Shawn Ryan Show - #187 Doug Collins - United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

Doug Collins is the 12th United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs, sworn in on February 5, 2025. A Republican with a track record of public service, Collins served as U.S. Representative for Georgia’s 9th district (2013–2021) and in the Georgia House (2007–2013). An Air Force Reserve chaplain since 2002, he deployed to Iraq in 2008 and was promoted to colonel in 2023. With a Master of Divinity and a Juris Doctor, Collins combines faith, law, and military experience in his mission to overhaul the VA by focusing on efficiency, transparency, and veteran care. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD https://AmericanFinancing.net/SRS | NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://trueclassic.com/SRS Upgrade your wardrobe and save on @trueclassic at trueclassic.com/SRS ! #trueclassicpod https://ZipRecruiter.com/SRS https://ExpressVPN.com/SRS https://hometitlelock.com/SRS Go to https://hometitlelock.com/srs and use promo code SRS to get a FREE title history report so you can find out if you’re already a victim AND 14 days of protection for FREE! And make sure to check out the Million Dollar TripleLock protection details when you get there! Exclusions apply. For details visit https://hometitlelock.com/warranty https://Hillsdale.edu/SRS https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/SRS | Download the app today and use code SRS Secretary Doug Collins Links: X - https://x.com/SecVetAffairs Call 1-800-MyVA411 (1-800-698-2411) – This is always the right number to reach VA and available 24/7/365.   Are you a Veteran in crisis or concerned about one? Dial 988 and Press 1 to reach the Veteran Crisis Line – confidential and standing by 24/7/365. More information: http://www.veteranscrisisline.net/.  Call 1-877-4AID-VET (1-877-424-3838) if you are a Veteran at risk of homelessness or a family member, friend, or advocate. Confidential and available 24/7/365. You may also chat online: National Call Center for Homeless Veterans - VA Homeless Programs  Submit your question to https://ask.VA.gov/ if you prefer to digitally send VA sensitive or private information.   Login to www.VA.gov or use the VA Health and Benefits Mobile App to directly message your health care provider.  Schedule 1-on-1 virtual or in-person assistance with a VA Benefits Expert: https://va.my.site.com/VAVERA/   Find a VA facility near you: https://www.va.gov/find-locations/   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With the FIZ loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with FIZ. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fiz.ca. Guys like me don't trust the VA. We just don't. You're not going to be getting your sex changed at the VA anymore. That's not what our services are for, and everything that we're taking money-wise away to that would take away from money that I could be spending on something else that are helping vets directly

who are not even getting primary healthcare. 480,000 VA employees, and there are 450,000 active duty Army. That's 30,000 more than the active Army members. I hope you're taking this in because I am the guy you're trying to reach. Secretary Collins, welcome to the show. I'm glad to be here, bud. It's an honor to have you here. So the new Secretary of the VA. Yeah. Lots of stuff to work on. It's a what do we call a target rich environment?

Yeah, I'll bet it is even more than I know but So we got a bunch of stuff to talk about say a whole lot of Topics to cover but I'm just how did how did Secretary of the VA pop up on your radar? Well, I think it come about a lot of things that you know The president I had known each other for a while and when I was in Congress for eight years Especially those last few years. I was in leadership and I had to was the ranking member of the VA It was not the VA committee

But the Judiciary Committee which put me in close proximity to the president because we had to deal with the sham Russia stuff We had to deal with the Mueller we had to deal with impeachment And so he and I got to know each other pretty well. And, you know, from my fighting, you know, during those days to keep the truth just out there about what we were seeing. And so we just had developed a closeness and we've kept it up over the time when he was out and when he started campaigning again, I would be out there and I show up. And, and after a while, about a year or so ago, he, you know, he said, look, I

think, I think you need to come with me and he just said you know if you've ever been around him he's like I just want you to come with me and this was a year out and I said Mr. Pratt 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 I had some ideas about this and it came about and I said you know this will be a good spot. It takes my career, takes my passions and puts it in a position that is as most well-known as a politically sensitive department because of Congress and everybody on the

veterans thing. I said, I think we can manage this because we're gonna have to make some change. It actually matters. And I said, we're going to have to work at it hard. And I think we can do that. So he, 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? I said, yes, sir. He said, I said, we're going to have to work at it hard. And I think we can do that. So 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 do? I said, what do you want me to do, sir? And he said, just take care of my veterans. That was it. Nice. You don't tend to do that. You better believe it. Perfect.

Perfect. Well, before we get too far into the weeds here, everybody gets a gift. All right. Even the secretary of the VA. All right. But there we go. I love it.

The Jones league gummy bears made in the U S and, uh, they're legal at all 50 stage about feeling weird after you. There we go. I love it. But, um, all right. So everybody gets an introduction too. So, all right. Doug Collins, secretary of the VA.

You are the 12th Secretary of the Departments of Veterans Affairs confirmed by the Senate in February of 2025 to lead the charge for our nation's veterans. You earned a degree in political science and criminal justice from the University of North Georgia. You earned a master's degree in divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and pastored Chickpea Baptist Church for 11 years. In 2006, the people of Georgia's 27th State House District elected you to represent them. During your first term in the state legislature, you graduated from Atlanta's John Marshall Law School and established your own legal practice.

You were the U.S. Representative from Georgia's 9th Congressional District from 2013 to 2021. You're a veteran who served as a chaplain in the Air Force Reserve, including a deployment to Iraq in 2008 with the 94th Air Wing. You remain a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve. You're a husband and a father, and most importantly, a Christian. And some of the things that you've already done, you've already cut DEI programs and shifted $14 million to VA healthcare and caregiver support, set up telehealth and remote and rural areas, changed the flag policy to only American and POW flags, and over 1 million

disability claims in 2025 already. That's two weeks faster than the normal that we've seen. So what are some of the things that you want to change about the VA? Have right now the size and scope of the VA. I know your DOge advisor is here somewhere today. And so what does that look like? 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. 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. and the truth of the matter is, is no, I'm still the Secretary of the VA. It comes through my desk. We make decisions. And mine will always be for the veteran and then, you know, how that works out to our VA employees. Where we're seeing the most issue right now is, Sean, and this is something

almost for any military person, anybody that wants to think about it. The first thing when you come into a branch, you come in anything, you're told about the culture. The culture is this. The culture, you will be an airman, you will be a Navy, you'll be a SEAL, you'll be a whatever it is, you've got the culture. Well, the only thing interesting is, 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. There's this idea of somewhere that you're out there that you all of a sudden, you know, you can just pop up culture. And that's just not true. You've got to have people and ideas at the top that then permeate through the system, sort of like it just like you were eating. So, and it comes up culture. And that's just not true. You've got to have people and ideas at the top that

then permeate through the system, sort of like it, just like you were eating. So, and it comes out the other end. Well, it comes out as culture. And so really that's the first step for me. The first step is, is developing a culture that says, we've done it this way for so long. Is this still the right way to do it? And that's, you know, look, I'm running against people who don't want to change. I'm running against, you know, media, union bosses, members of Congress and the Senate who just, you know, they've put in, here's the problem. They've invested so much in a system that's not working that now it's hard for them to admit maybe we need to do something different. So, you know, all the things

we're going to talk about today is going to come back to that culture issue. So that's why I'm out here talking to you. That's why I've been on social media, you know, Twitter, anything else I could find. Just tell the truth and I fought back against the lies. I'm not, I think the sum of my first five weeks is you may have been able to be, the VA may have been a whipping post for a long time. Some of it I'll agree with you probably needed to be, but nobody's ever stepped forward to fix it. So here's my thought to everybody. We're not going to be your whipping post anymore. I'm going to tell you the truth and I'm going to give you the answers that we need to do. And I'm going to take

care of our veteran, number one, and I'm going to make sure our VA employee is the best that we can. So it's a lot goes into it, but it's culture that has to start at the top and also has to filter down and buy in. And that's what I'm fighting the most right now. Yeah, you know I've got a whole slew of complaints about the VA and you know It's funny, but it's not I mean I haven't stepped into a VA I got a hundred percent. Yeah, I haven't stepped into a VA in almost ten years because my experience has been just atrocious

It was here's these pills, we can't see. I mean, I remember just going to my, I can't even remember what they call the appointments where you go in and you get checked out. Your consultations. Yeah, the consultations. I'm having doctors come to me. They don't even know what a Navy Seal is. They're asking me why I didn't go to medical when I'm, 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, and it, it is created. Look, I don't know any, any one of my friends and I have friends with the top war fighters on the planet. None of them have a good experience at the VA. None of them have anything positive to say about the VA. None of them trust the VA.

And that's why I quit going. I mean, I have more friends that have died of suicide and drug addiction and depression and PTS. And everybody's struggling with, especially the special operations guys with the, with the traumatic brain injuries. And we just aren't getting any answers at all from the VA.

And so, and then it's just created this distrust. So what I do with my check is I buy my own healthcare instead of use the VA because I just, I don't trust the system. I don't like the system. I get treated like shit when I go there. It's like, like 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. I will personally pay for my own healthcare on the civilian side, which is much, much better than anything I've ever had in the VA. And so, and then you see a lot of these therapies and I want to dive into this too, but I mean I'm just gonna share my experiences with it because I think you need to know and I mean I just talked about traumatic brain injury. I mean these guys have been Breaching doors with high explosives for 20 years They can't remember where the hell they are. They can't remember what they're doing the short-term memory loss. They drive somewhere They're driving their kids somewhere. They forget where the hell they're going

They're there there they 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 All these different I mean it's across the board. I mean you're seeing all these different, I mean, it's across the board. I mean, you're seeing all these nonprofits that are stood up by veterans and they're the ones that are actually taking care of us. It's not the VA and psychedelic therapy is one of the big ones that we've seen a tremendous amount of benefit from, especially with traumatic brain injury.

