That was quite a curious little essay that Arizona Rep. Bob Stump shared with your readers (Readers' Forum, Oct. 3) regarding my "attacks" on budget proposals that would do harm to veterans.
Let's see if I have this straight. According to Rep. Stump, I should not be telling veterans that he and his colleagues:- cut $915 million from the president's 1996 request for the Veterans Administration primarily in veterans health care;
- voted down a proposal to restore $213 million to VA's medical care budget;
- voted to take service-connected compensation from incompetent veterans;
- voted to cut my travel budget by 75 percent and attempted to cut the pay of 172 career VA employees in order to silence me; and
- shut the government down twice, which resulted in delays in veterans compensation, pension and education benefits.
I suppose I should have kept my mouth shut and not informed veterans that on the table were proposals to deny compensation to veterans rated 10 percent or 20 percent disabled, to means test compensation earned as a result of illness and disability incurred on active duty and to redefine service connection so as to effectively deny compensation to many veterans who were hurt while serving their country. Rep. Stump and his colleagues are quick to point out that those things did not happen. The disabled veterans of this country and I will just as quickly respond, "Congress should not have been considering them in the first place."
I stand by my statements of the past two years that the long-range congressional budget plan is devastating to veterans and their programs. And yes, the president's out-year budget numbers were very similar, a point in which Rep. Stump takes odd delight. But there is a profound difference in the two approaches to deficit reduction. Unlike Congress, President Clinton has made a commitment to annually review the needs of VA and the veterans it serves and to submit budgets that respond appropriately. Look only as far as his budget proposals for the past two years, in which he recommended significant increases in veterans' health care in particular, and it is evident that he intends to live up to his promise.
Rep. Stump and his colleagues can continue to count on hearing me when their proposals fly in the face of all that is right and moral about this nation's obligation to veterans and their families. That is exactly what a veterans advocate should be doing, and that is what VA employees should expect of their Secretary. The fact that I do, indeed, have the "courage to tell the truth" apparently has frightened those in Washington who prefer it be suppressed. They want me to "be honest with veterans." You can be sure I will.
Jesse Brown
Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Washington, D.C.