefit.
But also, there's a lot of other moral courage to go back and go back, and I think that frustrates a lot of veterans. And you've heard this like I have.
I want it to be known veterans are not victims. We're not.
We chose, we went into the profession, we've done that, and now many of us and others you've talked about, we may have conditions now, we may have stuff that have cost us in that time of service, and that's why the system was set up. It's to say, okay, we're going to do something.
The history of the VA was really set up for our veterans who were outside of cities and outside of areas where there were not hospitals.

The VA was set up because we had so many coming back in from World War I, and then, of course, as it expanded through World War II, that weren't in areas where hospitals were.

So that's how this sort of all started.

We just sort of lost our roots a little bit.

Because it's easier just to say, well, it's for the veterans, so let's just throw some money at it, and let's throw some more people at it.

I'm sorry. we just sort of lost our roots a little bit because it's easier just to say, well, it's for the veterans, so let's just throw some money at it and let's throw some more people at it.
But then let's legislate it to death that it can't get outside these boxes because we want to make sure that we're still in control. That's a big part of government issue that we have not just the VA but a lot of agencies.
So how would you partner with a nonprofit for that? Well, I think there's ways that we can look at that I'm exploring right now. We can do things together.
I can say, look, this is a group that we're meeting with. What's your ideas? Bringing those ideas to me.
I've already met that are saying you know why we have an example right now that is coming out and without getting into deep you know details about you know that that need we've had they've had issues with data collection they've had issues with stuff and it should be something we're should be willingly be a part of and for some reason the va is all is it shows to be a stumbling block there so it's like well i'm now looking at that and saying no let's let's see if we can remove those stumbling blocks let's get the data we need let's let's let's make sure we have this out there so that you know we get good answers then there's also ways again as we look going ahead is there ways that we remove some of the bureaucratic structure find ways to then partner with as you said it could it be through a grant? Possibly so. Or other ways to help other organizations help us get better.
That's my goal. I don't want to simply put out this idea that we need a whole other layer.
You've had VSOs out here helping forever and you've had all these others now just bringing us sort of another layer because this group trusts this group better than this one why don't we actually look at the root cause if you came to me and um you know my my fingers were turning blue and and i was having you know it's tingly and for some reason it looked like a circulation issue well the problem we've had lately is is we just put your hands in warm water or we get them warm and we rub on them and they get the circulation back in them. Instead of realizing maybe there's a heart problem here.
Maybe we're not pumping well. Well, I want to get back to the question is, is the VA heart pumping right? Are we putting things into place that help the veteran and not hinder the veteran? And are we getting to a place, and I said this in my confirmation, I said, I want us to become a place instead of where we're reactively no to a reactively let's get there yes, where we're actively saying, instead of saying, I'm not sure we can, to say, I think there's a way.
We've got to have that mindset difference to say, look, you have benefits you've earned. You've had healthcare you've earned.
We're here for a reason, but we're not to make it harder. And I think that's become the adversarial system that nobody sort of talks about here, that it makes it seem, and again, perception before anybody listened to this and screams, oh, that ain't the true world.
No, it doesn't matter what I think you think or any other group thinks when the perception is is it's broken, when the perception is it's bad, and when the perception is I'm going to get told no,

then that's the reality. Perception is reality to veterans.
And we've got to break that cycle.

What about nonprofits for treatments? There's a lot of nonprofits out there that have great

treatment programs that are proven

to work you know like i had mentioned that's that's that's that's probably the biggest one that i know of that's doing psychedelic stuff there's tom satterley is a former delta guy got the all secures foundation very therapeutic experience they lots of coaching that's been working I mean is there is there a way where because it sounds look i get it like you guys can't just be like oh we're doing ibocaine treatments now i realize that's going to be that's going to be an act of congress and the senator however works to get that through but you know maybe there's a way where where the veteran can look, maybe there's a voucher program or something where I want to try this nonprofit. And maybe those nonprofits get – There's some certification.
There's something to go through a process. So I'm kind of certified from the VA, and the VA says to the veteran, I'm not going to give you the money,