I mean, Stanford did a study, fly these guys down, they do a brain scan, they fly these guys down to Mexico, do an Ibogaine treatment. My friend Trevor's, he's, Ambio Life Sciences, there's all these black holes in the brain, you know, on the brain scan. They go down there where their brain's not working. They do the Ibogaine treatment, they fly them back up to Stanford.

Oh, magically the entire brain is lit up. I mean, I just want to, I have to tell you some of this stuff, cause it's important. One of my, one of my best friends of all time, I've known them for probably at least 15 years. We contracted it at CIA together, retired Green Beret, sustained one of the biggest blasts I've ever seen somebody walk out alive from, massive traumatic brain injury. Then he gets shot in the head.

His wife called, he's been hiding this stuff, his wife calls me and she's like, Sean, he's bedridden five to six days a week. He can't walk without a cane because he has vertigo. He can't go outside even on a cloudy day without his sunglasses because the light sensitivity is so bad. He can't, we haven't had sex in over two years. He goes down there. Nobody can help him. Nobody at the VA over two years. He goes down there.

Nobody can help him. Nobody at the VA can help him. He goes down there. He does the Ibogaine treatment. He leaves his cane there at the facility. He comes home, doesn't need, he doesn't need the cane anymore, doesn't need the sunglasses, is not bedridden at all anymore. All the vertigo is gone.

And then he goes home, has sex with his wife and it's and that was probably nine months ago Same It was like one week to fix that and I don't even I don't know I mean like I said, I haven't stepped foot in the V. I just gave up on it Yeah, but what why aren't they looking at stuff like that that actually works instead of doing the same old shit? Oh, here's some pills.

Here's this. Let's go do a brain scan. Oh, we don't have any answers. And it's discouraging. And that's not the only non-profit. That's Vets that I'm talking about, veterans exploring. I can't remember. It's Vets.

Vets.org. But treatment solutions. But 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. 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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So go to Sean likes gold.com that's Sean likes gold.com. S H a W N likes gold.com. Make sure you do everything in your power to help protect what's yours. Well, 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? When I was in Congress we'd have I think the interesting part and this is one of the things I told all the senators especially when going through confirmation which I had to go through to get this. I said

60% of your constituent calls, in other words 60% of the calls to your office for help in some way involved with the VA. Either VHA, our health benefits or their regular benefits, disability benefits, things like that. 60%. Some of them looked at me like, no, and it was interesting, the staff would be sitting in the side going, 60% of what? 60% of all their calls.

So like a phone call to a congressman or a senator. I need, I'm having trouble. 60%. Okay. Then that's, and some would actually be higher, some actually maybe a little lower. So just average out around 60%. Like I said, some of the members were like, I don't know. But yeah, they're South of San Antonio. Yeah, it is. It is. Because they hear it all the time. Think about that for a second. Let's just ponder for just one second. That that many people, and we're talking thousands

with each congressman, each senator, a year calling about an organization that is supposed to be already set up to give them what they have earned, to give them the benefits that they have earned through Congress action. This is none just dreamed up by a president. This is all from statutory law. But yet having to call them because they can't get the help they need. Only in Washington DC do we call that normal. Only in Washington DC do we call that okay.

I call it failure. And I've called that out since the day that I got sworn in. That we're not going to allow any more this discussion that it's okay to have to call for what you should be getting already. Now if you don't want it, don't take it. Go other way. That's why we have choices. That's why we have other things to do. But when it gets into the stuff that you're talking about, this goes back to that culture argument that I was talking about to start with. It gets into this situation where we've just sort of done it this way.

And the argument at the VA is, well everybody complains, everybody does, rightfully so. Even if they're new employees, they get, well the VA is awful. And there's been a lot of problems and probably a lot of stuff to back that up. I'm not gonna disagree with you. But there's also a lot of problems and probably a lot of stuff to back that up. I'm not going to disagree with you. But there's also a lot of times when you've got the ones who are trying to do it are getting bogged down and the people trying to get in the system is broken. So it'd be like me. I do a lot of counseling. I have it for years, of course, when I was pastoring in a chapel and everything else. And if you, in a relationship, the relationship starts, let's say, with a man, you know, husband or wife,

and a member, it doesn't matter if they're military or not, but if they have a relationship and they have an issue in which one does not trust the other, and you come into that position, 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, and then I walk into the room and I say, I want to help you, but the only thing that I I can give you the one thing you got to have to fix the relationship is the one thing that's broken. To fix a relationship you got to have trust. If you can't have trust you're not gonna fix a relationship. You can smooth it, you can paste it over, you can do whatever you want to do but

you got to have trust. In the VA we're 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 gonna be a congressional person, you know, say something or do something, or I'm gonna get complained about, or we're gonna do this,

or the union says, we gotta keep your job, so you just keep doing whatever you're doing, we'll protect your job and go forward. So when it comes to new ideas, there's some good things that you would never hear about. But when it comes to ideas such as you're talking about with a new generation of warfighter, this new generation of warfighter doesn't come,

they're starting to come to the VA if they have issues of prosthetics, they have issues of, they've lost limbs, they've done stuff like that. Because there's some of that we do probably as well if not better than most anywhere you're going to find. But when it comes to other areas like the traumatic brain injury, to like the issues of sleep deprivation, the issues of addictions, those things, we're stuck in a system that is not allowing it.

Now in the Bronx, there's a clinical study on psychedelics that we've actually been a part of and it's working. We're seeing tremendous change. Bobby Kennedy who's now the new HHS secretary, health and human services secretary, he and I sat in my office two weeks ago and talked about this very issue and how do we get it incorporated in. Some of it we're bound because we're actually a healthcare, actually hospital healthcare organization, we're bound by some of the laws that Congress has made that have bound us in to what we can use and what we can't use.

I'll use a big example there is marijuana. Marijuana has always been a fight treatment in some areas. And you've had a lot of congressmen say, we're not going to do that. We're going to keep it where it's at. And so that it binds us a little bit. But in one of the areas I'm looking at to get what you're talking about is a number of years ago, Donald Trump actually promoted a thing called a right to try. It was legislation in which if you were dying, if you had other issues, why not let you try

something? What are we hurting here? And if it works, then it's a miracle and we're good. We're actually exploring right now among the many things that I'm shoveling as fast as my shovel can shovel, is to see is there ways under right to try that we can expand some of those programs right now into psychedelics, into others,

treatments from hyperbaric to everything else. It says, is this working? Is it working? How do we expand it out? We know from case to case, like what you just talked about, that it is this working you know is it working how do we expand it out we know from case case like what you just talked about that it is working we know from experience that in some people this is this is you know a dead-on treatment for what they need but I've got to get a mindset change this says and this is what I'm facing almost all the time is well you can do that but there's a risk Sean getting up out of bed in the

morning and going to the bathroom and taking a shower is a risk. I'm gonna fall and bust my head and die. That's a risk. Getting up and walking in a car is a risk. I want us to help the people who need help but then there's also another generational issue we're having right now and the generational issue is something that's gonna be a little bit harder for me to tackle. Because it's not just the VA assimilating itself to the the younger warfighter, the GWAT fighter, my generation fighter, your generation fighter, who are not joiners. We don't join Kiwanis, we don't join Rotorua, we don't join, you know, for most of this

generation. They don't join the VFW, they don't join the American Legion, they don't do those things. They go with their buddies, they're drawn to nonprofits who are actually doing something on 10% margins instead of the opposite way around. 90% of what they do is going to fixing something instead of 90% going to fix the organization. 10% may be helping. These are kind of things that we got to deal with. So now I've got to get them back just like you to say, what can I do inside the VA to make enough change that I can get another shot? That I can get another shot and say,

look, if you want the care here, fine, but if not, we're going to pay for it in the community. See, that's another issue that the previous administration, the last four years have been horrific for expansion of care, which Donald Trump promoted in his first term That's another issue that the previous administration, the last four years have been horrific for expansion of care, which Donald Trump promoted in his first term and I voted for when I was in Congress. They just went away from it, Sean.

Because it's a mindset. You've got to understand the mindset of the VA and the mindset that the Biden administration and the previous administration spent tens of billions of dollars, well over a hundred billion and tens of thousand employees, well over fifty thousand in the last four years alone. Four years. And you know what? Our metrics have either just stopped or they've actually went backwards. So all these people that are screaming, you know, that, you know, you can't cut anybody,

you can't change it. Well, you've tried that now for the past ten years. And you know what GAO says, Government Accounting Office, it said, you can't cut anybody, you can't change it. Well, you've tried that now for the past 10 years. And you know what GAO says, government accounting office, it said, you're on the high risk list. VA has been on the high risk danger list of fraised fraud and abuse and poor quality health care in many of our facilities for 10 years. That's just unacceptable. But yet, the past three or four weeks, if you've watched any of the headlines, I'm being skewered and pillared by some of our VSO community and some of our members of the Senate and House that you can't change.

You're going to hurt wait times. You're going to hurt... You've done that already. Our wait times are not where they need to be. Our backlog is too high. It was under 60,000 when Trump left office. It's over 225,000 now. And that's with all the numbers I just told you. This is just bull crap. Okay, we can't keep doing the same thing the same way.

So really what those folks on the Hill and some of those outside and the 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. 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, not that the VA is actually doing its job, but I mean, I've got a stab written down here for, there are 480,000 VA employees and there

are 450,000 active duty army. Yeah, that's about right. How, and, and veterans all over the country have been dying, waiting to get treatment, commit suicide, dying, you know, because they can't get, so with 4, with 480,000 vehicles, that's 30,000 more than the active army members. How can't they, why can't they get in or why couldn't they get in? Well, because a lot of it, think about that organizational structure.

