#187 Doug Collins - United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs

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Speaker 4 Guys like me don't trust the VA. We just don't.

Speaker 5 You're not going to be getting your sex change at the VA anymore. That's not what our services are for.

Speaker 5 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 who are not even getting primary health care.

Speaker 4 480,000 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.

Speaker 4 Secretary Collins, welcome to the show.

Speaker 5 I'm glad to be here, bud.

Speaker 4 It's an honor to have you here. So, the new Secretary of the VA.
Yep. Lots of stuff to work on.

Speaker 5 It's a, what do we call it? A target-rich environment?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I'll bet it is.

Speaker 4 Probably even more than I know.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 so we got a bunch of stuff to talk about today, a whole lot of topics to cover. But I'm just, how did Secretary of the VA pop up on your radar?

Speaker 5 Well, I think it came up about a lot of things. You know, the president and I had known each other for a while.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And, you know, from my fighting during those days to keep the truth just out there about what we were seeing.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And after a while, about a year or so ago,

Speaker 5 he said, look,

Speaker 5 I think you need to come with me. And he just said, you know, if you've ever been around him, he's just like, I just want to, you need to come with me.
And this was a year out. And I said, Mr.

Speaker 5 President, I said, I said, let's get you elected. We'll talk about whatever you want to.
And after that happened, we had some conversation of some other ideas that was thought about. But then

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 as most well known as a politically sensitive department because of Congress and everybody on the veteran thing. I said, I think we can manage this because we're going to have to make some change.

Speaker 5 It actually matters. And I said, we're going to have to work at it hard.
And I think we can do that. So

Speaker 5 he agreed, 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? I said, yes, sir. He said, I said, what do you want me to?

Speaker 5 I said, what do you want me to do, sir? And he said, just take care of my veterans.

Speaker 5 That was it.

Speaker 4 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.

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I love it. But,

Speaker 4 all right, so everybody gets an introduction, too.

Speaker 5 So, all right.

Speaker 4 Doug Collins, Secretary of the VA, you are the 12th Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, confirmed by the Senate in February of 2025 to lead the charge for our nation's veterans.

Speaker 4 You earned a degree in political science and criminal justice from the University of North Georgia. You earned a master's degree in divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and pastored

Speaker 4 Chicopee Baptist Church for 11 years. In 2006, the people of Georgia's 27th State House District elected you to represent them.

Speaker 4 During your first term in the state legislator, you graduated from Atlanta's John Marshall Law School and established your own legal practice. You were the U.S.

Speaker 4 Representative from Georgia's 9th Congressional District from 2013 to 2021.

Speaker 4 You are 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.

Speaker 4 You're a husband and a father, and most importantly, a Christian.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 That's two weeks faster than the normal that we've seen.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so what does that look like?

Speaker 5 Yeah, well, he's my, 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.

Speaker 5 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 D.C.

Speaker 5 And the truth of the matter is, is, no, I'm still the Secretary of VA. It comes through my desk.
We make decisions.

Speaker 5 And mine will always be for the veteran and then how that works out through our VA employees.

Speaker 5 Where we're seeing the most issue right now is Sean, and this is something almost for many military person, anybody that wants to think about it.

Speaker 5 The first thing when you come into a branch or you come into anything,

Speaker 5 you're told about the culture.

Speaker 5 The culture is this. The culture, you will be a 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,

Speaker 5 in all fairness, Sean, that's Culture is at the end of the pipe. It's what comes out of the pipe.
It's what goes in at the top that gives you culture.

Speaker 5 There's this idea somewhere that you out there that you all of a sudden, you know, you can just pop up culture.

Speaker 5 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 like it, just like you were eating something, and it comes out the other end.

Speaker 5 What it comes out is 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?

Speaker 5 And that's, you know, look, I'm running against people who don't want to change.

Speaker 5 I'm running against, you know, media, union bosses, members of Congress and the Senate who just, you know, they've put, here's their problem.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 That's why I've been on social media, you know, Twitter, anything else I can find to tell the truth. And I fought back against the lies.

Speaker 5 I'm not, I think the sum up my first five weeks is you may have been able to be, VA may have been a whipping post for a long time.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I'm going to tell you the truth, and I'm going to give you the answers that we need to do.

Speaker 5 And I'm going to take care of our veteran, number one, and I'm going to make sure our VA employees the best that we can.

Speaker 5 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 what I'm fighting the most right now.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you know, I've

Speaker 4 got a whole slew of complaints about the VA.

Speaker 4 And, you know,

Speaker 4 it's funny, but it's not. I mean, I haven't stepped into a VA.
I got 100%.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 5 The consultations

Speaker 4 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 when i'm 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

Speaker 4 it is created. Look, I don't know any, any one of my friends.
And I have friends with the top warfighters on the planet.

Speaker 4 None of them have a good experience at the VA. None of them have anything positive to say about the VA.
None of them trust the VA. And that's why I quit going.

Speaker 5 I mean, I have...

Speaker 4 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, with the traumatic brain injuries, and we just aren't getting any answers at all from the VA.

Speaker 4 And so, and then it's just created this distrust. So what I do with my check is 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.

Speaker 4 I get treated like shit when I go there. It's like...

Speaker 4 Like

Speaker 4 I'm faking an injury or something. 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.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 and then you see a lot of these therapies. And I want to dive into this too, but I mean,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They drive somewhere. They're driving their kids somewhere.
They forget where the hell they're going.

Speaker 4 When I say they, I mean we, you know, we're temperamental. We're quick to fly off the handle.
There's chemical imbalances. There's the burn pit shit.
And now

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 they're the ones that are actually taking care of us. It's not the VA.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 they do a brain scan, they fly these guys down to Mexico,

Speaker 4 do an ibogaine treatment.

Speaker 4 My friend Trevor's, he's ambiolife sciences.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Oh, magically, the entire brain is lit up. I mean, I just want to, I have to tell you some of this stuff because it's important.
One of my...

Speaker 4 One of my best friends of all time, I've known him for probably at least 15 years. We contracted at

Speaker 4 CIA together. Retired Green Beret sustained one of the biggest blasts I've ever seen somebody walk out alive from.

Speaker 4 Massive traumatic brain injury. Then he gets shot in the head.

Speaker 4 His wife calls. He's been hiding this stuff.
His wife calls me, and she's like, Sean,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And then he goes home, has sex with his wife. And it's, and that was probably nine months ago.

Speaker 4 Same.

Speaker 4 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 V. I just gave up on it.

Speaker 4 But why, 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.

Speaker 4 Oh, we don't have any answers. And it's discouraging.
And, you know, that's not the only non-profit. That's vets that I'm talking about.
Veterans exploring, I can't remember. It's vets.
Right.

Speaker 4 Vets.org. But

Speaker 4 treatment solutions. But

Speaker 4 why isn't the VA getting, I mean, and then we have the veteran suicide epidemic. And the numbers are all over the board.
They say 22 a day.

Speaker 4 I hear reports that it's actually 40 a day when you start looking at the overdoses and stuff like that. I mean, so what's the plan here?

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Speaker 5 That's better H-E-L-P dot com slash s r s 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 it's the battle we face okay

Speaker 5 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 when going through confirmation which i had to go through to get this i said 60 of your uh constituent calls in other words 60 of the calls to your office for help in some way involve the va either vha our health benefits, or their regular, or their other benefits, disability benefits, other things like that.

