Collins Testifies at the Senate Appropriations FY26 VA Budget Hearing, Jun. 24, 2025
June 24, 2025 · Forbes Breaking News · 1:52:34
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
VA Secretary Doug Collins testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies on June 24, 2025, at its hearing titled “A Review of the President’s Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request for the Department of Veterans Affairs,” in Forbes Breaking News’ carry of the session. The subcommittee framed the request as it stated it: a fiscal year 2026 request of $441 billion, more than a $22 billion increase, including a large increase for the electronic health record program — a total of $3.5 billion, as stated at the hearing — alongside bipartisan concern, voiced at the hearing, over an $18 billion shift away from what Congress had advanced for VA medical care toward the Toxic Exposure Fund created by the PACT Act.
Senator Jon Ossoff put the top line to the Secretary directly, and Collins confirmed it on the record as stated in the exchange: the total all-in request for fiscal year 2026 is $441.2 billion. The same exchange fixed the department’s staffing shape as the department stated it: currently some 465,000 VA employees, 409,000 of them in the Veterans Health Administration, with the medical services request built to employ 396,000 in fiscal year 2026, a figure supplied at the table by the department’s budget official. Democratic members pressed the other ledger, as they stated it: staff fired and contracts cancelled — one member charging that a cancer registry in her state was among the contracts cancelled — the elimination of the VASP foreclosure-relief program, and a change to VA provider guidelines that struck the words age, national origin, politics, marital status, and disability from the anti-discrimination policy. Suicide prevention, veterans homelessness, women veterans’ care, and rural care ran through the questioning on both sides.
Why it matters
This hearing completes Collins’s fiscal year 2026 appropriations circuit: the House appropriators heard the same request on May 15, 2025, in the hearing paged elsewhere on this site, and the Senate subcommittee that shares the VA’s purse with them heard it here — and put the all-in number, $441.2 billion, into a yes-or-no exchange with the Secretary himself. The staffing figures stated here — 465,000 current employees against a 396,000 medical-services plan — are the Senate-side record of the workforce fight that began with Collins’s March 2025 message.
Scoreboard watch
Scoreboard watch: the fiscal year 2026 VA request as confirmed on June 24, 2025 — $441.2 billion all-in, as put to Secretary Collins and confirmed by him; the electronic health record program at $3.5 billion total, as stated at the hearing; and the department’s stated staffing shape of some 465,000 current employees with 396,000 to be employed through the fiscal year 2026 medical services request. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.
Sources: Forbes Breaking News, “VA Secretary Doug Collins Testifies Before The Senate Appropriations Committee” (carry of the Jun. 24, 2025 hearing, embedded above; hearing title, subcommittee, and witness list per The Union Herald’s carry of the same hearing; testimony as delivered by Secretary Collins and members of the subcommittee).
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