Where is most of that organizational structure going? You know, I've been told since, you know, we started the confirmation process and we started asking these questions. Well, PAC-TAC did this. PAC-TAC forced us, you know, and by the way, that was Biden, thought of it at State of the Union, a few months acted it, not really thinking about cost.

And by the way, when the House and Senate, I speak Hill because I was up there for a long time, here's what you do. You want to make somebody think you're doing something. You pass a bill, you leave a lot of the stuff in the middle, either unfunded or open-ended, you get the president to sign it and then you declare it a victory. Never mind going to the actual agency that's going to have to do this and give them in 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, where are these employees that were

hired for PACTAC? I mean, if we've hired all these employees to do PACTAC, where are they at? And only get one-off answers. Like, well, we've had to do some here we can't I come here to share the truth I'm just not BS anymore I just can't I don't know whatever but I can't tell you where all 480,000 people are I can't tell you now here's the interesting issue you were in the military you were in the SIL team. You know, if you went to your commander or you went to your headquarters head-ship, they could actually look down a list,

they could pull every base, they could pull every unit, they could pull everything, and by the line item tell you who was assigned where, and what their billet number was, what their pass number was, and everything else. You would know exactly where they're at. I do not have an HR system that allows me easily to do that. Think about that for a second. Let that sink in when all these other issues we're talking about is out there. So I can't even at this point now I'm working on it. That's the one thing where I've already hit the ground running. I've got some people that are helping. We're going to try and fix that pretty quick. Because if I don't know where they are, then this organization is functionally not ready for action. It's just not.

And you've got a lot of things. I mean, we've had organizational structure at the, you know, cutting bureaucracy at the end of management level in Washington and across the plains is going to be something that was one of the first looks we're gonna be I Don't need six people. I mean it'd be like I'm trying to put this in maybe ways that your guys will and fucking gals Would understand to watch this podcast and listen it would be almost like having in one unit Having six in from Air Force having six 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 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 get the wing commander to sign off So from an Air Force potato, it's just bureaucracy layers. Some of these were started for real reasons, you know that hey we need to It's just bureaucracy layers. Some of these were started for real reasons. You know, hey, we need to manage our central vision care, which is our vision division. But they were supposed to have 20 and 30 people. Now some of them have three and four and 500. They just grow for the sake of growing, but nobody has called it like I'm trying to call

it now in a real sense of a way. It's to say, what is our return on investment? Are we helping a veteran? Is the veteran being helped? Not a press release from the Hill, not a bill that says you think you're doing something, but are we actually doing stuff that allows the veteran choice, by the way, the mission act, what we talked about, is to let you go out in the community. We're going to pay for that because you've earned the benefit.

We're going to make it where you can go out into the community and get the care you need But yet over the last previous administration there was we have documented it We're gonna be rolling them out more of this where we saw basically and a turn toward De-incentivizing and actually keeping veterans from getting the care they need even if it meant waiting longer Shawn this is is this the more I dig, the worse it gets. We're right now making sure that we're starting to get out so that we can have a whole new culture shift to help the people we're supposed to be helping. How is that going to work?

How do I do that? How do I use the VA to pay for my community health care in the civilian market? If you meet certain criteria like distance and time, especially what it was designed for is especially those who are away from a VA health clinic or a center where they can get it quickly. What they can do is a real simple checklist to see, you know, do you qualify that? And most you do in different areas, especially specialty care. And then here's where I don't like some of this and I've not liked it for years. One, we have a third party administrator, which we're actually looking at. Anytime you put another third party anything in there, it tends to bog the system. They're supposed to be finding community

doctors. They're supposed to be finding the system where we send them to. The VA technically still has a sign off right now where you see a VA dot and they're not saying, yeah, we agree and then you send them. That's becoming a little bit of a problem because 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? Randomly you might think, no, but when you start seeing it enough, there's a pattern of what I call abuse of the law, basically. 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, these parts have been there, the Mission Act gave that, it expanded that, 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. Well I think a lot of people don't know how to use the VA system. I'm one of them. Yep. I mean, and I want to get into this later, but I mean even just to get the initial, to get the benefits, to go through the doctor's's appointments to you know, oh my shoulders messed up

I got tonight as I got TBI Whatever all those what do they call those the initial point the consoles? Yeah Yeah, the consoles. Yeah, you know a lot of vets They don't even know how to get into the consults or then you get in the consults and it's almost like a damn Interrogation and it's like like I'll give you an example. They denied my tinnitus I'm a Navy SEAL. I shot a lot of guns. I blew a lot of shit up. I've seen a lot of combat I have fucking tinnitus. Sorry lady. I don't know like what the hell you're talking about You can't even test for that. Just give me the tinnitus. Look at my service record

They deny it, you know, and then I got to go find, then I got introduced to this woman, Peggy Matthews, Veterans Advocacy Services. She's like probably 80 years old, runs it, is like an 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. But for us to try to navigate the Veterans Administration, it's impossible. Why should we have that, Sean? Think about it.

That's what I'm asking. But I'm also bringing it back. As someone, you know, look, looking ahead, in five weeks of sitting here doing this job, I have been seeing the exact same, asking the exact same questions and say, why is it you have to have a VA whisperer, so to speak, to get what should be honestly yours to state and to pick party, okay? You're exactly right. I mean, right now, as we look at this, this is the concern that a lot of us are having.

But how many government agencies are like this? Think about it. You're supposed to pay your taxes. I'll just use another. The IRS, you're supposed to pay your taxes. But yet you call the IRS hotline and they can't answer your questions. The very ones who will put you in jail for not paying your taxes can't answer some of your basic questions about how to file your taxes.

Well, as we get into the process of the VA, and I was just with a local vet center here, and one of the things I asked him, I said, tell me something, start telling me, getting up to me, tell me things that hinder veterans from getting the benefits or being a part of the system. Tell me what in our paperwork process, what in our setup is causing us problems because here's what we are seeing though. To those unlike some experiences you've had especially a number of years ago but what we're seeing today there's been an improvement is it once they can get through the system we're seeing general

satisfaction rating among veterans of different generations saying, okay, this may not be, you know, they like the care. They may not be what I want. It may not be for everybody, but 80, 90%, you know, saying, hey, this is, this is okay. I'm getting what I need or the benefits are getting their package. But getting to it has been our problem. Getting it through that front line to say this is an agency that is open. Look I don't have my phone with me right now but if I had my phone with me right now, I bet your private insurance, I know my health care with my wife who I've been on state health in Georgia forever, I can right

now pull up on my phone all my prescriptions, my doctor's appointments, I could talk to my doctor if I wanted to. We don't have that. Why is the large, and here's the other thing, we're the largest health care system in the country. By far. By far. Now there's a couple of privates that like to say they're close. I have 170 hospitals over almost 1500 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 and they've all run on siloed issues. I heard an issue today that was about you know just simple things as transportation well and when they were asked for help they said well that's not a VHA issue which is our health side that's a VBA issue which is our benefit side. Well I'm here to to say, I'm the secretary of all of you.

We're going to start acting like we're one company and not three companies working in the middle. And we're going to begin. Congress has facilitated this. Some prior administrations have facilitated this. Because here's the thing, Sean. How many times do you run across somebody who wasn't a veteran?

And especially in public life, if they're not a veteran and they run for office there it's hard for them to have honest questions to a veteran or to veteran service organizations which may or may not have the interest that they need to be promoting or another organization and they say well and I had a gentleman on the floor of the house one time and good friend, good guy, never served.

And there was an issue on the floor and it was wrong. It was just wrong. I mean we should be doing it differently, okay. There's a budget out. And I said, you know, and I went to this person and I said, because they're very vocal, I said, you know this is wrong. We shouldn't be doing it this way. This should go into the budget.

It shouldn't be done separately. This is the way we should be done. And I'll never forget. And it just floored me. The person looked at me and he said, Doug, I know that. He said, but I'm not a veteran. And he said, I can't have somebody attacking me as being against veterans. Sean, think about what he just said.

He was willing to make a bad vote because he was scared of the political fallout of being seen as against veterans. We've seen this consistently with policy that comes out of Congress for the VA. We've seen it consistently in situations where the VA they will pass budgets and then complain about it. Because that's the way you do it. We have veteran service organizations that honestly at times seem more at war with me and the VA than they do their membership. Now they're good people I'm not trying to throw them under the bus that's not what I'm trying to say

here but if your only way that you satisfy your membership is to say we fought the VA in one huh? We're on the same page. We're supposed to be on the same page here. We're trying to help veterans too, but we can't have adversarial roles to fix the problems that you're talking about because when we do that, we're just simply going in circles. It's got to be an all-in approach. Lord willing, Donald Trump's here. I know I've got hopefully four years to do this, but I really got 18 months. My mission is about 18 months to get in,

to start making the transformational process, to take the generational change that Donald Trump said he was gonna bring to DC. And I saw him just the other day. He and I talked last Friday. And he said, what about my, and he brought up the community care. He brought up all the folks being able to go out

and get the choices they need. And I said, sir, we're working on it. I said, but I got some problems. I need your help. He said, no, whatever you do, we'll take care of it. But these are the kind of generational change we've got to have. 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 rift.

Now the interesting thing is the legacy media, liberal media, the unions are all going nuts. How can you cut this money out of the federal government? The federal government will never survive if we cut 15% out of the workforce. Well, Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the 90s cut 13 to 14%, 12 to 14% out of the federal government. Several hundred thousand jobs. Nobody griped.