Speaker 5 60%.

Speaker 5 Some of them looked at me like, no, and it was interesting. The staff would be sitting in the side going.

Speaker 4 60% of what?

Speaker 5 60% of all their calls. So like a phone call to a congressman or a senator.
I need, I'm having trouble. 60%.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 And 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,

Speaker 5 I don't know. But yeah, their staff was sitting there and said, yeah, it is.
It is. Because I hear it all the time.

Speaker 5 Think about that for a second. Let's just ponder for just one second

Speaker 5 that that many people, and we're talking thousands with each congressman, each senator, a year calling about an organization

Speaker 5 that is supposed to be already set up

Speaker 5 to give them what they have earned. to give them the benefits that they have earned through Congress action.
This is none just dreamed dreamed up by a president. This is all from statutory law.

Speaker 5 But yet having to call them because they can't get the help they need.

Speaker 5 Only in Washington, D.C. do we call that normal.
Only in Washington, D.C. do we call that okay.

Speaker 5 I call it failure.

Speaker 5 And I've called that out since the day that I got sworn in, that we're not going to allow anymore this discussion, that it's okay to have to call for what you should be getting already.

Speaker 5 Now, if you don't want it, don't take it. Go otherwise.
That's why we have choices. That's why we have other things to do.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It gets into this situation where we've just sort of done it this way.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And there's been a lot of problems and probably in a lot of stuff to back that up. I'm not going to disagree with you.

Speaker 5 But there's also a lot of times when you got the ones who are trying to do it are getting bogged down in the people trying to get in the system that is broken. So it'd be like me.

Speaker 5 I do a lot of counseling. I have for years, of course, when I was pastoring and a chaplain and everything else, all I counsel.

Speaker 5 And if you, in a relationship,

Speaker 5 the relationship starts, let's say, with a man, you know, husband and wife, and remember, 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,

Speaker 5 and you come into that position, then they've now developed into a problem where they don't talk, they're fighting, they're, you know, maybe going to get divorced or breaking up, whatever.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 To fix a relationship, you got to have trust. If you can't have trust, you're not going to fix a relationship.

Speaker 5 You can smooth it, you can paste it over, you can do whatever you want to do, but you got to have trust.

Speaker 5 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, you know, 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.

Speaker 5 So you just keep doing whatever you're doing. We'll protect your job and go forward.

Speaker 5 So when it comes to new ideas,

Speaker 5 there's some good things that you would never hear about.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 because there's some of that we do probably as well, if not better, than most anywhere you're going to find.

Speaker 5 But when it comes to other areas like the traumatic brain injury, to like the issues of sleep deprivation, the issues of addictions, those things, we're stuck in a system that is not allowing.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Some of it we're bound because we're actually a healthcare, actually hospital healthcare organization.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I'll use a big example there is marijuana. Marijuana has always been a fight treatment

Speaker 5 in some areas. And you've had a lot of

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And 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?

Speaker 5 And if it works, then it's a miracle and we're good.

Speaker 5 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 Wright 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?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We know from experience that in some people, this is this is a dead-on treatment for what they need.

Speaker 5 But I've got to get a mindset change that says, and this is what I'm facing almost all the time, is,

Speaker 5 well, you can do that, but there's a risk. Sean, getting up out of bed in the morning and going to the bathroom and taking a shower is a risk.
I'm going to fall and bust my head and die.

Speaker 5 That's a risk. Getting up and walking and getting 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.

Speaker 5 And the generational issue is something that's going to be a little bit harder for for me to tackle because it's not just the VA assimilating itself to the

Speaker 5 younger warfighter, the GWAT fighter, my generation fighter, your generation fighter, who are not joiners. We don't join Kiwanas.
We don't join Rotary.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 They're drawn to nonprofits who are actually doing something on 10% margins instead of the opposite way around.

Speaker 5 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've got to deal with.

Speaker 5 So now I've got to get them back, just like you, to say,

Speaker 5 what can I do inside the VA

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 They just went away from it, Sean. They just, because it's a mindset.

Speaker 5 You've got to understand the mindset of the BA and the mindset that the Biden administration and the previous administration spent tens of billions of dollars, well over 100 billion, and tens of thousands of employees, well over 50,000 in the last four years alone.

Speaker 5 Four years.

Speaker 5 And you know what? Our metrics have either just stopped or they've actually went backwards.

Speaker 5 So all these people that are screaming, you know, that, you know, you can't cut anybody, you can't change it. Well, you've tried that now for the past 10 years.

Speaker 5 And you know what GAO says, government accounting offices said, you're on the high risk list.

Speaker 5 VA has been on the high risk danger list of fraced fraud and abuse and poor quality health care in many of our facilities for 10 years.

Speaker 5 That's just unacceptable.

Speaker 5 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 the House that you can't change.

Speaker 5 You're going to hurt wait times. You're going to hurt clients.

Speaker 5 You've done that already. Our wait times are not where they need to be.
Our backlog is too high.

Speaker 5 It 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.

Speaker 5 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's bad, and you just got to keep throwing stuff at it because it protects our jobs, protects our workers, and protects the system.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I mean, I've got a stat written written down here.

Speaker 4 There are 480,000 VA employees, and there are 450,000 active duty Army.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 veterans all over the country have been dying, waiting to get treatment. Committing suicide, dying, you know, because they can't get.
So

Speaker 4 with 480,000 VA, that's 30,000 more than the active Army members.

Speaker 4 Why can't they get in? Or why couldn't they get in?

Speaker 5 Well, because a lot of it, think about that organizational structure. Where is most of that organizational structure going?

Speaker 5 You know, I've been told since we started the confirmation process and we started asking these questions. Well, PACTAC did this.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Never mind going to the actual agency that's going to have to

Speaker 5 do this and give them help and instructions on how to make it happen. But I was told that was why the monies and everything increased so much.
Well, I've asked,

Speaker 5 where are these employees that were hired for PACTAT? I mean, if we've hired all these employees to be PACT, where are they at?

Speaker 5 And only get one-off answers. Like, well, we've had to do something here.
We can't.

Speaker 5 All right. I come here to share the truth.

Speaker 5 I'm just not BS anymore. I just can't.
I don't know whatever. But

Speaker 5 I can't tell you

Speaker 5 where all 480,000 of those people are.

Speaker 5 I can't tell you. Now, here's the interesting issue.
You were in the military. You were in the CIA team.

Speaker 5 You know, if you went to your commander or you went to your headquarters, headshot, they could actually look down a list. They could pull every base.
They could pull every unit.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You would know exactly where they're at. I do not have an HR system that allows me easily to do that.

Speaker 5 Think about that for a second. Let that sink in when all these other issues we're talking about is out there.

Speaker 5 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 gonna try and fix that pretty quick because if I don't know where they are then this organization is functionally

Speaker 5 not ready for for action it's just not And you've got a lot of things. I mean, we've had organizational structure at the, you know, cutting bureaucracy at the

Speaker 5 management level in Washington and across 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.

