This is about giving veterans who have sacrificed everything, every option we have to help them fulfill a simple dream of starting a family. Now as we all know, our men and women in uniform have become increasingly susceptible to productive spinal and traumatic brain injuries due to the changing weapons of war. But as we know, thanks to modern medicine, many of these Service Members are being kept alive and are returning home. In fact, as of the new year, there are 2,348 Service Members who are living with reproductive urinary or pelvic injuries as a result of this war. And like so many of our veterans, these men and women come home and want to return to their lives. They want to find employment. And importantly, they want to start a family. Yet, what they find when they go to r. V. A. Is that the Fertility Services that are available dont meet their extremely complex needs. In fact, veterans who suffer from these injuries find that the v. A. Is specifically barred from providing more
First person to give all of us your cell phone number so i hope this is not a situation where it is be careful what you ask for. I mean it. We appreciate it. Senator brown brought up the question of the significant events of that occurred to our enlisted people, our soldiers that never get into the records as i have heard of veterans as they are trying to make their claims, they are not able to get the information to back up those claims. It leads me to ask you when general gates and secretary shinseki were leading the dod and the v. A. Respectively, they talked about seamless records so that the records follow the person, the individual. Here we are. We still do not have the compatible systems. Is this something you would pursue so that when our people leave active service and become veterans as their records are with them, it follows them. Apparently this require some kind of a huge computer change now we have not been able to achieve even if a lot of money has been spent. Would you
Fathers. Virtually every field. Pioneers of the future are developing new technologies am a new science new solutions, new products, new ideas. Currenteakthroughs are in the private sector, nonprofit sector, and in government. They are going to continue and accelerate. Just as the Founding Fathers had to think through the relationship between organized citizens, so we have to think through the relationship between organized public effort and the technologies which are revolutionizing our lives. My recent book outlines the scale of change has occurred around us and begins to imagine a new 21stcentury model of government that takes advantage of this emerging world. Our current federal bureaucracy is trapped in the late 19th century. Bureaucracy is largely an intellectual pattern developed at the same time as the manual typewriter. They were the clerical requirements of carbon paper which led to a pentagon of enormous scale. 17 miles of hallways, 6. 6 million square feet, and extraordinar
When i ask all of you, take out your smartphone if you have one. To get a sense of the audience. You are holding the entry point for a massive information system. I think it is important to understand that. Every time you think the proposals in this speech are unrealistic, i want you to look at your own smartphone and the apps you already have installed. Which is more presented of our future . The current failing bureaucracy or the smartphone in your hand . We have the opportunity to create a 21stcentury Veterans Service system, empowering veterans to use their smartphones to recenter services on their lives, at their convenience, and with the veteran rather than bureaucrat in charge. This vision of a dramatically more effective, more modern, more responsive veterans centered system is part of a much larger opportunity to think about the transition from late 19th century bureaucracy to 21stcentury citizen centered government. The three Major Regions to have a National Dialogue at the f
It is always great to be back discussing ideas. I want to thank the cnn Investigative Team who stayed on the scandals until they broke through and became a national crisis. Early on the stories were dismissed as isolated small problems. The teams continued effort grew the facts until they had to be dealt with. Our thinking on the future of the Veterans Administration has been deeply influenced by the hard work of chairman jeff miller and there find many staffs. We are further down the road because of their help. They have worked tirelessly and against a lot of opposition to help americans veterans find a better future. I want to thank our chief researcher on the v. A. And who developed the interactive map you will see. I want to thank Ross Worthington for helping think through these proposals. Let me say this is going to be a bold by washington standards radical speech. Im going to use terms that are not common in washington circles. Let me share a few of these new ideas ahead of time.