but when you go to vets, when you go to All Secure Foundation, when you go to Veterans Advocacy Services, when you go to any of these nonprofits that are approved, look, you want psychedelic therapy for your traumatic brain injury? We're going to give you the voucher. You pick which nonprofit you want to use it for.
And then they email in some kind of a document that says, hey, we sent this person down. I mean, that would streamline it so fast because then those nonprofits don't have to focus so much on fundraising so they can get these guys down there and women down there to do these things or their therapy or their whatever.
And then the VA pays that voucher. Yep.
Is that a possibility? I think it's a possibility. I think everything for me is on the table right now.
And that doesn't mean everything's going to get approved. That doesn't mean that it's going to happen.
But for me, I want to say, okay, if we have these possibilities that we're seeing the mentoring, the counseling, the treatments, especially stuff like that that are working, can we partner with that? What's stopping me in my organization, either policy-wise or statutory-wise, what the law says I can and can't spend money on that? because there is some of that, and I'm never going to say there's not. But if it's something we can now try, then I'm going to be looking at this, and we've already started talking to these groups to say, how can that be? I'm going to go to my people and say, tell me what the problem is here.
And if the answer is, well, we can do that better in the VA, I'm going to say, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're going to do what you're doing in the VA, but why can't I have people out here that can go try this? And how do we do it? Tell me, as I've changed my entire general counsel, which by the way, we have a lot of lawyers.
I've changed their whole mindset into say, don't tell me no, tell me how to get to yes. If I'm asking you to get to a problem, you get me to yes, because I'm an attorney as well.
I can get you to know quicker than you can. Get me to yes.
Get me to a part where I can take what you're giving me. And so I'll go to our health people and say the same thing.
Get me to yes. Don't tell me the standard line.
Like we found out something today. We had to go, it happens almost every day.
I have to ask the question, Sean, and this is how it gets very frustrating. I have to ask the question, is this policy from the VA or is it statute from Congress? Because there's a big difference here.
Statute from Congress, that's our red line. I have to operate within the law.
Policy, I made. I mean, if there's a policy that you can't have ice cream on Fridays, well, we made the policy.
Guess what? You can have ice cream on Fridays. I can change that all day long.
So we've got to now delineate because many times in the VA, because they're scared of criticism, they're scared of what members of the Congress or the media or unions or anything would say about them, is that they'd much rather just say, no, we can't, instead of, well, why? And then if you ask them, well, the law just won't let us do that. Well, policy ain't law.
We can change those kinds of stuff. So I'm willing to look at it from all angles to see if we can.
And if it's treatments, then I think that's where we're going to have to make sure that we're operating. Because I can't bypass a law that says I can't do X treatment and just give you money to go do it somewhere else.
I understand that. I've got to work that out in Congress.
And that's where folks like you and others that can help me, and also working with Bobby Kennedy over at HHS to get some of this stuff approved in different ways. Having a president who would be willing to say, look, let's do whatever we can.
That's just when it's going to take the push of the veterans to say, these are the things that are working for us. It doesn't work for everybody, but at least for these, it is working.
I hope you're taking this in because I am the guy you're trying to reach. And not only would that work with the treatment, but it would also help build the trust back within the VA because guys like me don't trust the VA.
We just don't. But we do trust Tom Satterly, who is a retired Delta operator.
He's seen it all. He has seen it all.
And I know that he has my best interest because he's my friend or my friend is his friend and everybody looks up to guys like tom or marcus capone who's running vets with the psychedelic stuff it's if if if the va can be an interim and say yes we're aware of what they're doing. They're on our list.

We have a partnership with him. We want you to do that.
Here, go. That is a big step in getting guys like me to trust the VA again.
And then hopefully all these nonprofits can go away because the problem's solved. And once this shit's all passed through Congress, then we don't even need those nonprofits anymore.
Because hopefully, they all wind up going away because the problem's fixed. But in the interim, it's a great way, one, to get the treatment, two, to build the trust back.
I think you're right. And I think that's what I want to look at.
That's why I'm out in the field. That's why we're doing things like this.
If it times five weeks feels like I've been there five years. And in five weeks, I realized, my God, I've been there five weeks.

And I've had, in just that amount of time, we've had to deal with our first start of contract looks where we went through 2% of our contracts, 2%, and found almost 580 billion, about a billion and a half that are contracts that were non-mission critical, non-mission essential. That's just in 2%.
We've had to deal with that. I've had to deal with the probationary firings, which helped us begin this thing and get started.
We're dealing with things, and you mentioned it earlier, by the way, we've had the issue of the flags. We've changed that policy so that we're back to one force under the American and POW flag is all we're doing.
We've taken the DEI out. We're doing that today, even just as we're coming on, we changed the policy on transgender.
You're not going to be getting your sex changed at the VA anymore. If you're currently treatment we're going to continue that what was started before we ever got there just as as the sec defs did in his side but because we don't want anything bad to happen to somebody who's into those treatments but you know from this point on you're not going to we're not changing your sex you're going to get we're going to treat you with respect and dignity if you come to the va for all your for your services but we're just not going to be participating in in changing your sex that's not what our services are for and everything that we're taking money-wise away to that would take away from money that I could be spending on

something else that are helping vets directly we're not even getting primary health care

that's the things that we're looking at so we're in the process of doing as much of this as we

possibly can and so we're taking every new idea.