Speaker 5 i mean it'd be like i'm trying to put this in maybe ways that your guys and fucking gals would understand and watch this podcast and listen it would be almost like having

Speaker 5 in one unit

Speaker 5 having six and from air force having six uh shirts in one unit which one do you go to who do answers to who and then also having two or three chiefs above the six shirts to say Well, go get that approved.

Speaker 5 Go get that approved. Go get that approved.
Go get that. Oh, and then, by the way, we'll have to go find the, we'll get get the wing commander to sign off.

Speaker 5 So from an Air Force perspective, it's just bureaucracy layers. Some of these were started for real reasons.

Speaker 5 You know, hey, we need to manage our like central vision care, which is our bishop division. But they were supposed to have 20 and 30 people.
Now some of them have three and four and 500.

Speaker 5 They just grow for the sake of growing, but

Speaker 5 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? Is the veteran being helped?

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We're going to make it to where you can go out into the community and get the care you need. But yet over the last previous administration, there was...

Speaker 5 We have documented it, and we're going to be rolling out more of this, where we saw basically a turn toward de-incentivizing and actually keeping veterans from getting the care they need, even if it meant waiting longer.

Speaker 5 Sean, this is

Speaker 5 this, the more I dig, the worse it gets.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 How is that going to work?

Speaker 5 How is it going to, how do, how do, how do I do that?

Speaker 4 How do I use the VA to pay for my community health care in the civilian market?

Speaker 5 If you meet certain criteria like distance and time, especially what it was designed for, is especially those who are away from a VA health clinic

Speaker 5 or a center

Speaker 5 where they could 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 you,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Anytime you put another third-party anything in there, it tends to bog the system.

Speaker 5 they're supposed to be finding community doctors they're supposed to be finding the system where we send them to um the va technically still has a sign-off right now where you see a va dot and the doctor says yep we we 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

Speaker 5 what i call abuse of the law, basically.

Speaker 5 So you get that, and then you go, and then, you know, it's turned in, it's paid for just as if you were going to, you know, through the VA system itself. So these are out there.

Speaker 5 These part had been there. Mission Act gave that.
It expanded that.

Speaker 5 But you 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.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 I think a lot of people don't know how to use the VA system.

Speaker 5 I'm one of them.

Speaker 4 I mean, and I want to get into this later, but I mean, even just to get

Speaker 4 the initial,

Speaker 4 to get the benefits, to go through the doctor's appointments, you know, oh, my shoulder's messed up. I got tinnitus.
I got TBI,

Speaker 5 whatever. All those, what do they call those?

Speaker 4 The initial appointments.

Speaker 5 The consoles, yeah. Yeah, the consults.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 5 And it's like, I'll give you an example.

Speaker 4 They denied my tinnitus.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Then I got introduced to this woman, Peggy Matthews.

Speaker 4 Veterans Advocacy Services. She's like

Speaker 4 probably 80 years old, runs it,

Speaker 4 is like an angel angel to me and my guys because she's the one that can take our package, turn it into something, and somehow, some way, she gets it fast tracked through the VA.

Speaker 4 But for us to like try to navigate

Speaker 4 the Veterans Administration, it's impossible.

Speaker 5 Why should we have that, Sean? Think about that.

Speaker 5 But I'm also bringing it back is if someone, you know, look,

Speaker 5 looking ahead, in five weeks of sitting here doing this job, I have been seeing the exact same, asking the exact exact same questions. And say, why is it you have to have a VA whisperer, so to speak,

Speaker 5 to get what should be honestly yours to stay and to pay part in. Okay.
You're exactly right. I mean, right now, as we look at this,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I'll just use another IRS, you're supposed to pay your taxes, but yet you call the IRS hotline and they can't answer your questions.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 and I was just with a local vet center here, and one of the things I asked him, I said, tell me something.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 our setup is causing us problems? Because here's what we are seeing, though.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 They may not be what I want. It may not be for everybody, but 80, 90%, you know, saying, hey,

Speaker 5 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 us through that front line

Speaker 5 to say, this is an agency that is open. Look, I don't have my phone with me right now, but if I have my phone with me right now, I bet you're private insurance.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I could talk to my doctor if I wanted to.

Speaker 5 We don't have that.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I have 170 hospitals over almost 1,500 clinic, C-box clinics, and that's not counting the mobile stuff we do and everything else. That's how massive this organization is.
Okay.

Speaker 5 And they've all run on siloed issues. I heard an issue today that was about just simple things as transportation.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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've got to,

Speaker 5 again,

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 And especially in public life, if they're not a veteran and they run for office,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And they say, well, and I had a gentleman on the floor of the house one time

Speaker 5 and good friend, good guy, never served.

Speaker 5 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. It was a budget item.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It shouldn't be done separately. This is the way we should be done.

Speaker 5 And I'll never forget. And it just floored me.

Speaker 5 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 bad, as being against veterans.

Speaker 5 Sean, think about what he just said.

Speaker 5 He was willing to make a bad vote

Speaker 5 because he was scared of the political fallout of being seen as against veterans.

Speaker 5 We've seen this consistently with policy that comes out of Congress for the VA.

Speaker 5 We've seen it consistently in situations where the VA, they will pass budgets and then complain about it.

Speaker 5 Because that's the way you do it. We have veteran service organizations that honestly at times seem more at war with me

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But if your only way that you satisfy your membership is to say, we fought the VA and won, huh?

Speaker 5 We're on the same page. We're supposed to be on the same page here.
We're trying to help veterans too.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It's got to be an all-in approach.

Speaker 5 Lord willing,

Speaker 5 Donald Trump's here. I know I've got hopefully four years to do this, but I really got 18 months.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And I saw him just the other day.

Speaker 5 He and I talked last Friday. And he said, he said, what about my, you know, and he brought up the community care.
He brought up are the folks being able to go out and get the choices they need.

Speaker 5 And I said, sir, we're working on it. I said, but I got some problems.
I need your help. He said, no, whatever, do.
We'll take care of it. But these are the kind of generational change we got to have.

Speaker 5 And so now, one of the things we're experiencing is you mentioned how much we have. Well, we've had a across the board reduction in force is what it's called.
A riff. Now, the interesting thing is

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So what we're looking at now is how do we do this?

Speaker 5 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 they need, 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.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 then we've got a chance.

Speaker 5 But what we've got right now is a system and I have actually some Republicans and Democrats and some other organizations that are simply saying who will come to, who look on their own web pages, their websites and their statements.

Speaker 5 The VA is too much wait time, too long to do this and broken. But yet

Speaker 5 I've seen quotes and tweets. Secretary Collins needs to be careful on how he does the

Speaker 5 reorganization of the VA. It needs 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.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 When we had the president signed 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,

Speaker 5 doing other things. We fired them.
Guess what? The union.

Speaker 5 and others had lawsuits.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I've said it every day I have have been in this office, and I've not taken a day off really yet.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 how do you plan on leaning that process out for these guys to get benefits?

Speaker 5 It's going to be the, here's where we're starting right now.

Speaker 5 We're starting a process using career employees, others in the system to say, okay, where, because we're under this, to mandate to get the fat out, and then we can use that money to redirect.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 toward prosthetic care.

Speaker 5 We're redirecting it toward community care. We're redirecting that money.

Speaker 5 All that money that 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 veteran itself.