And by the way, we're still 20 something years in the future, almost 30. The government not only survived, it got bigger again. So what we're looking at now is how do we do this and we go into systems that are broken and take out the layers that don't need to be there. The things that are keeping veterans from getting the benefits they need that they've earned, keeping them from healthcare, keeping them from going into the community and getting the care that they need, getting access to new treatments like psychedelics or other things. We need to get that funding that's been there to fund positions and worry about funding

veterans' health care and worrying about funding veterans' benefits. If we can do that, then we've got a chance. But what we've got right now is a system in which I have actually some Republicans and Democrats and some other organizations that are simply saying who will continue to look on their own webpages or websites and their statements. The VA is too much wait time, too long to do this and broken. But yet I've seen quotes and tweets.

Secretary Collins needs to be careful on how he does the reorganization of the VA. It needs to be more structured and more, or better yet, some actually said, we don't need to get rid of anybody at the VA. What that's basically saying is, for 10 years GAO has said we're on high risk. We can't get rid of bad employees, by the way. Did you know that? 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, doing other things, we fired them. Guess what? The union and others had lawsuits, and when Donald Trump left office, basically the Biden administration through some series of bad judges just basically quit and said, we'll

bring them all back and give them back pay whether they came back or not. This is the kind of problem we're dealing with, Sean. It's not an easy just get your head out of your rear system. We've got to actually make structural changes so that, number one, we can get rid of the bad, hire good, and put a culture in that the veteran is first. I've said it every day I have been in this office, and I've not taken a day off really yet. So how do you plan on leaning that process out for these guys to get benefits?

It's going to be the issue. Here's where we're starting right now. We're starting a process using career employees, others in the system to say, okay, because we're under this mandate to get the fat out and then we can use that money to redirect. We're already redirecting over $500 million right now that's in the process being redirected towards suicide, which by the way, I want to talk about, You need to hear what's going on there and you're not going to like it, but you need to hear. Homelessness the same way. We're redirecting that toward prosthetic care. We're redirecting toward community care. We're redirecting that money. All that money

was sitting out here that was for PowerPoint and meeting notes kind of stuff that we were doing is now going back to the to the veteran itself. We're gonna have to, as we go through looking for this reduction in force, we're gonna take out folks that are not forward-facing when it comes to veterans health. 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. And all of a sudden Wall Street Journal, New York Times, all the legacy media, the Hill, senators and others,

union members, Collins is killing healthcare, Collins is gutting the VA, Collins is calling, 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. None of the people, the people we fired were publicists, interior designers, laborers. I mean this is what we're talking about here. How has your surgery been put off because an interior designer was laid off?

It wasn't. It's a lie. But what we have is, you know what's interesting though? If you'd gone back to January 15th of this year and that same surgery had been put off, it would have never made a headline. Because now we're doing something. So now we just got to start trimming those out. Forward facing with the healthcare, with our benefit side, that's not the areas we're

looking at. We're looking at, I think somebody told me the other day, think about this, we have almost 16,000 contract agents. Contractors, all they do is contracts. 16,000? Really? Let's take a look and see if we need 16,000 contract agents. Let's see if we need five and six levels of bureaucracy in some of these situations and instead take those money redirect it back to where it needs to go. Then you're gonna be able to get you know a bit quicker access. Then you're gonna be able to cut oh by the way 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. Let's talk about the suicide. What do you want to say about that? Whatever we have been doing for the last five years, for whatever good there was and there's been some, explain to me how in the past five years, six years of budgets, we spent approximately $15 billion and the numbers is basically unchanged. We spend five hundred and eighty eight million dollars, five hundred eighty eight million on preventive supposed suicide. We spend two point three billion in what we'll call treatment

of either the mental aspect, health aspect, that you know issues that they've had with hurting themselves, other things like it, 2.3 billion. So $3 billion total, roughly, in suicide. And yet our numbers are not changing, Sean. We go from a low of about 63, 6400 up to almost 7000 a year. Now you may have mentioned earlier of what's the real number. That's an arguable debate.

And I've heard this from others. It actually may be 25, 30, depending on how you classify overdose and how you'd, or also frankly, in rural communities. I grew up in a rural community. Suicide is something you don't talk about. And you get some of these medical examiners and coroners in these smaller counties,

they 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. So what I'm looking at here is what's actually working. What we're doing, frankly, in just all fairness, ain't working. You can't do that much this long and say it's working. So what we're trying to do now and what I'm beginning to do is I want to know why that 588 million is going for.

I want to know what are we supposedly doing to... And don't just tell me you're putting a Facebook ad out there. Don't tell me that you're running the call the crisis line number out there, which are all fine and good. But where are we at actually hitting to the members who are listening to your podcast who have no Want to to go to the VA because here's the other part of that Whether the number 17 or the numbers 24 or even higher the statistics are pretty good that said that 50% of those folks Have never been touched by the VA

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Go right now to hillsdale.edu slash srs to enroll. There's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's hillsdale.edu slash srs to enroll for free. Hillsdale.edu slash srs. So my one of the things I'm starting, starting right here with you, I'm starting with other things that we're going to be doing. I'm trying to reach that veteran who's sitting out there, who's saying, you know, screw the VA. I went over one time, they didn't even treat me like I was human. Or that was their perception. You know, look, everybody's got a perception.

And you know, that may be your perception that you wasn't treated well. It may have been a bad day for them, bad day for you. But then they're sitting in their home and they're self-medicating or they're going off doing destructive things. They're going to end up to the point where they don't see a reason to go on. But if they listen to your podcast, they listen to somebody, I'm going to sit here and say, look, folks, let's get help. Let me send somebody.

Go to an organization you trust. Call your battle buddy. Call your airman. Call your wingman, whoever it is. We got to get out of this stigma that we don't touch people that are saying they have problems. Think about your friend that you just talked about. He's not going to run out in the front yard and say, hey, I'm really not able to function today. They're not going to do that. But we got to find them. We got

to hit ways that people like his wife and others have the ability to reach out to somebody and say, here's real ways we can help. And get back to the simple fact of, hey are we actually treating this as what it is and that is a serious condition brought on many times by things that were out of their control or what they saw or what they didn't. I was in Nashville today at National Songwriter Association. Some folks I've known for years who write country music, some of them write songs all over the world for stuff you hear on the radio all the time. And there's a couple organizations that work with veterans, American Song, there's some others, where they get veterans together,

and who have had years of not being able to express themselves, not being able, they feel isolated. And they get them down, they start talking with other veterans, and they start writing a song. They say, write a song. And they show them and talk to them about how to do that. I had a veteran today who told me, he said, been married 50

something years. He said I was in Vietnam. 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. And he said 10 years ago somebody finally got to me and he said I sat down I wrote this song. He said it was not the't talk about it. And he said, 10 years ago, somebody finally got to me. And he said, I sat down and I wrote this song. He said, and it was not the song itself. It's the action of putting it on paper. And he says, now I'm able to talk to her. I'm able to release that. There's another gentleman.

This is a Vietnam. There's another gentleman there who, again, his kids. And you know the saying. How many times have people said, tell me a war story, Sean, tell me what you did, tell me what was cool. This guy was saying, he said, he didn't want to talk about it. And his kids would ask him,

well, granddad, dad, what are you doing? And he couldn't talk about it, he got in this position. In a power of a song, where he wrote down what happened to him at Tet, way back when, when he saw his buddies burned up in a tank. When he saw that, and you could see it as if it was today in his eyes. But then he was able to say, if you want to know it, then listen to this song. Listen to the words that I wrote down.

That's a totally different way to look at this stuff. We've got to reach the veteran where they are. And if it's hunting, let's take them, you know, let's match them with somebody that can talk to them and get them out on a duck blind somewhere, or get them out in the field. If they can't, if they want to do exercise, let them do that. Or if they just want to sit and get coffee, or they want to, you know, go have a beer, do something. Instead of just spending $588 million on programming, let's see if our program is actually being effective. I'm just not gonna sit here.

I may do a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong in the next few years, but I will tell you this, I will not sit here for the next four years and spend that amount of money and do the same damn thing. I'm just not gonna do it. How will you know if it's working? Well, see if my numbers go down. I'm gonna see how many people are responding. I'm gonna see if we're reaching people that we've not reached for because if we're starting to

touch them then we're gonna start seeing them into our systems. I'm looking to use nonprofits. By the way, I'm non-discriminatory here. I don't care if they come to the VA or not. I want them to come to the VA because we got resources to help, but if they're willing to go to a nonprofit somewhere, if they come to the VA or not. I want them to come to the VA because we got resources to help them. 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 George who happens to be the secretary of VA, to say go get help, it's okay,

then we're gonna see our communities put back together better. We're gonna see people and families come back together. You're gonna hear it from your buddies. I'm gonna hear it from mine. Because those people, we hear about them, but they're not getting help that they need because it's so quiet. I'll use an example for you. My daughter has spina bifida. She was born, she's 32 years old now. If she were to come in here and

she roll in her little chair, she would knock socks off of her, she's got a smile. She she's never walked in her life. I mean You know, I've watched her not experience the quote normal, you know going on dates and getting married all I just you know I've watched it Broke my heart For her she just gets up and goes every day. She goes to work five days a week. She works at a hospital But if you were to come in here or we were to take her over here to the mall, people would come up here and they'd feel sorry for her. They'd try to help her, they'd try to open a door,

they'd try to help her get to what she needs. But if I was to stand up in that same mall and say, folks, I don't know what's wrong, but my mind's broke. We don't look to open a door for that person. We don't look to run to them. Too much in our time is we're moving away from them. We've got to change the whole scenario here,

especially in the VA and our veteran community for brothers and sisters who we served with. They've got to know it's okay. You're not going to be wrong in reaching out and giving somebody some help. And the person who needs the help needs to see somebody willing to sort of run the mile with them. If we can get that, that's how I'm gonna see results. That's how I'm gonna see bottom line.