I'm taking it back. Our team is starting to process it.
And we're working toward this end of making it a much more accessible, much more idea friendly, if you would, VA. That restores trust.
I'm hoping that restoring trust in the VA is me using social media in every possible way I can to tell people what's actually going on. And this is that.
Coming on your show, doing other shows, and going into the media, and going on and saying, guys, no, I'm not going to let senators lie to you anymore. I'm not going to let union members, I'm not going to let the newspapers and legacy media tell you stories which they, by the way, can't back up.
This is what I've been fighting. I know we're getting closer to the target because the flack's getting a lot heavier.
Because they don't want us on this, Sean. I mean, think about this.
If you redo this and get it done, in any circle of life in the federal government, or any other area, is if you talk about a problem, you develop a group that says, this is my problem, and then all along you never really get to solving the problem, then what you've done is you've built a group that perpetuates itself on what? The problem. So I don't care what group it is out there.
If they're not sort of in many ways trying to either put themselves out of business, so to speak, because they're solved a problem, as you said, or they're perpetuating the problem and then claiming they're the help for that problem, that's what we're fighting against. And I want to make sure that we're in a position to where veterans understand that they, at least from the secretary level here, and what's going to hopefully permeate down through the ranks is that this is not acceptable where we are.
There's a lot of things we do well, and there's a lot of things that, frankly, the VA does probably better than private healthcare anywhere else because we just have more experience in it. But then there's a lot of things that we don't.
So why aren't we partnering with the community? Crazy story I heard. We actually have hospitals that are sitting across the street, literally across the street from world-class oncology, cancer centers, and we're worrying about hiring cancer doctors at the VA.

I said, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life.

Just send them across the street and contract the care across the street.

I don't need to hire the doctor.

They've already got them over here.

But that's the kind of thinking, Sean.

That's your thinking.

When your mindset is organizational and not patient,

or in our case, veteran-centric, that's the kind of things you get what was your conversation like with bobby kennedy about psychedelics eye-opening because you know of course he is uh uh very you know make america healthy again you know getting people you know getting the food additives out getting those kind of stuff and i asked him specifically because we were talking about this, I said psychedelics because he's, you know, getting people, you know, getting the food additives out, getting those kinds of stuff. And I asked him specifically, because we were talking about this, I said, psychedelics, because he's, you know, his agency would have some, some say in some, you know, the studies and stuff on that.
And it was really interesting. Bobby starts talking about this.
And he says, one, he said, I was a heroin addict. He said, putting stuff in your body, he said, for me to begin to talk about, you put in my body to fix, he said, that's just nowhere close for me, he said, because of my past.
But then he wanted to explain a family member of his, a child of his, who had an experience using psychedelics that changed his life drastically. and he said, I would have never thought this, would have never thought, I would let him explain the way he sees it, but he said, this is working.
He said, I've changed my mind about this because he said, I actually see it happening and see it work. And he said, in my own flesh and blood.
And I think that's the part that for me began to be exciting a little bit. And to see, here's someone who is so sensitive to those issues of medication.
And one of the things, too, is, and I think you see this as well, the answer to people many times if they're having you know episodes and just this idea that the idea is that you can medicate them to health is a problematic to me i just believe it is and it doesn't mean that medicines don't work that's not what i'm saying i'm not saying go stop your medication i'm not saying don't give them but is there other ways to help in that regard that can reduce that dependency and if we can that'd be great so bobby's the same way so for us it was i got a partnership now that he and i are going to continue to work on from the research side and from the the other also bringing hopefully bringing dod involved a little bit in this as well because that's part part of our problem, Sean. We haven't even really talked about this.
The transition from DOD to civilian or what we would term VA, our side, is really bad. We don't do this well.
And it's not just the VA health or VA benefit, not just the benefit. It's we're not giving a lot of our young service members and even old service members the transition that they need.
We send them through the programs. You do the briefings.
You've been there. And is it really working? And the answer has to be that probably it's not working like it should because we're seeing too many people end up in suicidal issues.
We're seeing too much end up homelessness issues or, you know, financial breakdowns, marriage breakdowns, because as much as for those of us in the military who can gripe about the structure at times, you take away the structure and even the harshest rebel, you know, who rebelled against structure would say, I need that structure. So I think that's

where it's really changed for me in looking at how we do this and how we go about it. So again, having partners like that is going to be, whether it be at DOD, whether it be at HHS, or with us at the VA, it's going to be very important moving forward.
What is the plan?