Speaker 5 We're going to have to, as we go through looking for this reduction in force, we're going to take out folks that are not forward-facing when it comes to a veteran's health.

Speaker 5 In other words, it's amazing to me. And I don't know if you read just recently the paper.
We let 2,400 people go about two weeks ago, three weeks ago.

Speaker 5 And all of a sudden, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, all the legacy media, the Hill senators and others, union members,

Speaker 5 Collins is killing healthcare. Collins is gutting the VA.
Collins is calling it.

Speaker 5 And then they'll say, well, and they'll find somebody who said they had their surgery that was put off or that their appointment was rescheduled.

Speaker 5 None of the people, the people we fired were publicists, interior designers, laborers. I mean, this is what we're talking about here.

Speaker 5 How has your surgery been put off because an interior designer was laid off? It wasn't. It's a lie.

Speaker 5 But what we have is, you know what's interesting though? If you'd have gone back to January 15th of this year and that same surgery would have been put off, it would have never made a headline.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 that's not the areas we're looking at. 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

Speaker 5 really

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 in some of these situations and instead take those money redirect it back to where it needs to go then you're going to be able to get you know but quicker access then you're going to be able to cut oh by the way i'm also going to look at you know if we can 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

Speaker 4 let's talk about the suicide

Speaker 4 what do you want to say about that

Speaker 5 um 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

Speaker 5 is basically unchanged.

Speaker 5 We spend $588 million,

Speaker 5 $588 million on preventive supposed suicide.

Speaker 5 We spend $2.3 billion in what we'll call treatment of either the mental aspect,

Speaker 5 health aspect of that,

Speaker 5 issues that they've had with hurting themselves, other things like that, $2.3 billion. So $3 billion total, roughly, in suicide.
And yet our numbers are not changing, Sean.

Speaker 5 We go from a low of about $6,300, $6,400 up to almost $7,000 a year. Now, you made mention earlier of what's the real number.
That's an arguable debate. And I've heard this, you know, from others.

Speaker 5 It actually may be 25, 30,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And you get some of these medical examiners and coroners in these smaller counties.

Speaker 5 You know, they may not, they'll call it accidental or something else. So we may not know because it's just that stigma of suicide that's attached.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So what we're trying to do now and what I'm beginning to do is I want to know why that 588 million is going for.

Speaker 5 I want to know what are we supposedly doing to, and don't just tell me you're putting a Facebook ad out there.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Whether the number is 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.

Speaker 5 50%.

Speaker 5 That's just unacceptable.

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Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I'm trying to reach that veteran who's sitting out there who's saying, you know, screw the VA. I went over one time.
They didn't even treat me like I was human.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It may have been a bad day for them, bad day for you. But then they're sitting in there in their home and they're self-medicating

Speaker 5 or they're, you know, going off doing destructive things. They're going to end up toward the point where they don't see a reason to go on.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Call your battle buddy. Call your airman.
Call your wingman, whoever it is. We got to get out of this stigma that

Speaker 5 we don't touch people that are saying they have problems. I mean, think about your friend that you just talked about.

Speaker 5 He's not going to run out in the front yard and say, hey, I'm really not able to function today. They're not going to do that.
But we've got to find them.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And get back to the simple fact of, hey, are we actually treating this as what it is?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I was in Nashville today

Speaker 5 at National Songwriters Association, some folks I've known for years who write country music songs. They write songs all over the world for stuff you hear on the radio all the time.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And they get them down, they start talking with other veterans, and they start writing a song. They say, Write a song,

Speaker 5 and they show them and talk to them about how to do that.

Speaker 5 I had a veteran today who told me, He said,

Speaker 5 been married 50-something years.

Speaker 5 He said, I was in Vietnam.

Speaker 5 He said, I never, my wife never hardly knew anything about what happened. He said, I just, he said, I just didn't talk about it.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And he says, now I'm able to talk to her. I'm able to release that.

Speaker 5 There's another gentleman, this is a Vietnam vet. There's another gentleman there who, again,

Speaker 5 his kids, and you know the saying. How many times have people say, tell me a war story, Sean? Tell me what you did.
Tell me what was cool. This guy was saying, he said he didn't want to talk about it.

Speaker 5 And his kids would ask him about, 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

Speaker 5 where he wrote down

Speaker 5 what happened to him at Tet

Speaker 5 way back when,

Speaker 5 when he saw his buddies burned up in a tank.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 That's a totally different way to look at this stuff. We've got to reach the veteran where they are.

Speaker 5 And if it's hunting, let's take them, you know, let's match them with somebody that can talk to them and get them out on a duck blind somewhere or get them out in the field.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 How will you know if it's working?

Speaker 5 I'm going to see if my numbers go down. I'm going to see how many people are responding.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I'm looking to use nonprofits. By the way, I'm non-discriminatory non-discriminatory here.
I don't care if they come to the VA or not.

Speaker 5 I want them to come to the VA because we got resources to help them.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It's okay.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Because those people,

Speaker 5 we hear about them,

Speaker 5 but they're not getting help that they need because it's so quiet. I'll use an example for you.
My daughter has spinobipham. She was born, she's 32 years old now.

Speaker 5 If she were to come in here and she roll in in her little chair,

Speaker 5 she'll knock socks off of her. She's got a smile.
She's never walked down in her life. I mean.

Speaker 5 You know, I've watched her not experience 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.

Speaker 5 For her, she just gets up and goes every day. She goes to work five days a week.
She works at a hospital.

Speaker 5 But if you 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 try to open a door.

Speaker 5 They're trying to, you know, help her get to what she needs.

Speaker 5 But if I was to stand up in that same mall

Speaker 5 and say, folks, I don't know what's wrong, but my mind's broke.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We've got to change the whole scenario here, especially in the VA and our veteran community for brothers and sisters who we served with. They've got to know it's okay.
You're not going to

Speaker 5 be wrong in reaching out and giving somebody some help.

Speaker 5 And the person who needs the help needs to see somebody willing to sort of run the mile with them.

Speaker 5 If we can get that, 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.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 This isn't playtime anymore for me, Sean.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 Did I hear you say that you planned on using nonprofits to help?

Speaker 5 Yes, I'll use anybody that's willing to help. I'll use anybody willing to help.

Speaker 5 If that's a VSO, one of the big six VSOs or any of the other, if they're willing to get in the game and help and try new ways,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Because here's the situation:

Speaker 5 we're looking at a generation that

Speaker 5 is

Speaker 5 not functioning the way we did 20 years ago, even 10, 15 years ago,

Speaker 5 because they're more influencer-driven, they're more socially media-driven, they're more, you know, we just saw that in the last presidential election, that Donald Trump won because he reached voters who nobody were going after.

Speaker 5 He was speaking to them on platforms that

Speaker 5 they had never heard before. So why would I not use things like this or nonprofits who are, you know, and I could name the many, but I wouldn't want to forget anybody.

Speaker 5 I mean, you've got a lot of them out there that are putting good money to the actual end, putting, you know, lead on the target, so to speak, downrange, and they're using very little of it for administrative cost.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 I mean, as far as care and some of these other treatments that we're talking about, I mean, is there any way that the VA can partner with somebody other than

Speaker 4 other than, I don't know who you guys partner with,

Speaker 4 the American Legion,

Speaker 4 we listed a whole bunch of them that the modern-day warfighter veteran does not use anymore.

