Veteran Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough warned that his agency may be forced to “ration care” for veterans if Senate Republicans succeed in adding amendments to a bill aimed at expanding benefits to military members exposed to toxic burn pits.
Forty-one GOP lawmakers on Wednesday blocked the Biden administration-backed PACT bill, which would’ve seen the removal of the burden of proof for veterans seeking assistance for health-related ailments they’ve suffered in the years since being victims of exposure to toxic substances from burn pits.
Among them was Pennsylvania Sen Pat Toomey, who has proposed an amendment that would create a “a year-on-year cap” on what the VA can spend to care for veterans suffering from exposure to the toxic pits and would also cap the funding at 10 years.
Mr McDonough denounced the effort in an interview with told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.
“I can’t, in good conscience, do that, because the outcome of that will be rationing of care for vets, which is something I just can’t sign on,” he said.
Burn pits, as outlined on the VA website, are large swaths of land used as garbage sites on US military bases where metals, chemicals, paint, and both human and medical waste were burned using diesel fuel for several hours.
The Department of Defense has shut down a majority of the sites, with the outset goal of phasing out the remainder in the foreseeable future, the website adds.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, approximately 85 per cent of veterans from the two recent conflicts have reported that they were exposed to the toxic fumes of burn pits, and nearly 90 per cent of those who report being exposed have said they experience symptoms that could be related.
“This has been the number one priority for President Biden,” Mr McDonough said Sunday, explaining how President Biden – who has acknowledged himself how he believes burn pits may have been responsible for the deadly cancer that claimed the life of his son Beau in 2015 – had intentionally sought to remove the burden of proof for veterans.
While on the campaign trail in 2019, the then-Democratic candidate described how his son volunteered to join the National Guard at age 32, which would later lead to him being exposed to the toxic burn sites while deployed.
“Because of exposure to burn pits, in my view – I can’t prove it yet – he came back with stage four glioblastoma,” said Mr Biden in 2019.
Mr McDonough, who emphasised during the Sunday interview that the veterans seeking care for their deadly ailments “have waited long enough”, argued strongly against the amendment that, in his view, was just continuing to stall essential life-saving care.
“Let’s just get it done, and also let’s not be for a proposal that places artificial caps on year by year, and then functionally, at the end of those 10 years, makes this fund go away,” he said. “Let’s not sign up to that, because at the end of the day, the risk of that is going to be rationing of care to veterans.”
For Sen Toomey, at issue in the bill is, by his characterisation, the supposed accounting categorisation of certain spending in the bill, which he claims would “all our Democratic colleagues to go on an unrelated $400bn spending spree”.
“We are spending way too much money to use – to hide behind a veterans bill, the opportunity to go on an unrelated $400bn spending spree is wrong,” the Republican senator said during an earlier interview on State of the Union on Sunday. “We shouldn’t allow it.”
When the Pennsylvania Republican was challenged by Tapper about the specific text in the bill, which specifies that the funds are required to be spent on health care for veterans who suffered injuries from the toxic pits, he continued to contend that his Democratic peers were trying to “sneak” something in.
“This is why they do this sort of thing,” he said. “Because it gets very deep in the weeds and very confusing for people very quickly. It’s not really about veteran spending. It’s about what category of government bookkeeping they put the veteran spending in.”
The bill, which remains stalled since Wednesday’s procedural vote failed, could be scheduled for another vote as early as Monday, Senate Majority Chuck Schumer said last week.
Though no formal rescheduling had been announced as of last week, Mr Schumer has the ability to enact a vote for the bill at any given time.