Like with... with us at the VA is going to be very important moving forward.
What is the plan with psychedelics? What is the plan moving forward? How does it get introduced into the VA? What needs to happen? Well, the first thing we're going to do is, and I'm getting this information now. Again, this is part of this.
I've already had a few who have came in who've actually talked about it, who want to talk about it some more. And then we got this study that's being done in conjunction up in New York.
I want to see if there's a possibility to expand that program. Where is it right now? Again, some of this I'm getting, and again, I'm not trying to be anything evasive here.
I've got to get the knowledge of what we're doing and what we have not done. So I'm going to get that information and see.
I know what the program you're talking about, I've heard about it as well. So let's get data on that.
Have our people start reaching out across the board to say, okay, what is out there? Then we've got to also then take that and look at what is the structural limitations that I have. What is the VA structural problems to either entering into a larger study or entering into a trial basis or, you know, basically possibly even, you know, as you said earlier, voucher funding or whatever that may be.
What are my structural limitations that Congress has put on me there? Is there structural limitations that says you can use X dollars for this, but you can't use dollars for that okay and then if there is and we find enough evidences in our place to do it then i'm going to go to congress i'm going to go to the house the house of veterans affairs committee i'm going to go to senate veterans affairs committee and then i'm going to go to the to the leadership and say look these are things that i need changed y'all may not be able to agree on a lot of things here, but these are some things I'm hopefully you can agree on. Give me the statutory ability.
Even if you want to do it on a limited basis to start off with, I'll take that so that I can actually start trying. If I find out I don't have some of the statutory limitations, then I want to know what policy-wise may be hindering this, or is there a policy that can make sure that we're working with partners to do this? Now, again, you said it earlier, the fiduciary role I have, I take very seriously.
You get close to a vet, you get close to one. And Sean, you may have heard me say this already in this discussion.
I call them my vets and my employees. I don't do that to belittle.
I don't do that. It's just personalized to me.
So if you get close to them, we're going to make sure you're doing it right. My fiduciary duty is I got to make sure that no matter how great you think your program is, I got to make sure that we're not opening something up that nobody else has seen.
And that's just due diligence kind of thing. So we're going to make that happen.
One of the things that was concerning me, and I want to sidetrack to what we're talking about here, is there's a lot of residential treatment facilities in the private sector now that because of wait times for some mental health issues that are now popping up. I got no problem with us, and Congress is sort sort of backing this up and we're putting some more money in there for it.
But one of the concerns is, has, have we created a cottage industry for this now? Because look, money in DC is like water on a pavement. It's going to go to the, it's going to go to its lowest part.
It's going to find its way out. Okay.
So if all of a sudden people hear there's money in this, then they're going to be, there's always going to rise to meet that demand. But is that demand always good? No, it's not because they're doing it quickly.
They're doing it for the money. They're doing it for the, you know, the possibility, not every one of them, but probably some.
So we're having to deal with that right now in those kinds of programs. And I'm having to deal with our folks to say, are we making sure that if we're using these, are they up to standard that we need to be at? Because if we don't, then we're going to be giving money to things that aren't working and in the end hurting us in the long run.
And I think that's something that I've got to be aware of. So for me, it really goes down to that.
That's where we're already starting. We're going to have more meetings as we go about this to make sure we're getting the information and as quickly as possible, start to find those solutions that we can do something with.
You all know what speed dating is, right? Well, if you're the owner of a growing business, what if there was a feature like speed dating, but only for hiring? In other words, you could meet several interested, qualified candidates all at once. Well, good news.
There is. It's Zip Intro from Zip Recruiter.
You can post your job today and start talking to qualified candidates tomorrow. And right now, you can try Zip Intro for free.
It's ZipRecruiter.com slash SRS. Zip Intro gives you the power to quickly assess excellent candidates for your job via back-to-back video calls.
You simply pick a time, and Zip Intro does all the work of finding and scheduling qualified candidates for you. Then, you can choose who you want to talk to and meet with great people as soon as the next day.
It's so easy. Enjoy the benefits of speed hiring with new Zip Intro.
Only from ZipRecruiter. Rated the number one hiring site based on G2.
Try Zip Intro for free. It's ziprecruiter.com slash srs.
Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash srs. Zip Intro.
Post jobs today. Talk to qualified candidates tomorrow.
Going online without ExpressVPN is like not having a passcode on your phone. You're just making it insanely easy for anybody who steals your phone to also steal your whole digital life.
Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, like in a hotel, your online data is not secure and hackers on the same network can try to steal your personal data like your passwords expressvpn stops hackers from stealing your data by creating a secure tunnel between your device and the internet expressvpn is so easy to use and super secure you just need to fire up the app and click one button to get protected and it works on all devices your your phones, laptops, tablets, and more. I know