Speaker 4 They're all using, we are all using mom and pop nonprofits.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 where where

Speaker 4 they get their disability.

Speaker 4 Is it going to be,

Speaker 4 it sounds like it's going to be very bureaucratic and hard to push through. So is there a way to get nonprofits like Veterans Advocacy Services

Speaker 4 some type of a grant or give the veterans some type

Speaker 4 to where they can,

Speaker 4 hey,

Speaker 4 Peggy knows the system.

Speaker 4 She can get guys through. She can help guys through.
She can, I mean,

Speaker 4 is there a way that the VA can partner with these smaller mom and pop

Speaker 4 organizations and fund them so that they can get a bigger team

Speaker 4 and to get more vets pushed through?

Speaker 5 Yeah, and look, I think one of the things here is that

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Why do we need, as I said earlier, the VA whisper, why can't we do this easier? But until then,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And also. I can tell you why.
Okay.

Speaker 4 Because

Speaker 4 it's like I mentioned before, nobody trusts the VA. When they go to somebody like Peggy, she's like a protector.

Speaker 4 Guys like me,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You know what I mean? That's why that's happening.

Speaker 5 And that's where we've got to start rebuilding trust in a system that has

Speaker 5 for you, I can't explain this enough,

Speaker 5 the frustration I have

Speaker 5 with a lot, a lot of people out at 480,000, there's many, many, many, many dedicated people who want to help our veterans, period. Okay.
They are.

Speaker 5 I promise 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.

Speaker 5 But I'm also not going to tolerate status quo. I'm also also not going to tolerate lower standards.
We're going to have higher standards. We're going to push this up.

Speaker 5 But at the same point in time,

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 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 where I learn how to drive myself?

Speaker 5 And I think that's going to be, and look, but again, there's going to be parties in equities

Speaker 5 that that's not the way they've done it. That's not the way they do their business model.

Speaker 5 Because if they have people that come to them, they either get help from outside agencies or other stuff.

Speaker 5 I'm finding a whole different world that I'm just getting into the background of how they, you know, how we're working this stuff. And folks, if you've earned a benefit, take your benefit.

Speaker 5 You've earned the benefit.

Speaker 5 But also, there's a lot of more encouragement to go back and go back. And I think that frustrates a lot of veterans.
And you've heard this like I have.

Speaker 5 I want it to be known veterans are not victims.

Speaker 5 We're not. We chose, we went into the profession, we done that.

Speaker 5 And now we're, we're, many of us and you and others, you've talked about, we may have conditions now, we may have stuff that have cost us in that time of service.

Speaker 5 And that's why the system was set up is to say, okay, we're going to do something.

Speaker 5 You know, 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.

Speaker 5 The VA was set up because we had so many coming back in from World War I. And then, of course, you know, as it expanded through World War II, that wasn't in areas where hospitals were.

Speaker 5 So that's how this sort of all started. We just sort of lost our roots a little bit.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But then let's legislate it to death that it can't get outside these boxes

Speaker 5 because we want to make sure that we're still in control. That's a big part of government issue that we have of not just the VA, but a lot of agencies.

Speaker 4 So how would you partner with a nonprofit for that?

Speaker 5 Well, I think there's ways that we can look at that I'm exploring right now. We can profit, you know,

Speaker 5 do things together. We can, you know, I can, you know, say, look, you know, this is a group that I, you you know, that we're meeting with.
What's your ideas? Bringing those ideas to me.

Speaker 5 I've already met with several that are saying, you know,

Speaker 5 like we have an example right now that is coming out and without getting into deep details about, you know, that need,

Speaker 5 they've had issues with data collection. They've had issues with stuff.
And it should be something we should be willingly be a part of.

Speaker 5 And for some reason, the VA is all is chose to be a stumbling block there. So it's like, well, I'm now looking at that and saying, no, let's see if we can remove those stumbling blocks.

Speaker 5 Let's get the data we need.

Speaker 5 Let's make sure we have this out there so that we get good answers.

Speaker 5 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, could it be through a grant?

Speaker 5 Possibly so, or other ways to help other organizations help us get better. That's my goal.

Speaker 5 I don't want to simply put out

Speaker 5 this idea that we need

Speaker 5 a whole nother layer. You've had VSOs out here helping forever, and you've had all these others now just bringing a sort of another layer because this group trusts this group better than this one.

Speaker 5 Why don't we actually look at the root cause? If you came to me and,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 my fingers were turning blue and I was having, you know, I was tingly. And for some reason, it looked like a circulation issue.
Well,

Speaker 5 the problem we've had lately 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.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 And are we getting to a place?

Speaker 5 And I said this in my confirmation, I said, I want us to become a place instead of initially where we're reactively no to a reactively let's get there yes, where we're actively saying, instead of saying, you know, I'm not sure we can, to say, I think there's a way.

Speaker 5 We've got to to have that mindset difference to say, look,

Speaker 5 you have benefits you've earned. You've had healthcare you've earned.
We're here for a reason,

Speaker 5 but we're not to make it harder.

Speaker 5 And that's, 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.

Speaker 5 No, it doesn't matter what I think, you think, or any other group thinks, when the perception 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.

Speaker 5 Perception is reality to veterans. And we got to break that project.
We got to break that cycle.

Speaker 4 What about nonprofits for treatments? There's a lot of nonprofits out there that

Speaker 4 have great treatment programs that are proven to work. You know, like I had mentioned,

Speaker 4 that's probably the biggest one that I know of that's doing psychedelic stuff. There's Tom Satterly, he's a former Delta guy.
He's got the All Securus Foundation, very therapeutic experience.

Speaker 4 Lots of coaching. That's been working.
I mean,

Speaker 4 is there a way where,

Speaker 4 because it sounds, look, I get it. Like, you guys can't just be like, oh, we're doing Ibocaine treatments now.

Speaker 4 I realize that's going to be, that's going to be an act of Congress and the Senate or however it works to get that through. But, you know, maybe there's a way where

Speaker 4 the veteran can

Speaker 5 look,

Speaker 4 maybe there's a voucher program or something where the where I want to try this nonprofit. And maybe maybe those nonprofits get

Speaker 5 some certification, something to go through.

Speaker 4 Some kind of certified from the VA.

Speaker 4 And the VA says to the veteran, I'm not going to give you the money, but

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 you want psychedelic therapy for your traumatic brain injury. We're going to give you the voucher.

Speaker 4 You pick

Speaker 4 which nonprofit you want to use it for.

Speaker 4 And then they email in some kind of a document that says, hey, we sent this person down.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 their therapy or their whatever. And then the VA pays that voucher.
Yep.

Speaker 4 Is that a possibility?

Speaker 5 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 it's going to happen.
But for me,

Speaker 5 I want to say, okay, if we have these possibilities that we're seeing, you know,

Speaker 5 the mentoring, the counseling, the treatments, especially stuff like that, that are working. Can we partner with that?

Speaker 5 Can we, you know, 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?

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And if the answer is, well,

Speaker 5 we can do that better in the VA, I'm going to say, 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?

Speaker 5 Tell me, as I've changed, I've changed my entire general counsel, which by the way, we have a lot of lawyers. I've changed their whole mindset and to say, don't tell me no, tell me how to get to yes.