That's how I'm gonna see that our vet centers are getting maybe some more people. Or I'm gonna hear it in the community. I'm gonna see it in our judges who are actually seeing these people in front of them. Because they've crashed their car while they were drunk. They've, they've gotten to a domestic violence situation because they didn't know who they were hitting and they were hitting their own kid. This isn't playtime anymore for me, Sean. We've got to seriously deal with this in this country and we got to

deal with our veterans. So for me, that's the way I'm going to hopefully see it play out. Did I hear you say that you planned on using nonprofits to help? Yes. I'll use anybody that's willing to help. I'll use anybody willing to help. If that's a VSO, one of the big six VSOs or any of the others, if they're willing to get in the game and help and try new ways, I'm ready to help. I'm ready to use nonprofits.

I'm ready to use somebody that's willing to come in and we'll work the barriers and we'll do whatever it takes to get there. Because here's the situation. We're looking at a generation that is not functioning the way we did 20 years ago, even 10, 15 years ago. Because they're more influencer driven, they're more socially media driven, 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.

He was speaking to them on platforms that they had never heard before. So why would I not use things like this or nonprofits who are, you know, and I can name the many but I wouldn't want to forget anybody. I mean you got all a lot of them out there that are putting good money to the actual end or putting you know lead on the target so to speak down range and they're using very little of it for administrative cost and we don't do that. So if you've got organizations that have always been doing it, they want to try new ways, I'm all for it. But you've also got to be willing to get in and dig a little bit and know that you don't always have all the answers. As far as care and some of these other treatments that we're talking about, is there any way that the VA can partner with somebody other than, I don't know who you guys partnered with, the American Legion, we listed a whole

bunch of them that the modern day war fighter veteran does not use anymore. Right. They're all using, we are all using mom and pop nonprofits. So I brought up, how are you guys going to get, how are you going to get people into the VA system more and get them to their, to their initial appointments where, where, where they get their disability? Yep. Is it going to be, it sounds like it's going to be very bureaucratic and hard to push through. So is, is there a way to get nonprofits like Veterans Advocacy Services some type of a grant or give the veterans some type to where they can they can hey Peggy knows the system yeah she can get guys through she can help

guys through she can I mean is there a way that the VA can partner with these smaller mom and pop Is there a way that the VA can partner with these smaller mom-and-pop Nothing organizations and fund them so that they can get a bigger team and in in in to get more vets pushed through Yeah, I look I think one of the things here is is that Doing that in such a way That encourages good, you know work now look some of our VSOs They offer, you know free help will get you, and I'm not criticizing that in a situation. But many times they're willing to go through a situation, why are we having to use so much help? I'm actually attaching it, hopefully attacking it at a different end. Why do we need, as I said earlier, the VA whisper, why

can't we do this easier? But until then, yeah,, yeah, I'll look at any way I can to help organizations that are helping veterans get the services they need without having to join an organization, without having to do anything else, just get what they have earned. And also- I can tell you why. Okay. Because it's like I mentioned before, nobody trusts the VA. When they go to somebody like Peggy, she's like a protector.

Guys like me, just about everybody that's been on the show that's been to work, they trust her, they know that she's going to protect them through that process. They know that if something goes bad, Peggy's got it. You know what I mean? That's why that's happening. And that's where we got to start rebuilding trust in a system that has free. I can't explain this enough. The frustration I have with a lot, a lot of people, I have 480,000.

There's, there's many, many, many, many dedicated people who want to help our veterans period. Okay. They are. I promised them as secretary of VA that they will not have a better, many, many, many dedicated people who want to help our veterans, period. They are. I promised them as Secretary of VA that they will not have a better advocate for the good work that they do and to do it right to fight, to make sure we're doing what we need to do. But I'm also not going to tolerate status quo.

I'm also not going to tolerate lower standards. We're going to have higher standards. We're going to push this up but at the same point in time it's gonna take a holistic look at everything that we're doing it can't simply be how do we fix the third-party helpers here how do we fix the system itself instead of instead of us 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?

And I think that's going to be, but again, there's going to be parties and equities that that's not the way they've done it. That's not the way they do their business model. Because if they have people that come to them, they either get help from outside agencies or other stuff. I'm finding a whole different world that I'm just getting into the background of, of how we're working this stuff. And folks, if you've earned a benefit, take your benefit.

You've earned the benefit. But also there's a lot of other 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. I want it to be known veterans are not victims. We're not. We chose, we went into the profession, we've done that. And now 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, and that's why the system was set up. It's to say, okay, we're going to do something. The history of the VA was really set up for our veterans who were outside of cities and outside of areas where there were not hospitals. The VA was set up because we had so many coming back in from World War I and then, of course, as it expanded through World War II, that weren't in areas where hospitals were. So that's how this sort of all started. We just sort of lost our roots a little bit because it's easier just to say well this is for the veterans so let's just

throw some money at it and let's throw some more people at it and but then let's legislate it to death that it can't get outside these boxes because we want to make sure that we're still in control. That's a big part of government issue that we have not just a VA but a lot of agencies. So how would you partner with the nonprofit for that? Well I think there's ways that we can look at that I'm exploring right now. We can profit you know you know do things together. We can you know I can you know say look you know this is a group that, you know, do things together. We can, you know, I can, you know, say, look, you know, this is a group that, you know, that we're meeting with. What's your ideas? Bringing

those ideas to me. I've already met with several that are saying, you know, like we have an example right now that is coming out and without getting into deep, you know, details about, you know, that need, we've had, 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 and for some reason the VA has 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.

Let's get the data we need. Let's make sure we have this out there so that we get good answers. Then there's also ways, again, as we look going ahead, is there so that you know we get good answers. Then there's also ways again as we look going ahead is there ways that we remove some of the bureaucratic structure find ways to then partner with as you said it could it be through a grant possibly so or other ways to help other organizations help us get better. That's my goal. I don't want to simply put out this idea that we need a whole other layer. You've had VSOs out here helping forever and you've had all these others now just bringing us sort of another layer because this group

trusts this group better than this one. Why don't we actually look at the root cause? If you came to me and you know 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 The problem we've had lately is is we just put your hands in warm water We get them warm and we rub on them and they get the circulation back in them instead of realizing Maybe there's a heart problem here. Maybe we're not pumping well Well, I want to get back to the question is, is the VA heart pumping right?

Are we putting things into place that help the veteran and not hinder the veteran? And are we getting to a place, and I said this in my confirmation, I said, I want us to become a place instead of initial, to 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. We've got to have that mindset difference to say look, you have benefits you've earned, you've had healthcare you've earned, we're here for a reason, but we're not to make it

harder and I think that's become the adversarial system that nobody sort of talks about here, that it makes it seem, and again again perception before anybody listen to this and screams Oh that ain't the true world No It doesn't matter what I think you think or any other group thinks when the perception is it's broken when the perception is is bad And when the perception is I'm gonna get told no then that's the reality perception is reality to veterans And we got to break that product. We got to break that cycle What about nonprofits for treatments?

There's a lot of nonprofits out there that have that have great treatment programs that are proven to work You know, like I had mentioned that's that's that's that's probably the biggest one that I know of that's doing psychedelic stuff There's Tom Satterleys a former Delta guys got the All Secures Foundation, very therapeutic experience. They, lots of coaching that's been working. I mean, is there, is there a way where, because it sounds, look, I get it. Like you guys can't just be like, oh, we're doing Ibogaine treatments now. I realize that's going to be, that's going to be an act of Congress and the

Senator, however it works to get that through. But you know, maybe there's a way where, where the veteran can look, maybe there's a voucher program or something where the, where I want to try this nonprofit and maybe, maybe those nonprofits get. That's some certification. There's something to go through. Yeah. So kind of certified from the VA in the, in the, in the VA says to the veteran, I'm not going to give you the money, but when, when you go to vets,

when you go to all secure foundation, when you go to veterans advocacy services, when you go to any of these nonprofits that are approved, look, you want psychedelic therapy for your traumatic brain injury, we're going to give you the voucher. You pick which nonprofit you want to use it for and then they email in some kind of a document that says, hey, we sent this person down. I mean, that would just, that would streamline it so fast because then those nonprofits don't have to focus so much on fundraising so they can get these guys down there and women down there to do these things or their therapy or their whatever.

And then the VA pays that voucher. Is that a possibility? I think it's a possibility. I think everything for me is on the table right now. therapy or their whatever and then the VA pays that voucher. Is that a possibility? I think it's a possibility. I think everything for me is on the table right now. And that doesn't mean everything's going to get approved. That doesn't mean it's going to happen. But for me, I want to say, okay, if we have these possibilities that we're seeing the

mentoring, the counseling, the treatments, especially stuff like that, that are working, can we partner with that? 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? Because there is some of that. And I'm never gonna say there's not. But if it's something we can now try,

then I'm gonna be looking at this, and we've already started talking to these groups, to say, how can that be? I'm gonna go to my people and say tell me what the problem is here And if the answer is well, we we can do that better in a VA I'm saying no, no, no, no, no, you're gonna do what you're doing a bit But why can't I have people out here that can go try this and how do we do it? Tell me as I've changed I've changed my entire general counsel, which by the way, we have a lot of lawyers I've changed their whole mindset and, which by the way we have a lot of lawyers,

I've changed their whole mindset into say, don't tell me no, tell me how to get to yes. If I'm asking you to get to a problem, you get me to yes, because I'm an attorney as well, I can get you to no quicker than you can. Get me to yes. Get me to a part where I can take what you're giving me.