for me, helping to protect myself from hackers is a top priority, and I really like that ExpressVPN can be used and trusted when I'm on the go or in the studio. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash srs that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-vpn.com slash srs to find out how you can get up to four extra months for free expressvpn.com slash srs would advocacy help at all does it help you to get veterans that have been through x y and z treatments in front of congress to vouch yeah it never hurts it never hurts and to do that um because again the best i've said this for years the best spokesman for anything is the satisfied customer you know and i think that's the the part in the recognition that it may or might not be for everybody but for me this work um and so in conjunction with what hopefully we're going to do over the next few weeks and maybe governments is seeing what are our limitations? Beginning the process to say, hey, this is work for me.
I'm not sure where we're at in the process, but Mr. Congressman, Ms.
Congressman or Madam Senator, Senator, whatever. I want you to know this is work for me.
I just want to give you this information. And I would appreciate if you help the secretary find us a way to this.
I believe this could help others. That's always a good – I would never turn anybody down to talk about what they have.
I mean, the reason I'm asking is earlier you were talking about how media is attacking you about this stuff. And so would a hearing with a thousand – I mean, you're talking to the largest veteran population in the world right now on this show.
And so would it help if there was some type of a hearing at Congress and you brought in a thousand vets that have been through different treatment? You know, whatever you're advocating for change-wise to bring in people that it's actually worked for in front of Congress, televised, here it is, media, put this on. Yeah, I think that's something definitely working with Congress and working with the two committees in particular to say, as we go forward, here's things that we want to emphasize.
And some of that's been done a little bit, but I think it could be done more. I'm not going to downplay that there's not been an interest in Congress about this.
But it's not just the VA committee there. It's the Energy and Commerce, which does a lot of the health care stuff and everything else.
So there's different ways. But yeah, I think those are definitely ways if we can get partnership with the Congress to say, are there better ways to do this? And frankly, I think it would be a Republican and Democrat coming together on it.
I think you're going to see both parties be willing to look at stuff that work. You're going to have some on both ends who say, no, we're not going to touch this, or no, this is bad.
But you're going to have enough in the middle to say, well, let's at least listen to it. So I think as we progress in the next little bit with our information, and then working with Chairman Boston, the House, and the committee and Chairman Moran and the other side to say, hey, we've got some ideas here.
Is this something we could get you to take a look at? We can make sure you have all the witnesses you want in dealing with this. I think it'd be definitely something.
Now, I'm not going to also fool anybody. You start dealing with everybody's sort of piece of the pie out there, nonprofits, VSOs, everybody starts shuffling, you're going to make a lot of people nervous, Sean.
Because, again, you're dealing in livelihood, so to speak, with stuff that they're doing and how they've done it, and do we need to change I'm just not, I'm not bought and sold to anybody. I'm bought and sold to the veteran getting the help that they need and not dying anymore.
So look, it's just where we got to have it. And right now the bigger fights that we've got to have is getting a structural basis.
These are things that we can work on, but bringing it back to where we sort of started this whole thing is I've got to work on getting the VA in the best possible shape it can be to actually do its mission. And right now, we're probably a little more than probably.
We are heavy in where our allocation of employees are, where allocation and where our contracts have been spent and how the money is being spent and should be spent differently.

Those are the things that we're working on very hard right now.

But again, when you've got Congress who has put this money out there telling everybody it's going to work, but the reality is it's not, they're going to be very hesitant to be told that what they did was wrong or to do it better and so we're fighting those battles right now that are keeping me away from dealing with some of these other issues on how can we you know find new and inventive ways to do things how can we actually try things that haven't been tried before? So I'm fighting a bunch of battles on different levels right now. And wherever veterans can help, that's where I would love to have them be a part of this solution.
Man, it's just a damn shame. You know, you got the entire veteran population that's screaming, we need help.
This is how you help us. And then you got the fucking bureaucrats that are getting in the way that are slandering whatever's happening in the media and it's just it's i think that's what makes it so frustrating is we know what we need and we know what we want and we can't get it done because some fucking politician in dc who didn't ever step a foot on a fucking combat God ever, never is making the decisions for us, and it pisses us off.

But earlier you had mentioned about community health care. Yeah.
How is it working now, and what would you like to see happen? It's not working as good as it should, I believe. And I think this is where we need to make it easier.
And I think, and again, I look at this generationally.

And I don't mean to put everybody in a pigeonhole here. But we're dealing with different generations of veterans.
Okay, I still got World War II veterans. I still got Korean veterans.
Still have a lot of Vietnam veterans. And then there's a sort of that, if you know your history, sort of that lull time, that 70s and 80s.
that was sort of after the Vietnam, before Gulf War,

that is a veteran that has a lot of different needs. They were in a lot of different things, but just sort of the quiet veteran, that veteran in the middle.
And then you sort of pick up with Gulf War and then GWAT. Okay? Think about that for a second.
You go from boomers, or not even boomers, you know, you go pre-boomers to the greatest generation through boomers, through X, through everything else. The mentality of those generations and how they interact with the VA is very different.
And so the issues of the older ones are more attracted to the VA centers themselves, the health, the hospitals, the CBOC.

They want that care there.

If as they get older, some of them can't drive as far, they can't get that health. So it's more advantageous for them to go to a local eye doctor instead of driving 80 miles to the VA where they've always been forever.
That's a help. But then you get into that Gulf-watt veteran who has visions of the va from their moms or dads or from others from the vietnam era which they were they they don't want any part of that but they want still the help especially if they're struggling with financially or something else they want to have the health care that they need and by the way we've got to do a better job i'm going that they need.
And by the way, we've got to do a better job. I'm going to take a little turn here for a second.
We've got to do a better job at preventive health for veterans. We don't do a very good job at this right now.
We're trying, but I've talked to our folks. So like my generation and others, we have the issues of health care, mental health, but just the basics of getting our diabetes under control.
Make sure we're still eating right. Make sure we're doing the things that run our cost up long term and also take away quality of life.
If we can do that in the VA system, then we're going to not only save money, but we're also going to help people in the long run too from losing fingers, losing arms, especially the diabetic stuff. We're two and a half more times than the average population for diabetes.
We're much more high potency for hypertension and blood pressure, cholesterol, those kinds of things. Those are areas that we've got to fix.
But if they're not willing to go into the VA to get it or have been turned off from the VA as you have, then the community care needs to be accessed, in my opinion, more readily. Now, the first thing I'm getting accused of, Sean, and I can tell you right now, somebody listening right now, they say, Doug wants to privatize the VA.
No, I don't. VA will always be there for folks to get care.
And one way or the other, it's always going to be there. We're not privatizing anything if I'm paying the bill for you to go to a local doctor that you feel comfortable with and get the care that you need.
That's not privatization. That's simply being