Speaker 5 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 no quicker than you can.
Get me to yes.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We had to go, it happens almost every day. I have to ask the question, Sean, and this is how it gets very frustrating.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 that's our red line. Okay.

Speaker 5 I have to operate within the law. Policy, I made.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 You know, 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.

Speaker 5 So we've got to now delineate because many times in the VA, because they're scared of criticism, they're scared of what

Speaker 5 members of the Congress or the media or unions or anything would say about them,

Speaker 5 is that they much rather just say, no, we can't,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We can change those kinds of stuff. So I'm willing to look at it from all angles to see if we can.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I understand. I've got to work that out in Congress.
And that's where folks like you and others that can help me.

Speaker 5 And also working with Bobby Kennedy over at HHS to get some of this stuff approved in different ways, having a president. you know, who would be willing to say, look, let's do whatever we can.

Speaker 5 That's just when it's going to take the push of the veterans 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.

Speaker 4 I hope you're taking this in because I am the guy you're trying to reach.

Speaker 4 And not only would that work with the treatment, but it would also help build the trust back within the VA because

Speaker 4 guys like me don't trust the VA. We just don't.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And everybody looks up to guys like Tom or Marcus Capone, who's running vets with the psychedelic stuff.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 That is a big step in getting guys like me to trust the VA again.

Speaker 4 And then hopefully all these nonprofits can go away because the problem's solved.

Speaker 4 And once this shit's all passed through Congress, then

Speaker 4 we don't even need those nonprofits anymore because hopefully they all wind up going away because the problem's fixed.

Speaker 4 But in the interim, it's a great way, one, to get the treatment, two, to build the trust back. Yeah, I think you're right.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 At times, five weeks feels like I've been there five years. And in five weeks, I realize, my God, I've been there five weeks.

Speaker 5 And going, and I've had to, in just in that amount of time, we've had to deal with

Speaker 5 our first chart of contract looks where we found, we went through 2% of our contracts, 2%,

Speaker 5 and found almost 580 billion, 900,

Speaker 5 and a half, about B 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.

Speaker 5 I've had to deal with the probationary firings, which helped us

Speaker 5 begin this thing and get started. We're dealing things, and you mentioned it earlier, by the way, we've had

Speaker 5 the issue of the flags.

Speaker 5 We've changed that policy so that we're back to one force under the American and POW flag. That's all we're doing.

Speaker 5 We've took 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.

Speaker 5 If you're currently in treatment, we're going to continue that, what was started before we ever got there, just as the sec deaths did in his side, but because we don't want anything bad to happen to somebody who's under those treatments.

Speaker 5 But from this point on,

Speaker 5 we're not changing your sex.

Speaker 5 We're going to treat you with respect and dignity if you come to the VA for all your services, but we're just not going to be participating in changing your sex. That's not what our services are for.

Speaker 5 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 who are not even getting primary health care.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Our team is starting to process it.

Speaker 5 And we're working toward this end of making it a much more accessible, much more

Speaker 5 idea-friendly, if you would,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And this is that, coming on your show, doing other shows and saying, going into the media and going on and saying, guys, no, I'm not going to let senators lie to you anymore.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I know we're getting closer to the target because

Speaker 5 the flax 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

Speaker 5 in any circle of life in the federal government or any other area, is if you talk about a problem,

Speaker 5 you develop a group that says, this is my problem.

Speaker 5 And then all along you never really get to solving the problem.

Speaker 5 Then what you've done is you've built a group this perpetuates itself on what? The problem.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 a condition 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 um the va does probably better than private uh health care 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

Speaker 5 craziest story i heard

Speaker 5 We actually have hospitals are sitting across the street, literally across the street from

Speaker 5 world-class oncology cancer centers, and we're worrying about hiring cancer doctors at the VA.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 They've already got them over here. But that's the kind of thinking, Sean.

Speaker 5 That's your thinking. When your mindset is organizational

Speaker 5 and not patient or in our case, veteran-centric, that's the kind of things you get.

Speaker 4 What was your conversation like with Bobby Kennedy about psychedelics?

Speaker 5 Eye-opening.

Speaker 5 Because, you know, of course, he is

Speaker 5 very, you know, our Make America Healthy Again, you know, getting people, you know, getting the food additives out, getting those kind of stuff.

Speaker 5 And I asked him specifically, because we were talking about this, I said, psychedelics, because he's, he, you know, his agency would have some, some say in some, you know, the studies and stuff on that.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 you know, having something put in my body, to quote fix, he said, I'm just, he said, I'm just, that's just nowhere close for me. He said, because of my past.

Speaker 5 He said, but then he went on to explain a family member of his, this child of his, who had an experience using psychedelics that changed his life

Speaker 5 drastically.

Speaker 5 And he said,

Speaker 5 I would have never thought this, would have never saw, you know, sort of I'll let him, I will let him explain his the way he sees it. But he said,

Speaker 5 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, you know, flesh and blood.

Speaker 5 And I think that's the part that, you know, for me began to be exciting a little bit. And to see, here's someone who is so

Speaker 5 sensitive to those issues of medication. And one of the things too is, and I think you see this as well.

Speaker 5 The answer to people many times, if they're having,

Speaker 5 you know, episodes and decision,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I'm not saying go stop your medication. I'm not saying don't give up.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 other.

Speaker 5 Also bringing, hopefully bringing DOD involved a little bit in this as well. Because that's part of our problem, Sean.
We hadn't even really talked about this.

Speaker 5 The transition from DOD

Speaker 5 to

Speaker 5 civilian or what we would term VA our side

Speaker 5 is really bad. We don't do this well.
And it's not just the VA health or VA benefit, not just the benefit.

Speaker 5 It's we're not giving a lot of our young service members and even older service members the transition that they need. You know, we send them through the programs.

Speaker 5 We, you know, you do the briefings, you've been there, you know,

Speaker 5 and is it really working? And the answer has to be that probably it's not working like it should because we're seeing

Speaker 5 too many people end up in

Speaker 5 suicidal issues.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 and even the harshest rebel

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So again, having partners like that is going to be, whether it be at DOD, whether it be at HHS, or,

Speaker 5 you know, with us at the VA, it's going to be very important moving forward.

Speaker 4 What is the plan?

Speaker 4 Like with

Speaker 4 psychedelics,

Speaker 4 what is the plan moving forward? How does it get introduced into the VA? What needs to happen?

Speaker 5 Well, the first off we're going to do is, and I'm getting this information now. Again, this is part of this.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 in conjunction up in in uh new york we i want to see if we 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 to be a you know 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 um you know i've heard about it you know as well so let's get data on that you know have our people start you know 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.

Speaker 5 What is the VA's 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?

Speaker 5 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 X dollars for that? Okay.

Speaker 5 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 Veterans Affairs Committee.

Speaker 5 I'm going to go to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and then I'm going to go to the leadership and say, look, these are things that I need changed.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You know, 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.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 to do this? Now, again, you said it earlier. The fiduciary role I have, I take very seriously.

Speaker 5 You get close to a vet, you get close to one, and I, 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.

Speaker 5 I don't do that. I just, it's personalized to me.

Speaker 5 So if you get close to them, we're going to make sure you're doing it right.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And it would, and that's just due diligence kind of thing. So we're going to make that happen.

