President Joe Biden evoked the memory of his late son and praised leaders from both parties for unifying behind veterans Thursday as he and Utah's Republican governor paid tribute to a year-old law that is delivering the largest expansion of veterans benefits in decades.
The president and Gov. Spencer Cox visited the George E. Wahlen Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center to promote the PACT Act, which is intended to improve health care and disability compensation for exposure to toxic substances, including burn pits that were used to dispose of trash on military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More than 348,000 veterans have had their claims approved in the last year, and about 111,000 who are believed to have toxic exposure have enrolled in health care.
“Everything you can imagine is thrown in these pits and incinerated," Biden said. "The waste of war, tires, poisonous chemicals, jet fuels and so much more. Toxic smoke, thick with poison, spreads through the air and into the lungs of our troops.”
He said that when troops exposed to burn pits came home — “many of them the fittest and best-trained warriors we ever sent anywhere” — they were not the same.
The issue of veterans care is personal for Biden. He’s long believed that the brain cancer that took the life of his eldest son, Beau, was caused by exposure to burn pits while he served overseas in the Delaware National Guard. The president's voice caught as he again noted during Thursday's ceremony that Beau Biden had lived “about 400 yards” from a large burn pit during the year he was stationed in Iraq.
Biden sought to share the credit for the act, noting it cleared Congress with bipartisan support while calling it part of his “unity agenda.”
“Don’t tell me we can’t get things done when we work together," he said.
The president is winding up a three-state Western swing in which he has been combining events focused on achievements from his first term with campaign fundraisers aimed at helping him win a second in next year's election.
But the empathetic, deeply personal tone Biden struck Thursday and his praise for bipartisanship were departures from stops earlier this week in Arizona and New Mexico, when he criticized Republicans for failing to support legislation to combat climate change and to increase domestic spending.
Cox also said he wasn't afraid to work across party lines. He noted that some people wondered if a Republican governor would welcome a Democratic president and responded, “I think it’s insane that we’re having those conversations." The remark drew applause.
The expansion of benefits has pleased advocates but tested the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has been racing to add staff to handle the influx of applications. The backlog of disability claims, meaning they've lingered for at least four months without a decision, is expected to grow from about 266,000 now to 730,000 in April.
VA Secretary Denis McDonough told The Associated Press in a recent interview that the department is ahead of its internal projections and working to process veterans' claims faster.
“Now that we’ve urged them to come in and file their claims, we want them to continue to have a good experience with us by getting a timely response back to those claims," he said. "That’s the biggest challenge.”
Although there’s no deadline to apply, anyone who files a claim or simply signals the intent to do so by Monday could collect payments retroactive to last year if the claim is approved. The original cutoff date was Wednesday, but officials extended it because of technical difficulties with the VA website.