smart and also following the law. The law says we're supposed to.
But yet, we've also got to

deal in the realities that in some of our areas, the private health care, public health care,

the public hospitals have as much of a problem with finding doctors and nurses and all as we do. And so like I know down in our part of the world where I'm from in Georgia, the wait time for mental health and for psychiatry and some of the stuff like that in the private sector is actually longer than it is unreasonably than it is for the VA.
so to dump all of a sudden, to put a lot of stuff, pressure back on communities that can't handle that anyway, we've got to find a balance. That means we have to staff up in areas that helps us get to the points that we need to be.
But that's a generational issue. But right now what's happening, and I'll just tell you candidly, in the last administration, they moved away from that model altogether.
They just seemingly turned their back on getting people into the community healthcare if they chose it. They were trying to keep all of it or as much of it into the VA itself.
And if people hadn't figured out why yet, I'll go ahead and break the sad news. It's because if I keep them more in the health care, then I can ask for more money.
I can keep more people here. Now, there are also things that we do that others don't do, but that's fine.
But when you're keeping them from the health care, then you're also putting them at risk that if they're not getting the health care out there and they're not coming to see you, then you're not helping them in the way that you should. So that's the way community health should work.
That's where our community care program should be. We're going to get it back to where that is more applicable.
And there actually is some legislation right now, both in the House and the Senate, to actually strengthen that by reducing some of the limitations to community care so that it's easier to access. That will help us all in the

long run, especially our rural health care and especially our suburban health care, that sort of middle ground health care where they're maybe not too far from a health VA center, but they're not close enough and they just want to be in their community. But Sean, how many of our generation want to drive 90 miles to a center or a CBOC that they don't know anybody, and they go in and their peer group is much older than them probably, and they're going to sit around and say, I'll just go to my doctor down the street, or I'll go to the quick care if I need something, or I'll just keep doing this myself.
Everybody wants to be able to do that. So that's what we're looking at.
So are you saying it will be a choice? You can either go to the VA or you can, because that's what I've been advocating. Yeah, there is.
There's choice in there. There's some criteria that's been set up, because again, with the mileage and stuff like that, but even in the House and the Senate, they're trying to refine those down to where it makes it easier to get that community care.
And what we're going to, you know what I think is probably the result of some of this, and this is me speaking, I think you're going to see as it gets better and better with working with the community and working with the VA, you'll start seeing a lot more split care. You'll start seeing some, for instance, I instance i want to like say you had orthopedic issues or you had we've got some great of some of our medical centers especially orthopedic and bone are probably some is good if not better than a lot of the the private they may go there to get an orthopedic issue but they're going to go outside to get their cardio their cardiac care or they're going to go outside get their kidney doctor.
So you'll have a split model, which is exactly what the law envisions. So you don't have to be stuck to one or the other.
You get the best care you can at the way that you want it got. But yet we've got to get to a system in which we take out the middle people, we take out the processes, we get it streamlined into where VA has the control it needs to make sure fiduciarily we're doing what we're

supposed to do, but not the control to where we keep it ourselves.

There's a big difference there.

There's a big difference in signing off and agreeing, this is the condition, I see this,

I'm going to give this person a referral, instead of saying, well, I see this condition, but let's see if we can get them back in in two weeks to talk to them again. You know, those kind of things.
I'll just say this, in the coming weeks, you're going to see some more of this coming out from our office. I would just say stay tuned.
It's bigger than what I can even describe here. We got some other stuff coming out, and I'll just say, just bear with us there.
We're working through this community care issue to overcome what we've had in the last four years. That sounds good.
That sounds real reassuring. What about the burn pits? You know, a lot of, I mean, there's all these weird cancers popping up.
It's like every day I got a new buddy that's got cancer, that died of cancer, that's got stage 4 cancer.

