Our nation has kept faith with its veterans. Funding for veterans healthcare and benefits is strong, and has increased more than 75 percent in the last decade.

Our greatest privilege and responsibility as leaders of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs is to provide our veterans with a system that cares for their wounds and ensures that they have an opportunity to succeed.

The sacrifices ordinary American men and women from communities large and small have been willing to make, often before they were past their teenage years, have secured our nation unprecedented freedoms and made us the world's bulwark of liberty.

Men and women whose early youth was shaped in the ordeal of the Great Depression showed the values formed in that crucible when tyranny threatened a world.

From a generation that came of age during the Great Depression, millions of our country's best and bravest took up arms in a worldwide struggle against tyranny.

Each family of the United States military now attends to their loved ones funeral with a wrenching worry that it will be met possibly with a protest or a demonstration.

I expect VA's inspector general and the FBI to work closely together so that we can identify and eliminate the flaws that allowed this leak and prosecute any criminal acts.