And so I'll go to our health people and say the same thing. Get me to yes. Don't tell me the standard line. Like we found out something today. We had to go, it happens almost every day. I have to ask the question, Sean, and this is how it gets very frustrating. I have to ask the question, is this policy from the VA or is it statute from Congress? Because there's a big difference here. Statute from Congress, that's our red line. I have to operate within the law. Policy, I made. I mean, if there's a policy that you can't have ice cream on Fridays, well, we made the policy. Guess what? You can have ice cream on Fridays. I can change that all day long. So we've got to now delineate because many times in the VA because they're scared of criticism, they're scared of

what you know members of the Congress or or the media or unions or anything would say about them is that they much rather just say no we can't instead of well why and then if you ask them well the law just won't let us do that well policy policy ain't law. We can change those kinds of stuff. So I'm willing to look at it from all angles to see if we can. And if it's treatments, then I think that's where we're going to have to make sure that we're operating because I can't bypass a law that says I can't do X treatment and just give you money to go do it somewhere else. I've got to work that out in Congress. And that's where folks like you and others that can help me and also working with Bobby

Kennedy over at HHS to get some of this stuff approved in different ways, having a president, you know, who would be willing to say, look, let's do whatever we can. That's just when it's going to take the push of the veterans to say, these are the things that are working for us. Doesn't work for everybody, but at least for these, it is working. working for us doesn't work for everybody, but at least for these, it is working. I hope you're taking this in because I am the guy you're trying to reach. And I'm, and not only would that work with the treatment, but it would also help

build the trust back within the VA because, because guys like me don't trust the VA. We just don't trust the VA. We just don't. But we do trust Tom Satterly, who is a retired Delta operator. Yep. He's seen it all. He has seen it all. And I know that he has my best interest because he's my friend or my friend is his friend.

And everybody looks up to guys like Tom or Marcus Capone, who's running vets with the psychedelic stuff. It's if, if, if the VA can be an interim and say, yes, we're aware of what they're doing, they're on our list, we have a partnership with him, we want you to do that here, go. That, that is a, that is a big step in getting guys like me to trust the VA again. And then hopefully all these nonprofits can go away because the problem's solved. And once the shit's all passed through Congress, then we don't even need that,

those nonprofits anymore. Cause hopefully they all wind up going away because the problem's fixed. But in the interim, it's a great way, one, to get the treatment, two, to build the trust back. Yeah. I think you're right. And I think that's what I want to look at. That's why I'm out in the field. That's why we're doing things like this. If it times five weeks feels like I've been there five years, and in five weeks, I realize, my God, I've been there five weeks. And I've had, in just the amount of time, we've had to deal with our first

start of contract looks where we went through 2% of our contracts, 2% and found almost 580B and 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. I've had to deal with the probationary firings, which helped us get, you know, begin this thing and get started. We're dealing things and you mentioned it earlier, by the way, we've had the issue of the flags. We've changed that policy so that we're back to one force under the American and POW flag.

That's all we're doing. We've taken the DEI out. We're doing that today even just as we're coming on. We changed the policy on transgender. You're not going to be getting your sex changed at the VA anymore. If you're currently in treatment, we're going to continue that what was started before we ever got there just as the sec-deafs did in his side, but because we don't want anything bad to happen to somebody who's under those treatments. you know from this point on you're not gonna we're not changing your sex you're gonna get it we're gonna treat you with respect and dignity if

you come to the VA for all your for your services but we're just not going to be participating in changing us your sex that's not what our services are for and everything that we're taking money wise away to that would take away from money that I could be spending on something else that are helping vets directly who are not even getting primary health care. That's the things that we're looking at. So we're in the process of doing as much of this as we possibly can. And so we're taking every new idea, I'm taking it back, our team is starting to process it,

and we're working toward this end of making it a much more accessible, much more idea-friendly, if you would, VA. That restores trust. I'm hoping that restoring trust in the VA is me using social media in every possible way I can to tell people what's actually going on. And this is that. Coming on your show, doing other shows and saying, going into the media and going on and saying, guys, no, I'm not going to let senators lie to you anymore. I'm not going to let union members,

I'm not going to let the newspapers and legacy media tell you stories, which they, by the way, can't back up. This is what I've been fighting. I know we're getting closer to the target because the flack's getting a lot heavier heavier because they don't want us on this Sean. I mean think about this if you redo this and get it done in any circle of life in in the federal government. Now really other is if you talk about a problem you develop a group that says this is my problem. And then all along, you never really get to solving the problem. Then what you've done is you've built a group.

This perpetuates itself on what? The problem. So I don't care what group it is out there. If they're not sort of in many ways trying to either put themselves out of business, so to speak, because they're solved the problem, problem as you said or they're perpetuating the problem and Then claiming there that will help for that problem That's what we're fighting against and I want to make sure that we're in a position To our veterans understand that they at least from the secretary level here and what's gonna 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, the VA does probably better than private 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? Crazy story I heard. We actually have hospitals that are sitting across the street, literally across the street

from world-class oncology, cancer centers, and we're worrying about hiring cancer doctors at the VA. I said, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. Just send them across the street and contract the care across the street. I don't need to hire the doctor. They've already got them over here. But that's the kind of thinking, Sean. That's your thinking when your mindset is organizational and not patient or in

our case, veteran-centric, that's the kind of things you get. What was your conversation like with Bobby Kennedy about psychedelics? Eye-opening because, you know, of course he is very, you know, make America healthy again, you know, getting people, you know, getting the food additives out, getting those kinds of stuff. And I asked him specifically, because we were talking about this, I said psychedelics. Because he's, you know, his agency would have some say in some, you know, the studies and stuff on that. And it was really interesting. Bobby starts talking about this and he says, one, he said, I was a heroin addict. He said, putting stuff in your body, he said, for me to begin to talk about, you 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, he said, but then he wanted to explain a family member of his, child of his, who had an experience using psychedelics that changed his life drastically. And he said, I would have never thought this, would have never thought, you know, it's sort of, I let him, I would let him explain it the way he sees it. But he said, this is working. He said, I've changed my mind about it. But he said, this is working. He said, I've changed my mind about this. Because he said, I actually see it happening and see it work.

And he said, in my own flesh and blood. And I think that's the part that for me began to be exciting a little bit. And to see, here's someone who is so sensitive to those issues of medication. One of the things too is, and I think you see this as well, the answer to people many times if they're having episodes and just this idea that the idea is that you can medicate them to health is a problematic to me. I just believe it is.

It doesn't mean that medicines don't work. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying go stop your medication. I'm not saying don't give them. But is there other ways to help in that regard that can reduce that dependency? And if we can, that'd be great. So Bobby's the same way. So for us, I got a partnership now that he and I are going to continue to work on from the

research side and from the other. 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. The transition from DOD to civilian or what we would term VA our side is really bad. We don't do this well. And it's not just the VA health or VA benefit, not just the benefit. We're not giving a lot of our young service members and even old service members the transition that they need. We send them through the programs.

You do the briefings. You've been there. And is it really working? And the answer has to be that probably it's not working like it should because we're seeing, you know, too many people end up in suicidal issues. We're seeing too much end up homelessness issues or, you know, financial breakdowns, marriage breakdowns because as much as for those of us in the military who can grope about the structure at times, you take away the structure and even the harshest rebel who rebelled against structure would say,

I need that structure. So I think that's where it's really changed for me in looking at how we do this and how we go about it. So again, having partners like that is going to be, whether it be at DOD, whether it be at HHS, or with us at the VA, it's going to be very important moving forward. What is the plan? With psychedelics, what is the plan moving forward? How does it get introduced into the VA?

What needs to happen? Well, the first thing we're gonna do is, and I'm getting this information now. Again, this is a part of this, I've already had a few who have came in who've actually talked about it, who wanna talk about this more. And then we got this study, this being done

in conjunction up in New York. We, I wanna see if there's a possibility to expand that program. Where is it right now? Again, some of this I'm getting, and again, I'm not trying to be anything evasive here. I've got to get the knowledge of what we're doing and what we have not done. So I'm going to get that information and see. I know what the program you're talking about. I've heard about it as well. So let's get data on that, have our people start reaching out across the board to say, okay,

what is out there? Then we've got to also then take that and look at what is the structural limitations that I have. What is the VA structural problems to either entering into a larger study or entering into a trial basis or, basically, possibly even, as you said earlier, voucher funding or whatever that may be. What are my structural limitations that Congress has put on me there? Is there structural limitations that says you can use X dollars for this, but you can't use X dollars for that? Okay. And then if

there is, and we find enough evidences in our place to do it, then I'm going to go to Congress. I'm going to go to the House, the House Veterans Affairs Committee. I'm going to go to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and then I'm going to go to the House the House of Veterans Affairs Committee I'm gonna go to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee and I'm gonna go to the to the leadership and say look these are things that I need changed y'all may not be able to agree on a lot of things here but these are some things I'm hopefully you can agree on give me the statutory ability 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 if I find out I don't have some of the

statutory limitations then I want to know what policy wise may be hindering this or is there a policy that can make sure that we're working with partners to do this. Now again you said it earlier the fiduciary role I have I take very seriously. You get close to a vet. You get close to one. And Sean, you may have heard me say this already in this discussion. I call them my vets and my employees. I don't do that to the little. I don't do that. It's personalized to me. So if you get close to them, we're going to make sure you're doing it right. My fiduciary duty is I've got to make sure that no matter how great you think your program is, I've got to make sure that we're not opening

something up that nobody else has seen. And that's just due diligence kind of thing. So we're going to make that happen. One of the things that was concerning me and I want to sidetrack to what we're talking about here is there's a lot of residential treatment facilities in the private sector now that because of wait times for some mental health issues that are now popping up. 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, have we created a cottage industry for this now?

