PRIORITIES • Protect Our Future • Policy to

Serve Our Veterans

Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.

I grew up in a military family.

My dad was disabled veteran.

He came home from a war with shrapnel in his back and in his brain, and for a while he was mostly fine. Later a run of back surgeries went wrong, and the pain never left him.

He had put his life on the line. What rural America had for a man in constant pain was the cheapest, fastest thing on the shelf. Not a plan. Not a team. A prescription and the door. He became addicted to opioids, and it nearly cost our family everything.

My brother served on a nuclear submarine.

He was deployed underwater for months at a time after 9/11. We waited at home not knowing when he would surface or what shape he would be in when he did.

The service belongs to the whole household, and the bill does not stop coming when somebody gets home.

We know this, and we say it every other November — then, we go back to treating care for veterans as a budget line instead of a debt.

It is happening today. The VA's own inspector general has reported severe nursing shortages across most VA medical centers. Roughly 5.2 million veterans — about one in four — live in rural America, farther from care and getting less of it.

We always find the money to send to the defense contractors who price gouge the tax payer. The budget is never tight when it is time to buy the weapons or start the deployment. It gets tight the moment they come home. That is backwards, and Americans of every political stripe know it.

Here’s what I’ll do — and why

Write VA staffing minimums into law. Right now VA staffing rises and falls with whoever is in charge and whatever mood Congress is in, and veterans absorb the difference in longer waits and canceled appointments. I would legislate mandatory minimum staffing levels tied to the veterans each facility actually serves. You do not get to promise care and then decline to hire the people who deliver it.

Guarantee the same standard of care no matter where a veteran lives. A veteran in a city and a veteran in Colusa County earned exactly the same thing, and they do not get it. Rural veterans travel farther and wait longer, because construction dollars, specialists, and even telehealth infrastructure concentrate in metro medical centers. I would set an enforceable national standard — how far you should have to travel, how long you should have to wait — and hold the VA to it out here, not just on paper in Washington. The veteran who lives farthest out should not be the one who gets the least.

Make mental health care something a veteran can actually get. Not a referral, not a waitlist, not a number to call. Appointments close to home, telehealth that works, and enough clinicians to answer when somebody finally asks for help. The hardest part is asking. The system should not punish a veteran for getting that far.

Build the VA around who serves now. Women are the fastest-growing part of the veteran population, and the system was designed decades ago around a patient who did not look like them. That shows up in everything from specialty care to whether a clinic has the right providers on staff. The VA has to be built for the force we actually have.

Pay for the care that works, not just the cheapest thing on the shelf. My father's generation was handed pills because pills were what the system reimbursed. We know more now. I would expand VA coverage for physical therapy, acupuncture, chiropractic care, and other evidence-based approaches to chronic pain, so a veteran living in pain has real options. When we only pay for the pill, the pill is what everyone gets. I watched how that story ends.

Strengthen the VA. Do not dismantle it. Every few years someone proposes solving the VA's problems by handing veterans a card and sending them into the private insurance market. That drains the VA and hands the money to an industry that has spent thirty years perfecting the art of denying claims. Community care has a real role where the VA genuinely cannot reach, and that is exactly the rural gap I want closed. But it fills the gaps. It does not replace the system. The VA's expertise in combat trauma, prosthetics, and service-connected injury exists nowhere else in American medicine, and once it is gone we do not get it back.

Build a real bridge from service to work. Too many veterans come home with skills the civilian economy would kill for and no way to translate them. I would start transition assistance well before discharge and continue it after, with paid training, apprenticeships, and credentialing that counts what someone did in uniform instead of making them start over — into nursing and healthcare, advanced manufacturing, energy, and the skilled trades. A veteran should not have to explain to a hiring manager what a decade of leadership was worth.

Pay for it by ending the fraud on the other side of the ledger. We do not need to raise your taxes or cut anything to do this. The Pentagon has never passed a clean audit. Defense contractors overcharge for parts by multiples, with no real competition to stop them. I would push fair-pricing mandates, independent audits, real competition in contracting instead of the same handful of giants, and a freeze on the Pentagon's budget growth until it can pass an audit — and put those savings directly into the VA. We can afford to take care of veterans. We have just been spending the money on the contractors who profit from sending them.

What this means for Our District

We have veterans in every one of our nine counties, and out here the distances are real. An appointment can cost a whole day and a tank of gas before you ever see a doctor. The rural gap in VA care has a face on it: a neighbor weighing whether the drive is worth it, and sometimes deciding it is not.

Let me say this plainly, because it matters. I am not going to question any veteran's service, including my opponent's. He served, he was wounded, and he earned every bit of that. This is not about who wore the uniform.

It is about where the money goes.

Our congressman has taken $99,500 from Lockheed Martin's PAC over his career. That is not a rounding error. It is more than he has taken from PG&E, and it puts a single defense contractor among the largest donors of his career. In December, he voted for a defense package of more than $900 billion.

Meanwhile the VA's own watchdog reports the nursing shortages, and the veteran in Colusa County makes the long drive.

Despite being a veteran, he neglects to serve those that served alongside him. All the while, Lockheed Martin funds his campaigns and rakes in cash that would be better spent on veterans.

And he refuses to use his leverage: for fiscal year 2026, instead of using his leverage on the defense budget when both anti-war Republicans and anti-war Democrats stood up, our current congressman folded: he voted YES on the 2026 NDAA and failed to get enough back for veterans.

That is the pattern I want to break: the contractors never wait, and the veterans always do. I take no corporate PAC money, no special interest money, and no foreign money, and not one dollar from a defense contractor. So when I say the savings belong to veterans instead of shareholders, there is nobody on the other end of the line telling me otherwise.

The bottom line

This is one of the few things left in this country that nearly all of us still agree on. Nobody has to be talked into taking care of the people who served. The failure was never the will. What is missing is the follow-through, and the money that keeps getting spent somewhere else first.

That is fixable, and fixable without asking a single working family for another dollar.

So let's staff the VA like we meant the promise, close the gap for the veteran who lives farthest from the door, pay for the care that actually works, and take the savings out of the contractors instead of out of the people who served.

They kept their end. Let's go keep ours.

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