You know, nobody knows what it's from. A lot of people think it's from the burn pits or the vicinity around high explosives, breathing in that shit, especially in Afghanistan.
You know, the burning tires to keep warm, we breathe that in. I remember spitting in the sink and my spit was gray right because i had breathed in so much crap yeah i mean it sounds like there's something on going on there with the burn pits yeah the packtack was designed to to address some of that the problem is look the packtack was a was a good uh step into dealing with it look i'm a burn pit guy as well i mean i was at blod every day in our uh you know while i was there you'd wake up in the morning when i first got there i don't know if it's your experience i got there and i thought why is it so hazy around here you know i thought i thought it was an environmental i'd never been in the desert kind of thing so i thought but then i got to realize and it was just the constant flow of the burn air pit area that was going over our hutches over there.
It's just what it was all the time. It was there all the time.
I remember riding by it, and you could see it burning. It reminded me of growing up in North Georgia where everybody in our neighborhood had the 55-gallon drums and had the bottom out, and you throw your trash in there, and you burn your burn your trash i mean i smell the same smells and worse that i was smelling in the burn pit that was there was used to be when we were burning plastics and crap and everything in the in the trash bin so yeah there's i think there's a lot to go on there what my concern was is they sort of took this from the 9-11 if you remember time frame wise here because we had a lot of exposure.
So President Biden at the time got up in the State of the Union and said, we're going to address this. Well, all of a sudden they threw a bill together, which had already been worked on, but they sort of threw out everything they'd been worked on and threw this bill together that is part good, but also very rushed.
I'll be kind today. Okay, it was rushed and then thrust upon the VA to say, here, do this.
Did you know part of that bill, I bet most people didn't know, do you know that that bill actually requires the VA to test every veteran? The test of, were you near a burnt pit? Were you near toxic chemicals? Were you near? they ask those basic questions that i'm supposed to ask every veteran i i mean there's over 18 million 19 million veterans in this country only nine million roughly have been touched in any way by the va how am i supposed to find the nine million if they don't want to be found but that's the kind of thing that was put in the bill and i actually asked asked one, I happened to be in a meeting the other day with someone who actually wrote that bill, and they were nice about it, but they didn't really have a good answer. And there's no way for me to reach these people.
So I say all that to say that's the conduit around PACTAC was that looking for the diseases right now we have basically permissively allowed almost almost every condition under that that if you have that it's going to be found under the PACTAC um and then how treatment goes from there will be just determined on what like everything cancers of the head which technically there is no such thing as cancers of the head it's specifics in there but that we have a terminology of cancers of the head okay i mean we've turned that when in the previous secretary uh added in i think it was the previous secretary and i was confirmed but the these uh presumptive conditions were added for hypertension and prostate and everything else. Like, okay, I get it, but you know, we're, we're just sort of at this point, just say, if you've been near a burpenter, you can answer one of these questions, you're just going to get healthcare.
And which is in some ways burdening the system a little bit and the benefit side, the disability side of this. But if that's what the intent of Congress to do is just basically give everybody disability checks for that then you know that's what you're going to have to look at going forward so for me it's saying okay what are the real medical consequences of this what can we do to treat this this was also something i brought up that was bobby kennedy and i actually talked about as well on from but we talked about it from a vaccine perspective but also some others you know is just saying you know how can we you know look at these conditions and begin to know that what we're seeing and and the treatments are effective to what we have and I think that's the question sometimes never asked so for me I'm having to live with PAC-TAC and say how do we fix it it's a good thing to get these people in who have these cancers, have this, to make sure we're treating them,

getting the healthcare they need in the community or with us.

So that's really where for the burn pit people

and for the toxic exposure people,

we're keeping that commitment.

And contrary to lies,

we didn't cut any toxic exposure funds.

We actually, the Congress just actually added in

more money in this latest CR that was just done. So again, I cannot tell you the magnitude of lies that I deal with on a daily basis.
And now we've got a big one coming in too. And not a lot I can tell you is much about this.
We're trying to implement that. It's the Dole Act, Elizabeth Dole Act, which is going to deal with caregivers at home and other things that have been building up over time.
I'm now trying to figure out how do I do that and process it properly because some of it

we were not funded for.

Here's another trick.

And look, I've been in Congress, so I participated, fortunately, in this, is we pass stuff, but

we don't fund it.

And so we suspect the VA, which, by the way, you're complaining about how much money we

