During today’s markup of the GI Bill Tuition Fairness Act of 2013, Congressman Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas) and a majority of his colleagues on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee passed Chairman Jeff Miller’s amendment to impose a five year moratorium on performance bonuses for senior executives at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Congressman Huelskamp made the following statement:

“When I asked a VA official to tell me what he did to earn his $55,000 bonus, his hemming and hawing amounted to ‘beats me.’ Needless to say, that stunning admission was a seminal moment in the ongoing Congressional oversight of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Banning the managers’ bonuses for five years is an appropriate remedy to VA mismanagement. There is one thing more outrageous than the benefits claim backlog crisis, deadly Legionnaire’s outbreak, construction cost overruns, Patton movie parody fiasco, and extravagant conference flap. It is the discovery that the very officials who presided over these scandals were rewarded – with taxpayer funded cash bonuses – for their gross incompetence and mismanagement of taxpayers’ money. Every taxpayer, and especially every veteran, is owed an apology by this Administration.”