Mexican tomato exporters are conducting unfair trade practices and dumping tomatoes into the U.S. market, despite the 2019 Tomato Suspension Agreement. This is forcing American tomato farmers out of business and destroying the domestic tomato industry. U.S....
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) office will host in-person and virtual Mobile Office Hours next week to assist constituents with federal casework issues in their respective local communities. These office hours offer constituents who do not live close to one of...
El senador estadounidense Marco Rubio (R-FL) habló con Nio Encendio de Maxima 92.5 de Tampa Bay, sobre cómo la inflación ha impactado a las familias, sobre las olas de migración ilegal, sobre el juicio político de Biden vs. el de Trump, sobre el canje de prisioneros...
This year alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has encountered an estimated 40,000 Chinese nationals along the U.S. northern and southern border. The Biden Administration has left the border wide open, allowing potential spies from the Chinese Communist...
Gotion, Inc., a Chinese company and U.S. subsidiary of Guoxuan High-Tech, announced a lithium battery plant in Illinois that is expected to open next year. This CCP-tied battery company is expected to benefit from green-energy tax breaks under the Democrats’ Inflation...
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined National Public Radio’s All Things Considered to discuss his plan to expand the child tax credit for working families. See below for the full transcript and listen to the edited interview here. On the connection between the child...
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) today joined Senators Jerry Moran (R-KS), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and John McCain (R-AZ) to introduce the S. 290, Increasing VA Accountability to Veterans Act of 2015, legislation to give the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) more authority to hold corrupt executives accountable for their actions. The legislation would give the VA Secretary the authority to reduce the pensions of executives convicted of a crime, limit the amount of time VA senior executive service (SES) employees can spend on paid administrative leave, and reform the Department’s performance appraisal system for senior executives.
The House companion bill was introduced last week by House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL).
“To fix the VA and make sure it achieves its mission of providing high quality and timely health care to our veterans, we must eliminate the culture of incompetence, negligence and underperformance that has been tolerated and, in some cases, even covered up for too long,” said Rubio. “Last year, I was encouraged that my proposal authorizing the VA secretary to fire bad managers became law. Now we have to make it clear that if you’re a senior VA executive found guilty of criminal activity during your tenure, you should have no guarantee of a bonus or pension. We owe our veterans the very best health care and customer service, and that’s going to be hard to achieve as long as you have VA officials believing there are no consequences for poor work or even criminal behavior.”
The Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act (the Choice Act), which included legislation sponsored by Rubio that gave the VA Secretary the authority to fire senior executives based on performance, was signed into law on Aug. 7, 2014. The legislation was passed in response to the biggest scandal in VA history, which centered on appointment wait time manipulation. At the bill’s signing, President Obama said, “If you engaged in an unethical practice, if you cover up a problem, you should be fired.” Still, not a single VA senior executive has been fired for wait time manipulation. Instead, corrupt VA employees have been placed on paid administrative leave for several months.
Specifically, the Increasing VA Accountability to Veterans Act of 2015 would:
Click here to read the full text of the legislation.