have now, but now you're telling me to do something that could be literally billions of dollars, and I'm having to find the money. So this is, you know, but I'm having a ball.
It sounds like it. Because I believe in what I'm doing.
So with all these cuts, was it 83,000 jobs right now are on the line at the VA? There's about 15%, so give or take around, that's what we're looking at. And so that money that's going to those jobs, that just won't disappear.
That will get reallocated into something else like health care. Yeah, that's what, I mean, that will be what we fight for is to get reallocated.
Some, you know, if you get to the point, probably would go to something differently. I'm not going to say all will just stay in all that, you know, especially with what we got going on.
That might be my preference. But again, also is the workforce slimming and the monies that we can spend going to where it needs to go.
And I think that's going to be the big key for us is making sure that now, again, one of the things is Congress, again, holds the purse strings. You know, in actual actuality they are the ones that pass the budgets and put the monies in there and everything else so we've got to make the decision so that we do have cuts we do have things that don't continue on in our budgets because the one thing we've not talked about and we've had senior military leaders and others our national debt and national and deficits are a national security issue.
We can't keep going the way we're going in this. The VA will always be one that's going to probably be looked at as to make us as efficient as we possibly can.
And we're going to do that, and we're going to do our part. We're already well ahead in working that way.
But also, I have to be, as I've told our staff many times, I've told, you know, work at the White House and everybody else, is I said, look, we're going to do it in a measured way because at the end of the day, I'm dealing with people. I'm the only agency up there that has to deal with cuts, but actually also has to look at doctors and nurses and families in the face and say, we're taking care of your health care.
No other agency has to do that. Pete at DOD is about as close as, you know, I would say that comes to having to deal with the sort of real viral side of people and the decisions that he makes, life or death kind of decision.
Where does my son or daughter get sent kind of thing? I'm on the other end of it in which that it's very, we got to be very careful where we make it so that we're not hurting the veterans and we're giving them the ability to get the disability benefits or the other benefits they've earned so i take it very seriously but do i think we can get a large amount of that number you better believe it i do believe it because i know and one of the reasons i know is because everybody that's coming up who's saying oh well all the wait times are going to go up and all the backlog is going to go up. Well, I just have four years of proof that tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people didn't solve your problem.
So why don't we try it a little differently here? Let's give them a better organization. Here's a better thing.
Like I said earlier, give me an HR tool that actually lets me know how many people I have and where they're at. Give me a computer system that can begin to screen disability benefits and others to help the actual person so that we can take the easy ones, the tinnitus and everything.
Let's take those off the table. Let's quit griping and going paperwork and paperwork about that.
Let's take the easies off the shelf so that we can get to the harder ones to determine their level of disability let's do things with with ai never taking a human component out of it because there's always especially with veterans there's complex cases so i'm always going to have the the person there to go through that and make sure that we're getting what we need to get and not over give but not under give either but why don't we use a computer and AI training to actually say, let's do this better and do it quicker. I'm all for doing things better and quicker, Sean.
Look, what's the old saying? Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. That's where we got to be here.
And I'm committed to doing that. I'm asking questions that others may have asked.
I'm just going to be doing it differently because as I've told all our folks, I sit here with you as about as content an individual as I can be. I've had 59, almost 60 years of life.
I've had the experiences of being around the world, sitting with presidents and kings and doing things in Congress and being with a lawyer, helping people in court, standing beside them on their worst day and helping them out. I've had the privilege of pastoring a little church that grew into a little bit bigger church.
I've had a wife that's been with me for 36, almost 37 years. We've been together 38.
I have three kids. I'm at the point in my life where I want to help others get better.
I'm at that point I want to turn around and say, for all this experience and where I've been, I want to make sure we're doing something right. I get as much joy out of somebody that's working for me coming to me and say, hey, we got this done.
That's the celebration for me. Because I've really come to the conclusion over years of working this and believing this one statement that if I help enough people in life get what they want, I'll get what I want.
Well, now we're at a place to really make this happen. So for me, I don't know what will happen if I get to stay for four years in this.
I don't care. I get four years to make a difference in the life of my brothers and sisters and war fighters that gave something to this country.
And now my job is to make sure that that country who promised them things, who set it up, actually does it. I can't think of a better calling.
And I'll take the arrows. I'll take the slings.
I'll go to Congress and have the other side of the aisle yell at me and tell me I'm bad. That's fine.
You come at me because I'm going to do the best I can with what I have, with what they gave me. But the one thing about it, Sean, is this.
You're not going to kick around the VA anymore without offering solutions. You're not going to scare my veterans and you're not going to scare my employees without this secretary calling you out when you are wrong.
And I've seen it so much in the last few weeks. It's disgusting.
I've had sitting senators lie repeatedly about who was let go. I've had sitting house members and senators lie repeatedly about, as I said earlier, appointments getting put off, surgeries getting put off, delays are already going up.
There's been three weeks when 2,400 people who never touched any of those things were laid off, and you're telling me this is a problem? Where have you been for 10 years when GAO says that we're as screwed up as we have been? Don't tell me that anymore. We may not get everything I want to get accomplished.
I may not be able to help every veteran, but we're damn sure going to try because it's not going to happen anymore. Tired of it.
Good for you. I think that's the perfect place to end this and I'm glad you're in there.
I hope these changes happen. Buddy, I'm looking forward to the folks like you and others.
We're going to have to make it happen. Perfect.
Thank you, brother. Thank you.
Thank you. Expert entrepreneur Ed Milet is on a mission to max out your life i exist here weekly so that you can make your dreams come true become the man or woman you're capable of and then pay it forward it's time to get laser focused on peak performance.
Clarity equals focus and focus equals success.

That's what I'm here to do every week with you.

Max out.

The Ed Milet Show.

Follow and listen on your favorite platform.