Speaker 5 One of the things that was concerning me, and I'm going 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.

Speaker 5 Okay. I got no problem with us and Congress is sort of backing this up and we're putting some more money in there for it.
But one of the concerns is,

Speaker 5 have we created a cottage industry for this now? Because

Speaker 5 look, money in DC is like water on a pavement.

Speaker 5 It's going to go to its lowest part. It's going to find its way out.
Okay.

Speaker 5 So if all of a sudden people hear there's money in this,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 kind of programs.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So for me, this really goes down to that. That's where we're already starting.

Speaker 5 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.

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Speaker 4 Would advocacy help at all?

Speaker 4 Does it help you to get veterans that have been through X, Y, and Z treatments in front of Congress to vouch?

Speaker 5 Yeah, it never hurts. It never hurts to do that.
Because again,

Speaker 5 I've said this for years, the best spokesman for anything is a satisfied customer.

Speaker 5 And I think that's the part and the recognition that it may or may not be for everybody, but for me, this worked.

Speaker 5 um and so in conjunction with what hopefully we're going to do over the next few weeks and maybe a couple months 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 miss miss congressman or you know 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 you know help the secretary find us a way to this i believe this could help others that's always a good i i would never turn anybody down to talk about what they have.

Speaker 4 The reason I'm asking is earlier you're talking about how media is attacking you about this stuff. And so

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 whatever you're advocating for change-wise to bring in people that have actually, that it's actually worked for in front of Congress, televised.

Speaker 5 Here it is,

Speaker 5 media, put this on.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think we could, 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.

Speaker 5 And some of that's been done a little bit, but I think it can be done more. I'm not going to downplay that there's not been an interest in Congress about this.

Speaker 5 But it's not just the VA committee there. It's the Energy and Commerce, which does a lot of the healthcare stuff and everything else.
So there's different ways.

Speaker 5 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 I think, frankly, I think it'll be a Republican and Democrat

Speaker 5 coming together on it. I think you're going to see both parties be willing to look at stuff that works.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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, you know, we've got some ideas here.

Speaker 5 Is this something we can get you to take a look at? We can make sure you have all the, you know, the witnesses you want in dealing with this.

Speaker 5 I think it'd be definitely something. Now, I'm not going to also fool anybody.
You start dealing with everybody's

Speaker 5 sort of piece of the pie out there, you know, nonprofits, VSOs, everybody starts shuffling. You're going to make a lot of people nervous, Sean.

Speaker 5 Because, again, you're dealing in livelihoods, so to speak, with stuff that they're doing and how they've done it. And do we need to change and not change?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So, look, this is where we got to have it.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But bringing it back to where we sort of started this whole thing is I've got to work on getting the VA

Speaker 5 in the best possible shape it can be

Speaker 5 to actually do its mission.

Speaker 5 And right now, we're probably a little

Speaker 5 more than probably we are heavy in where our allocation of employees are.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But again, when you 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.

Speaker 5 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 find new and inventive ways to do things.

Speaker 5 How 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.

Speaker 5 And wherever veterans can help, that's where I would love to have them be a part of this solution.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 we know what we need and we know what we want.

Speaker 4 And we can't get it done because some fucking politician in DC who didn't ever step a foot on a fucking combat ever, never, is making the decisions for us. And it pisses us off.

Speaker 4 And, you know, but earlier you had mentioned about community health care.

Speaker 4 How does that, how is it working now? And what would you like to see happen?

Speaker 5 It's not working as good as it should, I believe. And I think this is where

Speaker 5 we need to make it easier. And I think, and again, I look at this generationally.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 still have a lot of Vietnam veterans.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Think about that for a second. You go from boomers, or not even boomers, you know, you go pre-boomers

Speaker 5 to the greatest generation through boomers, through X, through everything else. The mentality of those generations and how they interact with the VA

Speaker 5 is very different.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 the issues of the older ones are more attracted to the VA centers themselves, the health, the hospitals, the C-Box. They want that care there.

Speaker 5 If as they get older, some of them can't drive as far, they can't get that help.

Speaker 5 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 War GWAT veteran

Speaker 5 who

Speaker 5 has visions of the VA from their moms or dads or from others from the Vietnam era, which

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We don't do a very good job at this right now. We're trying, but I've talked to our folks.

Speaker 5 So like my generation and others that 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.

Speaker 5 If we can do that in the VA system, then we're going to not only save money, we're also going to help people, you know, in the long run too, from losing fingers, losing arms, you know, especially the diabetic stuff.

Speaker 5 We're two and a half more times than the average population for diabetes. We're much more high protensity for hypertension and blood pressure, cholesterol, those kind of things.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 then the community care needs to be accessed, in my opinion, more readily.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 That's simply being smart and also following the law. The law says we're supposed to.

Speaker 5 But yet we've also got to deal in the realities that in some of our areas, the private health care, public health here, the public hospitals

Speaker 5 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 the world where I'm from in Georgia,

Speaker 5 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 for the VA.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But right now, what's happening, happened, 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

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 if people hadn't figured out why yet, I'll go ahead and break

Speaker 5 the sad news. It's because if I keep them more in the healthcare, then I can ask for more money.
I can keep more people here.

Speaker 5 Now, there are also things that we do that others don't do and 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.

Speaker 5 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 is more applicable.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 too far from a health VA center, but they're not close enough and they just want to be in their community. But Sean,

Speaker 5 how many of our generation want to drive 90 miles? to a center or a Seabach that they don't know anybody and they go in and their peer group is much older than them probably

Speaker 5 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 and just if I need something or I'll just keep you know doing this myself everybody wants to be able to do that so that's what we're looking at so that's what it so are you saying it will be a choice you can either go to the VA or you can yeah because that's what I've been advocating there is there there's choice in there there's some criteria that's been set up you know because again with the 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.

Speaker 5 And what we're going to, well, you know what I think is probably the

Speaker 5 result of some of this, and this is me speaking just as

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You'll start seeing some for like instance, I want to

Speaker 5 like say you had orthopedic issues or you had, we've got some great of some of our medical centers, especially orthopedic and bone, or probably some as good, if not better, than a lot of the private hospitals.

Speaker 5 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 to get their kidney doctor.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 There's a big difference there. There's a big difference in

Speaker 5 signing off and agreeing, this is the condition, I see this, I'm going to give this person a referral.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We're working through this community care issue to overcome what we've had in the last four years.

Speaker 4 That sounds good. That sounds real reassuring.
What about the burn pits? You know, a lot of,

Speaker 4 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 four cancer you know nobody knows what it's from a lot of people think it's from the burn pits or the the the 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 i remember spitting in the sink and my spit was gray because I had breathed in so much crap.

Speaker 4 I mean, it sounds like there's something going on there with the burn pits.

Speaker 5 Yeah, the PACT Act was designed

Speaker 5 to address some of that. The problem is, is look, the PACT Act was a good step into dealing with this.
Look, I'm a burn pit guy as well. I mean, I was at Ballad every day in our,

Speaker 5 you know, while I was there, you'd wake up in the morning. When I first got there, I don't know if it was your experience.
I got there and I was like, why is it so hazy around here?

Speaker 5 You know, I thought it was an environmental, I'd never been in the desert kind of thing.

