Collins Testifies at the House Veterans' Affairs Budget Hearing, May 15, 2025
May 15, 2025 · The Union Herald · 4:06:16
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
VA Secretary Doug Collins testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on May 15, 2025, at the committee’s hearing on the Department of Veterans Affairs’ budget request for fiscal year 2026 and fiscal year 2027 advance appropriations, in The Union Herald’s carry of the hearing — his first testimony before the committee, though, as the chairman noted, not his first time in the House. The chairman put the request’s shape on the record as he stated it: $187.2 billion requested for the VA for the next year, including $134.6 billion in discretionary funding and another $50 billion from the Toxic Exposure Fund, an increase of more than 17 percent over the prior year.
Collins opened by narrowing his purpose to one sentence, as he stated it: to make the VA exactly what it is supposed to be — taking care of veterans in the most efficient and effective way through its health, benefits, and cemetery administrations. He told the committee that front-line clinicians are exactly the employees he wants at the VA and have nothing to fear from the restructuring: the department, he said, has put 300,000 positions off limits and is hiring into them. His case against the status quo was a staffing paradox, as he stated it: the VA had added some 52,000 full-time equivalents between 2021 and 2024 and, by metrics established before he arrived, things had gotten worse — evidence, in his argument, that the department’s problems could not be solved by money and headcount alone.
Why it matters
The afternoon hearing completed Collins’s budget-day double: the appropriators in the morning, the authorizing committee in the afternoon, and at both the same argument — a request growing by more than 17 percent, defended by a Secretary simultaneously cutting contracts and targeting a smaller workforce. The 300,000 protected-positions figure he stated here became the standard answer to the workforce criticism that followed him through the year.
Scoreboard watch
Scoreboard watch: the fiscal year 2026 VA request as stated by the committee chairman on May 15, 2025 — $187.2 billion in total, $134.6 billion discretionary plus $50 billion from the Toxic Exposure Fund, up more than 17 percent — and Collins’s statement that 300,000 positions are off limits and being hired into. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.
Sources: The Union Herald, “House Hearing on Department of Veterans Affairs FY 2026 Budget and FY 2027 Advance Appropriations” (carry of the May 15, 2025 House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing, embedded above; hearing title and witness list per the committee’s listing as carried in the upload description; testimony as delivered by Secretary Collins and members of the committee).
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