Bishop opening statement at Subcommittee Markup of FY2017 Military Construction-VA Appropriations Bill

Thank you for yielding Mr. Chairman.

From your first day as Chairman, you have set a cooperative tone and I want to thank you for continuing to be inclusive as we work through this process. I believe the Chairman has worked very hard with very limited time to get to this point. I am pleased with several aspects of the bill.

First, the bill provides robust funding for military construction and provides adequate funding for both the Active and Reserve Components. I was pleased to see that for the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) account, the bill provides $25 million above the FY 2017 budget request to help speed up the clean-up of former Defense Department sites.

I was also pleased to see that the bill maintains the tough but fair reporting requirements for the Electronic Health Records endeavor. The bill continues to prioritize the elimination of the claims backlog and includes healthy funding for the Board of Veterans Appeals (BVA)—though I am concerned with the proposed reforms to the BVA. Nonetheless, I think these are all positive steps necessary to ensure the VA functions better.

While there are many things to praise, Mr. Chairman, one item I am not particularly pleased about is the inclusion of bill language limiting performance awards. As I have stated for the past three years, this language will not provide any solution in the short-term and in fact, may have more long-term consequences and compound the very problem it attempts to address. All this language will do is make the VA a less attractive option than other agencies when it comes to recruiting and retaining quality executive leaders, resulting in the Department not having the very talent it needs to solve the problems it faces today.

Turning away from the bill for a second; Mr. Chairman, you and I have had a lot of discussions regarding the Budget Committee and what they plan to do. So far, it is a real question if there will be a Budget resolution due to unrealistic demands of a small minority of the House. The only reason I feel the need to mention the Budget Committee is that their delay affects our Committee’s work. Unfortunately Mr. Chairman, for the Appropriations Committee to get back to regular order, the Budget Committee needs to act or we cannot precede on the floor until May 15th, which will set up yet another summer of failing to pass all 12 bills through the House.

Mr. Chairman, it is clear a small minority only wants to re-litigate issues that have already been decided and acted on by a bipartisan majority of both Houses and signed into law by the President. I applaud Chairman Rodgers for honoring the allocation the Bipartisan Budget Agreement (BBA) set for Fiscal Year 2017.

Would I have liked the BBA to provide more discretionary resources? Of course; however, it did not and we will have to live with that. Until we can get past these unrealistic beliefs of ‘cutting our way to prosperity’; we have no choice but to follow the BBA until Congress faces the reality—the BBA amounts are insufficient to adequately address the actual needs of our government responsibilities.

As I said earlier, regarding the discretionary resources, this year will be tough. Especially tough for this subcommittee because our bill advances funds to the medical services account. While we start off in the hole every year, when we factor in VA’s annual “second bite of the apple,” this committee’s work becomes even more difficult as we must balance the needs of the VA with the other federal agencies. As I have said numerous times, we must be more strategic about how we handle our federal budget. Now, we need to take the next step, and that is to stop creating artificial crises.

Mr. Chairman, would I have done some things differently? Of course. These mark-ups represent the first step in a long process. I commit to you that I will work to address these issues as we move forward in the appropriations process.

Thank you Mr. Chairman and I yield back.