Speaker 5 So I thought, but then I got to realize that it was just the constant flow of the burn air pit area that was going over

Speaker 5 our build, our hutches over there. That'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.

Speaker 5 It reminded me of growing up in North Georgia, where everybody in our neighborhood had the 55-gallon drums and had the bottom out. You throw your trash in there and you burn your trash.

Speaker 5 I mean, I smell the same

Speaker 5 smells and worse

Speaker 5 that I was smelling in the burn pit that was used to be when we were burning plastics and crap and everything in the trash bin. So, yeah, I think there's a lot to go on there.

Speaker 5 What my concern was, is they sort of took this from the 9-11. If you remember time frame-wise, here

Speaker 5 we had a lot of exposure. So,

Speaker 5 President Biden at the time got up in the Say of the Union and said, we're going to address this.

Speaker 5 Well, all of a sudden, they threw a bill together, which had already been worked on, but they sort of threw out everything that had been worked on and threw this bill together that

Speaker 5 is part good

Speaker 5 but also very rushed let's just put 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 this do you know that that bill actually requires the va to test every veteran the test of have were you near a burn pit were you near toxic chemicals were you near they ask those basic questions that i'm supposed to ask every veteran

Speaker 5 i

Speaker 5 i mean there's over 18 million, 19 million veterans in this country. Only 9 million roughly have been touched in any way by the VA.

Speaker 5 How am I supposed to find the 9 million if they don't want to be found? But that's the kind of thing that was put in the bill.

Speaker 5 And I actually asked one, I happened to be in a meeting the other day with someone who actually wrote that bill.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 conduit around PACTAC was that

Speaker 5 looking for the diseases. Right now, we have basically permissively allowed

Speaker 5 almost every condition under that that if you have, then it's going to be found under the PACTAC.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But we have a terminology of cancers of the head.

Speaker 5 Okay. I mean, we've turned it in the previous secretary added in, I think it was the previous secretary and confirmed, but these presumptive conditions were added for hypertension and

Speaker 5 prostate and everything else.

Speaker 5 Okay, I get it, but

Speaker 5 we're just sort of at this point just say if you've been near a burnt pen or you can answer one of these questions, you're just going to get health care.

Speaker 5 And which is in some ways burdening the system a little bit and the benefit side, the disability side side of this.

Speaker 5 But if that's what the intent of Congress to do is just basically give everybody disability checks for that, then

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 This was also something I brought up that was Bobby Kennedy and I actually talked about as well.

Speaker 5 But we talked about it from a vaccine perspective, but also some others.

Speaker 5 You know, is this saying, you know, how can we, you know, look at these conditions and begin to know that what we're seeing and the treatments are effective to what we have.

Speaker 5 And I think that's the question sometimes never asked. So for me, I'm having to live with PACTAC and say, how do we fix it?

Speaker 5 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 health care they need in the community or with us.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We actually added 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And now we got a big one coming in too. And

Speaker 5 not a lot I can tell you is much about this. We're trying to implement that.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Here's another trick.

Speaker 5 And look, I've been in Congress, so I participated

Speaker 5 fortunately in this, is we pass stuff, but we don't fund it.

Speaker 5 And so we just expect the VA, which by the way, you're complaining about how much money we have now, you complain, but now you're telling me to do something that could be literally billions of dollars, and I'm having to find the money.

Speaker 5 So this is, you know,

Speaker 5 but I'm having a ball. It sounds like it.
Because I believe in what I'm doing.

Speaker 4 So with all these cuts,

Speaker 4 was it 83,000 jobs right now are on the line at the VA?

Speaker 5 There's about 15%. So give or take around.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 reallocated into something else like health care.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's what, I mean, that would be what we fight for is to get reallocated. Some will, some, you know, if you get to the point, probably would go to something differently.

Speaker 5 I'm not going to say all will just stay in.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 In actuality, they are the ones that pass the budgets and put the monies in there and everything else.

Speaker 5 So we've got to make the decisions so that we do have cuts, we do have things that don't continue on in our budgets.

Speaker 5 Because the one thing we've not talked about, and we've had senior military leaders and others, our national debt and national

Speaker 5 deficits are a national security issue. And we can't keep going the way we're going in this.

Speaker 5 The VA will always be one that's going to probably be looked at is to make us as efficient as we possibly can. And we're going to do that, and we're going to do our part.

Speaker 5 We're already well ahead in working that way.

Speaker 5 But also, I have to be, as I've told, our staff many times, I've told, you know, worked at the White House and everybody else, as I said, look, we're going to do in a measured way because at the end of the day, I'm dealing with people.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 No other agency has to do that. Pete, DOD is about as close as, you know, I would say it comes to having to deal with

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I'm on the other other end of it in which that it's very,

Speaker 5 we got to be very careful where we make it so that we're not hurting veterans and we're giving them the ability to get the disability benefits or the other benefits they've earned.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 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 backlogs are going to go up.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So why don't we try a little differently here? Let's give them a better organization. Here's a better thing.
Like I said earlier, give me

Speaker 5 an HR tool that actually lets me know how many people I have and where they're at.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Let's take those off the table. Let's quit griping and going paperwork and paperwork about that.

Speaker 5 Let's take the easies off the shelf so that we can get to the harder ones to determine their level of disability.

Speaker 5 Let's do things with AI, never taking a human component out of it because there's always, especially with veterans, there's complex cases.

Speaker 5 So, I'm always going to have the person there to go through that and make sure that we're getting what we need to get and not overgive, but not undergive either.

Speaker 5 But why don't we use computer and AI training to actually say,

Speaker 5 Let's do this better and do it quicker.

Speaker 5 I'm all for doing things better and quicker, Sean. Look, what's the old saying?

Speaker 5 Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Speaker 5 That's where we got to be here.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 I sit here with you. as about as content an individual as I can be.
I've had, you know, 59, almost 60 years of life.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I'm at the point in my life where

Speaker 5 I want to help others get better. I'm at that point.
I want to to turn around and say, for all this experience and where I've been, I want to make sure we're doing something right.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 because I've really come to the conclusion over years of work in this and believing this one statement that if I help enough people in life get what they want, I'll get what I want.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I get four years to make a difference in the life of my brothers and sisters and warfighters

Speaker 5 that gave something to this country.

Speaker 5 And now my job is to make sure that that country who promised them things, who set it up, actually does it.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You come at me because I'm going to do the best I can with what I have, with what they gave me.

Speaker 5 But the one thing about it, Sean, is this. You're not going to kick around the VA anymore without offering solutions.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 was let go.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 There's been three weeks when 40, 2,400 people who never touched any of those things were laid off, and you're telling me this is the problem.

Speaker 5 Where have you been for 10 years when GAO says that we're as screwed up as we have been?

Speaker 5 Don't tell me that anymore.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 because it's not going to happen anymore.

Speaker 4 Tired of it.

Speaker 4 Good for you. I think that's the perfect place to end this.
And

Speaker 4 I'm glad you're in there. I hope these changes happen.

Speaker 5 Buddy, I'm looking forward to it. With folks like you and others, we're going to make it happen.

Speaker 4 Perfect.

Speaker 5 Thank you, Russ.

Speaker 5 Thank you. Thank you.

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