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Collins Testifies at His Senate Veterans' Affairs Confirmation Hearing, Jan. 21, 2025

January 21, 2025 · CNBC Television · 3:21:00

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Doug Collins testified at his confirmation hearing for Secretary of Veterans Affairs before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on January 21, 2025 — the committee’s first hearing of the 119th Congress — in CNBC Television’s carry of the session. Senator Kevin Cramer, who had served with Collins in the House, introduced him as a former colleague, Navy veteran, military chaplain, and attorney. Collins built his opening statement around the laws he said he had helped pass in the House — the VA MISSION Act, which he called the template for timely access to care, the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act, the PACT Act, and the just-passed Elizabeth Dole Act — and told the committee the VA’s workforce would not have a stronger fighter than him if confirmed, paired with accountability for those who fall short.

Collins closed his statement with two objects, as he described them: his dog tags, a reminder, he said, that every veteran is part of a bigger unit, and a bracelet made for him by a young airman who kept watch on the flight line where he served as a chaplain at Balad — a bracelet he said would sit in the Secretary’s office reminding him daily of the men and women the VA serves. Under questioning from Chairman Jerry Moran, Collins committed, as he stated it, to following the letter and spirit of the MISSION Act from day one, and tied rural access and mental-health care to community care working alongside the VA system, naming suicide prevention one of the department’s biggest issues.

Why it matters

The hearing is the founding statement of Collins’s tenure: a nominee presenting himself first as a veteran and chaplain, and staking his program on the MISSION Act he helped write — veteran choice between VA and community care, with the VA always standing as the backstop. The Senate confirmed him on February 4, 2025, by a vote of 77–23, among the widest bipartisan margins of the administration’s nominees, and he was sworn in on February 5, 2025.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: Collins’s confirmation commitments as he stated them on January 21, 2025 — follow the MISSION Act’s letter and spirit from day one, and make suicide prevention a central fight. Flagged for the scoreboard editor as promise-record material; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: CNBC Television, “Doug Collins faces Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of Veterans Affairs — 1/21/25” (carry of the Jan. 21, 2025 hearing, embedded above; testimony as delivered by Mr. Collins and members of the committee). Confirmation vote and swearing-in per the VA biography and Senate record carried in this site’s team profile.