[WHOOSH]

During the presidential campaign,

Donald Trump vowed he'd take on the bureaucracy at the Veterans

Administration.

Now he pledged to make it more efficient and responsive

to veterans.

But what kind of actions have actually been made?

Have they made a difference since he took office?

Congressman Scott Taylor, former Navy SEAL,

from Virginia's second district, joins us to explain.

Congressman Taylor, the VA has had their share of problems.

Can you tell us about some improvements

that have been made under this administration?

Sure.

Well, yeah, I think you said it very correctly and succinctly

that the VA has certainly had some problems.

And everybody knows that.

You have a secretary, Shulkin, who has really

wanting to tackle this head on, as well as

the president, of course.

So one of the first things that the Congress has passed

is the VA Accountability Act, which allows the secretary

basically to fire folks.

I mean, you had a director in Puerto Rico,

I think, who was getting convicted of a crime,

was taking prescription meds, and something else as well,

too.

But they tried to fire him.

And then he repealed, and he was back on the job.

They couldn't fire him, which is insane.

So you have to have accountability

for the folks that are running the show there, and quite

frankly, a lot of them running it in a poor way.

So that's the first and foremost thing.

You also have more choice in veterans' health care

right now with this secretary--

Congress has passed; the president

has signed as well, too--

which enables vets to be able to seek a little bit

more choice of private care when they can't get the care

they need from the VA centers themselves.

So that's certainly a big, a huge improvement.

I actually just passed-- our office just

passed another VA accountability bill through the House, which

is moving on to the Senate.

And what that would do--

and here in Hampton, we knew that the Hampton facility

was performing at a one-star level out

of a five-star rating.

And all they did to correct that was take the director

and swap them out with someone else.

So no accountability at the highest level.

So this would require the secretary

to report to Congress when they move senior executives,

as well as personally sign off on a senior executive

change like that.

So you're seeing more accountability.

You're seeing more choice.

You're seeing that Secretary Shulkin

is moving to update these old IT legacy systems.

The VA literally has legacy systems that have MS-DOS.

So you remember floppy disks that were out there.

So they're looking at commercial products that are off the shelf

to make sure that it keeps up with technology, to make sure

that it's talking to DoD because what you've seen,

that 100% of the people in the VA are from DoD.

And those systems didn't talk correctly.

So they're changing that.

So there's a lot of improvements coming to the VA

under the leadership of this president and Secretary Shulkin

and Congress, of course.

You also recently passed your first bill

that will tighten requirements on Veterans Affairs Department

administrators to report to Congress when

senior executives are transferred within the VA

system.

So what sparked this bill?

Well you have a huge bureaucratic layers in the VA.

You have, I guess you could say it's socialized medicine, where

it's state controlled.

And as we know, the private sector

does things a little bit better.

That being said, I think it's very important and incumbent

upon leadership to make sure that we do our duty in taking

care of our veterans medically.

Once they're there, they've served us, of course.

And we have to do the same thing for them.

So I'm for more privatization but not complete privatization

because it's the government's duty.

But you just have these bureaucratic layers.

And it seems as though, like I just talked about,

the accountability now that we had to pass legislatively

to remove underperforming, sub-performing senior-level

folks at the VA.

So you had these folks that were protecting the bureaucracy, as

opposed to making sure that the health

care was good for the veterans.

That's not to say-- and I definitely want

to say this-- there are many, many people who work in the VA

system who deeply care about taking care of veterans

and are doing a great job.

But it's pretty clear that there needed

to be some structural changes.

At least 20 veterans are killing themselves each day

in America.

Must the VA share some responsibility

for these shattered lives?

And what can we do?

Are we doing enough to help them before they

take their own lives?

Well, I think that's a great question and of huge concern

to a lot of folks.

One of the problems that I see personally--

and when you look at the 16 years

now that we've been in conflict, never

before has the United States been in this type of conflict

for this long.

And never before has a small percentage of the country--

less than 1% of the country--

been going back over and over again,

sharing that burden on their shoulders and their families'

shoulders.

So you have this gap, too, as well,

when folks get out of active duty, before they have--

when they're on active duty, they

have their teammates that are there that are in the military.

They have these organization, these structures

to be able to deal with problems.

But then when they get out, there's like this gap.

And of course with the VA, we've seen problems

with the suicide hotline.

We've seen problems-- and this is something

that my office is working on-- in that there's not

a uniform policy for walk-ups.

So let's say you come up to a VA,

and you're exhibiting suicidal signs, or you're saying,

I'm suicidal.

Well, there's not a uniform policy

across the whole nation-- because it is decentralized,

in some respects-- that says, what's

the procedures to deal with someone

who comes up physically there.

Now there are also populations-- like, listen,

I'm from the SEAL teams and Special Warfare.

A lot of our folks, the problems that we've had with suicide--

people don't reach out to the VA.

They just don't.

They don't call the suicide hotline.

They're not walking up there.

They're looking for potentially someone else who understands

them-- other veterans that are sort of emergency response

to help them out and their families.

And again, there's that gap when they leave

the service, become veterans.

So my office is working on a suicide prevention program

actually right here in Virginia Beach and the surrounding

areas to look at that gap to say, OK,

let's look at a public-private partnership that brings

the VA in, that brings folks that are working

on traumatic brain injury and PTSD and depression, and also

a quick-response force, if you will,

that can go right to that veteran's house

24/7 to bring them in, to help them in, and then

keep them close to their families as well, too.

So I think that we need to change

the way that we look at suicide prevention with the VA.

And we certainly need a uniform policy across the VA

for people who actually physically walk there.