Because look, money in DC is like water on a pavement it's gonna go to it's gonna go to its lowest part it's gonna find its way out okay so if all of a sudden people here there's money in this then they're gonna be there's always gonna rise to meet that demand but is that demand always good no it's not because they're doing it, they're doing it for the money, they're doing it for the possible... Not every one of them, but probably some. So we're having to deal with that right now in those kind of programs and I'm having to deal with our folks to say, are we making sure that if we're using these are they up to

standard that we need to be at? Because if we don't then we're gonna be giving money to things that aren't working and in the end hurting us in the long run and I think that's something that I've got to be aware of. So for me it really goes down to that. That's where we're already starting. We're going to have more meetings as we go about this to make sure we're getting the information and as quickly as possible start to find those solutions that we can do something with. Would advocacy help at all? Does it help you to get veterans that have been through X, Y, and Z treatments in front of Congress to vouch? Yeah, it never hurts.

It never hurts to do that. Because again, I've said this for years. The best spokesman for anything is a satisfied customer. And I think that's the part and the recognition that it may or may not be for everybody, but for me this worked. In conjunction with what we're going to do over the next few weeks and maybe a couple months is see what are our limitations.

Beginning the process to say, hey, this has worked for me. I'm not sure where we're at in the process, but Mr. Congressman, Ms. Congressman, or Madam Senator, Senator, I want you to know this has worked 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 would never turn anybody down to talk about what they have. The reason I'm asking is earlier you're talking about how media is attacking you about this stuff. And so would, would, would, would a hearing with a thousand, I mean, you're talking to the largest veteran population in the world right now on this show. And so would it help if there was some type of a hearing at Congress and you

brought in a thousand vets that have been through different treat, you know, whatever, whatever you're advocating for change wise to bring inets that have been through different, you know, whatever you're advocating for change-wise to bring in people that have actually, that has actually worked for in front of Congress, televised, here it is, media, put this on. 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. And some of that's been done a little bit, but I think it could be done more. I'm not going to downplay that there's not been an interest in Congress about

this. But it's not just the VA committee there. It's the Energy and Commerce, which does a lot of the healthcare stuff and everything else. So there's different ways. But yeah, I think those are definitely ways if we can get partnership with the congress to say are there better ways to do this? And and I think frankly, I think it'll be a republican and democrat Um coming together on it. I think you're going to see both parties Be willing to look at stuff that work. You're going to have some on both ends who say no We're not going to touch this or or no, this is bad But you're going to have enough in the middle to say well Let's at least listen to it

so I think as we progress in the next little bit with our information and then working with Chairman Boston the house and the committee and Chairman Moran and the other side to say hey, you know We've got some ideas here Is this something we could get you to take a look at we can make sure you have all the you know The the witnesses you want in dealing with this. I think it'd be definitely something. Now I'm not going to also fool anybody. You start dealing with everybody's sort of piece of the pie out there, nonprofits, VSOs,

everybody starts shuffling, you're going to make a lot of people nervous, Sean. Because again, you're dealing in livelihood, so to speak with, with stuff that they're doing and how they've done it and do we need to change and not change, I'm just not, I'm not bought and sold to anybody. I'm bought and sold to the veteran getting the help that they need and not dying anymore. So look, it's, it's just where we got to have it. And right now the bigger fights that we got to have is

getting a structural basis. These are things that we can work on. But bringing it back to where we sort of started this whole thing is I've got to work on getting the VA in the best possible shape it can be to actually do its mission. And right now we're probably a little more than probably, we are heavy in where our allocation of employees are, where allocation and where our contracts have been spent and how the money is being spent and should be spent differently. Those are the things that we're working on

very hard right now. But again, when you've got Congress who has put this money out there, telling everybody it's going to work, but the reality is it's not, they're going to be very hesitant to be told that what they did was wrong or to do it better. And so we're fighting those battles right now that are keeping me away from dealing with some of these other issues on how can we find new and inventive ways to do things.

How can we actually try things that haven't been tried before? So I'm fighting a bunch of battles on different levels right now. And wherever veterans can help, that's where I would love to have them be a part of this solution. Man, it's just a damn shame. You got the entire veteran population that's screaming, we need help. This is how you help us. And then you got the fucking bureaucrats that are getting in the way that are slandering

whatever's happening in the media. And it's just, I think that's what makes it so frustrating is we know what we need and we know what we want. And we can't get it done because some fucking politician in DC who didn't never step a foot on a fucking combat ever. Never is making the decisions for us and it pisses us off. And, you know, but earlier you had mentioned about community healthcare. How does that, how is it working now? And what would you like to see happen?

It's, it's not working as good as it should, I believe. And I think this is where we need to make it easier. And I think, and again, I look at this generationally and I don't mean to put everybody in a pigeonhole here, but we're dealing with different generations of veterans. Okay, I still got World War II veterans. I still got Korean veterans, still have a lot of Vietnam veterans. And then there's a sort of that, if you know your history, sort of that loyal time, that 70s and 80s, that was sort of after the Vietnam, before Gulf War, that is a veteran that has

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

If as they get older, some of them can't drive as far, they can't get that health. So it's more advantageous for them to go to a local eye doctor instead of driving 80 miles to the VA where they've always been forever. That's a help. But then you get into that Gulf War GWAT veteran who has visions of the VA from their moms or dads or from others from the Vietnam era, which 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 healthcare that they need. And by the way, we've got to do a better job. I'm going to take a little turn here for a second. We've got to do a better job at preventive health for veterans. We don't do a very good job at this right now. We were trying, but I've talked to our folks. So like my generation and others, we have the issues of healthcare and mental health, but just the basics of getting our diabetes under control. Make sure we're still eating right. Make sure we're doing the things that run our cost up long-term and also take away quality of life. If we can do that in the VA system, then we're going to not only save money, but we're also going to help people

in the long run too from losing fingers, losing arm, especially the diabetic stuff. We're two and a half more times than the average population for diabetes. We're much more high-proteincy for hypertension and blood pressure, cholesterol, those kind of things. Those are areas that we've got to fix. But if they're not willing to go into the VA to get it or have been turned off from the VA as you have, then the community care needs to be accessed in my opinion more readily. Now the first thing I'm getting accused of Sean and I can tell you right now somebody listening right now they say, Doug wants to privatize the VA. No, I don't. VA will always be there for folks to get care.

And one way or the other it's always going to be there. We're not privatizing anything if I'm paying the bill for you to go to a local doctor that you feel comfortable with and get the care that you need. That's not privatization. That's simply being smart and also following the law. The law says we're supposed to. But yet, we've also got to deal with the realities that in some of our areas, the private healthcare, public healthcare, the public hospitals have as much of a problem with finding doctors

and nurses and all as we do. And so, like I know down in our part of the world where I'm from in Georgia, the wait time for mental health and for psychiatry and some of the stuff like that in the private sector is actually longer than it is Unreasonably is that it is for the for the VA So to dump all of a sudden to put a lot of stuff pressure back on communities that can't handle that anyway We've got to find a balance that means we have to staff up in areas that Helps us get to the points that we need to be. But that's a generational issue. But right now what's happening,

I'll just tell you candidly, in the last administration, they moved away from that model altogether. They just seemingly turned their back on getting people into the community health care if they chose it. They were trying to keep all of it, or as much of it it into the VA itself. And if people hadn't figured out why yet, I'll go ahead and break the sad news. It's because if I keep them more in the healthcare, then I can ask for more money. I can keep more people here.

Now, there are also things that we do that others don't do, but that's fine. But when you're keeping them from the healthcare, then you're also putting them at risk that if they're not getting the health care out there and they're not coming to see you then you're not helping them in the way that you should. So that's the way community health should work. That's where our community care program should be. We're going to get it back to where that is is more applicable and there actually is some legislation right now both in the house and the, to actually strengthen that by reducing some of the limitations to community care so that it's easier to access.

That will help us all in the long run, especially our rural healthcare, and especially our suburban healthcare, that sort of middle ground healthcare, where they're maybe not too far from a health VA center, but they're not close enough, and they just wanna be in their community. But Shawn, how many of our generation want to drive 90 miles to a center or a CBOT that

they don't know anybody and they go in and their peer group is much older than them probably, and they're going to sit around and say, I'll just go to my doctor down the street or I'll go to the quick care and just if I need something or I'll just keep doing this myself. Everybody wants to be able to do that. So that's what we're looking at. So that's what it- So are you saying it will be a choice? You can either go to the VA-

Should be. Or you can- Yeah. Because that's what I've been advocating. There is. There's choice in there. There's some criteria that's been set up, because again, with the mileage and stuff like that. But even in the House and the Senate, they're trying to refine those down to where it makes

it easier to get that community care. And what we're going to, you know, what I think is probably the result of some of this, and this is me speaking, I think you're going to see as it gets better and better with working with the community and working with the VA, you'll start seeing a lot more split care. You'll start seeing some for like instance, I want to like say you had orthopedic issues or you had, we've got some great of some of our medical centers, especially orthopedic and bone are probably some is good if not better than a lot of the private house. They may go there to get an orthopedic issue but they're going to go outside to get their

cardiac care or they're going to go outside to get their kidney. So you'll have a split model which is exactly what the law envisions. So you don't have to be stuck to one or the other. You get the best care you can at the way that you want it got. But yet we've got to get to a system in which we take out the middle people, we take out the processes, we get it streamlined into where VA has the control it needs to make sure fiduciarily we're doing what we're supposed to do, but not the control to where we keep it ourselves.

There's a big difference there. There's a big difference in signing off and agreeing, this is the condition, I see this, I'm going to give this person a referral, instead of saying, well, I see this condition, but let's see if we can get them back in in two weeks to talk to them again. You know, those kinds of things. I'll just say this, in the coming weeks, you're going to see some more of this coming out from our office. I would just say stay tuned. It's bigger than what I can even describe here. We got some other stuff coming out and I'll just say just bear with us there. We're working through this community care issue to overcome what we've had in the last four years. That sounds good. That sounds real reassuring.

What about the burn pits? You know a lot of I, I mean, there's all these weird cancers pop it 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 breathed that in. I remember spitting in the sink and my spit was gray because I had breathed in so much

crap. I mean, it sounds like there's something going on there with the burn pits. Yeah, the PACT Act was designed to address some of that. The problem is, look, the PACT Cat was a good step into dealing with it. Look, I'm a burn pit guy as well. I mean, I was at Balad every day 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 thought,

why is it so hazy around here? I thought it was an environmental, I'd never been in the desert kind of thing, so I thought, but then I got to realize it was just the constant flow of the burn pit area that was going over our hutches over there. It's just what it was all the time. It was there all the time. I remember riding by and you could see it burning. It reminded me of growing up in North Georgia where everybody in our neighborhood had the 55 gallon drums and had the bottom out and you throw your trash in there and you burn your trash. I mean, I smell the same smells and worse 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. What my concern was is they sort of took this from the nine 11. If you remember timeframe wise here, they had a lot of exposure. So president Biden at the time got up in the state of the union said, we're going to address this. Well, all of a sudden they threw a bill together, which had been already been worked on, but they sort of threw out everything that had been worked on it through this

bill together that is part good, but also very rushed. I'll be kind today. Okay, it was rushed and then thrust upon the VA to say, here, do this. Did you know part of that bill, I bet most people didn't know, did you know that that bill actually requires the VA to test every veteran? The test of 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. 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. 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 and I actually asked one I happen to have been a meeting the other day with someone who actually wrote that bill And they I mean 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 the the conduit around PACTAC was that looking for the diseases. Right now we have basically permissively allowed almost every condition under that that if you have that it's going to be found under the PACTAC.

And then how treatment goes from there will be just determined on what like everything cancers of the head, which technically there is no such thing as cancers of the head. It's specifics in there, but that we have a terminology of cancers of the head. Okay. I mean, we've turned it in the previous secretary added in, I think it was the previous secretary added in I think it was a previous secretary and I was confirmed but the these presumptive conditions were added for hypertension and prostate and everything else like okay I get it but you know we're just sort of at this point just say if you've been near a burn better you can answer one of these questions you're just gonna get health care and which is in some

ways burdening the system a little bit and the benefit side, the disability side of this. But if that's what the intent of Congress to do is basically give everybody disability checks for that, then that's what you're going to have to look at going forward. So for me, it's saying, okay, what are the real medical consequences of this? What can we do to treat this? This is also something I brought up that Bobby Kennedy and I actually talked about as well. We talked about it from a vaccine perspective but also some others. You know, is just saying, you know,

how can we, you know, look at these conditions and begin to know that what we're seeing and the treatments are effective to what we have? And I think that's the question sometimes never asked. So for me, I'm having to live with PACTAC and say, how do we fix it? It's a good thing to get these people in who have these cancers, have this to make sure we're treating them, getting the health care they need in the community or with us. So that's really where for the burn pit people and for the epoxy exposure people, we're keeping that commitment. And contrary to lies, we didn't cut any toxic exposure funds. We actually, the Congress just actually added in more money

in this latest CR that was just done. So again, I cannot tell you the magnitude of lies that I deal with on a daily basis. Yeah. And now we got a big one coming in too. And not a lot I can tell you as much about this, but we're trying to implement that. It's the Dole Act, Elizabeth Dole Act,

which is gonna deal with with caregivers at home and And other things that have been building up over time. I'm now trying to figure out How do I do that and process it properly? Because some of it we were not funded for here's a here's another trick, you know, and look I've been in Congress So I I participated on you know, fortunately in this is we passed up. We don't fund it And so we suspect the VA which by the way, you're complaining about how much money we have now you can play it But now you're telling me to do something that could be literally billions of dollars and I'm having to find the money So this is you know

But I'm having a ball. It sounds like it because I believe in what I'm doing So with all these these cuts was it 83,000 jobs right now are on the line at the VA? There's about 15%, so give or take around, that's what we're looking at. And so that money that's going to those jobs, that just won't disappear, that will get reallocated into something else like healthcare. Yeah, that's what, I mean, that would be what we fight for is to get reallocated into something else like healthcare. Yeah, that's what I mean, that will be what we fight for is to get it reallocated. Some if you get to the point, probably would go to something differently. I'm not going to say all will just stay in all that, especially with what we got going

on. That might be my preference. But again, also is the workforce slimming and the monies that we can spend going to where it needs to go. And I think that's going gonna be the big key for us is making sure that now, again, one of the things is Congress again holds purse strings, you know, in actuality,

they are the ones that pass the budgets and put the monies in there and everything else. So we've got to make the decision so that we do have cuts, we do have things that don't continue on in our budgets. Because the one thing we've not talked about, and we've had senior military leaders and others, our national debt and deficits are a national security issue. We can't keep going the way we're going in this. The VA will always be one that's going to probably be looked at is to make us as efficient as we possibly can. And we're going to

do that and we're're gonna do our part. We're already well ahead in working that way. But also I have to be, as I've told our staff many times, I've told, you know, worked with the White House and everybody else, is I said, look, we're gonna do it a measured way because at the end of the day, I'm dealing with people. I'm the only agency up there that has to deal with cuts,

but actually also has to look at doctors and nurses and families in the face and say, we're taking care of your health care. No other agency has to do that. DOD is about as close as, I would say, that comes to having to deal with the sort of real viral side of people in the decisions that he makes, life or death kind of decision, where does my son or daughter get sent kind of thing. I'm on the other end of it in which that it's very, we got to be very careful where we make

it so that we're not hurting veterans and we're giving them the ability to get the disability benefits or the other benefits they've earned. So I take it very seriously, but do I think we can get a large amount of that number? You better believe it. I do believe it because I know, and one of the reasons I know is because everybody that's coming up who's saying, Oh, well all the wait times are going to go up and all the backlogs are going to go up. Well, I just have four years of proof that tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands

of people didn't solve your problem. So why don't we try it a little differently here? Let's give them a better organization. Here's a better thing. Like I said earlier, give me an HR tool that actually lets me know how many people I have and where they're at. Give me a computer system that can begin to screen disability benefits and others to help the actual person so that we can take the easy ones, the tinnitus and everything. Let's take those off the table. Let's quit griping and going paperwork and paperwork about that, let's take the easy's off the shelf so that we can get to the harder ones to determine their level of disability. Let's do things with AI, never taking a human component out of it because there's always

a special with veterans, there's complex cases. 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 over give but not under give either. But why don't we use computer and AI training to actually say, let's do this better and do it quicker. I'm all for doing things better and quicker, Sean. What's the old saying? Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

That's where we got to be here. And I'm committed to doing that. I'm asking questions that others may have asked. I'm just going to be doing it differently because as I've told all our folks, I sit here with you as about as content an individual as I can be. I've had, you know, 59 or 60 years of life. I've had the experiences of being around the world, sitting with presidents and kings, and doing things in Congress, and being with a lawyer, helping people in court, standing beside them on their worst day, and helping them out.

I've had the privilege of pastoring a little church that grew into a little bit bigger church. I've had a wife that's been with me for 36, almost 37 years. We've been together 38. I have three kids. I'm at the point in my life where I want to help others get better. I'm at that point I want to turn around and say, for all this experience and where I've been, I want to make sure we're doing something right. I get as much joy out of somebody that's working for me coming to me and saying, hey, we got

this done. That's the celebration for me because I've really come to the conclusion over years of working this and believing this one statement that if I help enough people in life get what they want, I'll get what I want. Well now we're in a place to really make this happen. So for me, I don't know what will happen if I get to stay for four years in this. I don't care. I get four years to make a difference in the life of my brothers and sisters and warfighters

that gave something to this country. And now my job is to make sure that that country who promised them things, who set it up, actually does it. I can't think of a better calling. And I'll take the arrows, I'll take the slings, I'll go to Congress and have the other side of the aisle yell at me and tell me I'm bad. That's fine. You come at me.

Because I'm going to do the best I can with what I have, with what they gave me. But the one thing about it, Sean, is this. You're not going to kick around the VA anymore without offering solutions. You're not going to scare my veterans and you're not going to scare my employees without this secretary calling you out when you are wrong. And I've seen it so much in the last few weeks. It's disgusting. I've had sitting senators lie repeatedly about who was let go. I've had House members and senators lie repeatedly about, as I said earlier, appointments

getting put off, surgeries getting put off, delays are already going up. It's been three weeks when 2,400 people who never touched any of those things were laid off, and you're telling me this is a problem? Where have you been for 10 years when GAO says that we're as screwed up as we have been? Don't tell me that anymore. We may not get everything I want to get accomplished. I may not be able to help every veteran but we're damn sure gonna try because it's not gonna happen anymore. Tired of it. Good for you. I think that's the perfect place to end this Tired of it. Good for you. I think that's the perfect place to end this and I'm glad you're in there.

I hope these changes happen. Buddy, I'm looking forward to it. With folks like you and others, we're going to have to make it happen. Perfect. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it. Thank you. Expert entrepreneur Ed Milet is on a mission to max out your life. I exist here weekly so that you can make your dreams come true, become the man or woman

you're capable of, and then pay it forward. It's time to get laser focused on peak performance. Clarity equals focus, and focus equals success. That's what I'm here to do every week with you. Max out. The Ed Mylett Show. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.