BACKGROUND PRESS CALL BY SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL ON THE PRESIDENT’S ROADMAP TO EMPOWER VETERANS AND END A NATIONAL TRAGEDY OF SUICIDE (PREVENTS) INITIATIVE.

Office of the Press Secretary FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 5, 2019

BACKGROUND PRESS CALL BY SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL ON THE PRESIDENT’S ROADMAP TO EMPOWER VETERANS AND END A NATIONAL TRAGEDY OF SUICIDE (PREVENTS) INITIATIVE. Via Teleconference   10:05 A.M. EST      MR. DEERE:  Good morning everyone, and thank you for joining today's background call on the executive order the President will sign later this afternoon.  A couple ground rules: This call is on background and attributable to a senior administration official.  It is embargoed until the conclusion of the call.      With that, I will turn it over to our senior administration official to brief us on the executive order the President will sign.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Thank you, Operator.  And thank you, Judd.  And thank you all for your time this morning. In recent years, both at the agency level and at the administration level, there's been an effort to reduce the number of veteran suicides.  In spite of billions of dollars of investment and a non-profit sea of goodwill, the impact has been minimal.  That is why, today, the President is signing an executive order launching the PREVENTS Initiative, which stands for the "President's Roadmap to Empower Veterans and End the National Tragedy of Suicide," which is a national call to action. This order creates a new Cabinet-level task force directed by Secretary of VA Wilkie.  Within 365 days, the task force will create a comprehensive national public health roadmap to empower veterans to pursue an improved quality of life, coordinate suicide prevention efforts, prioritize related research activities, and engender collaboration across public and private sectors to end the national tragedy of suicide. Part of the roadmap is to develop a national research strategy that engenders public and private stakeholders to align resources and efforts to solve this issue with a cohesive and strategic plan that challenges the frontier of our understanding of related and contributing health factors. Additionally, under this order, the administration will also partner with Congress to work side by side with state and local governments to provide resources, technical assistance, and coordination in the form of grants that empower veteran communities to provide critical information, networks of support, and services when and where they are needed. This approach allows the community, who is already serving two thirds of the veteran population, to foster communities where veterans and their families can thrive, as well as improve the quality of life for our veterans and turn the tide on this crisis. In that sense, the roadmap will be a national strategy that lays out the roles and responsibilities for each of the federal agencies: where does DOD start and end, and where does VA pick up, as well as the rest of the Cabinet.  And then where does non-government and private sector play a role, and how can they be helpful and participate in ending this crisis. And with that, I'll leave it there. Q    Hello.  It's Bill White.  I just -- I didn't know who was speaking, Judd, after you were speaking. MR. DEERE:  What's your question?  I'm sorry. Q    Oh, no, I just didn’t know who was speaking -- who was announcing the announcement, so we could address that person. MR. DEERE:  The call is on background, attributable to a senior administration official. Q    Oh, I got you.  I'm sorry.  I didn't catch all that.  I just wanted to thank you very much.  As somebody who has spent the last 20 years working with the Intrepid, the Fisher House, the Fallen Heroes Fund, this is one of the most important things coming out right now.  And the fact that you've elevated it to the Cabinet level and to Bob Wilkie, it's going to be tremendous. I will just send you an email to follow up.  We have some great research and development that's been done at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence program, which is across 15 major military medical bases.  And I think that work, coupled with the leadership that President Trump is taking on this, will really have an impact and we can reduce those suicides, which are so significant and so horrible to these families who have given their life for our freedoms. It's just tremendous what you're doing.  So thank you. MR. DEERE:  Thanks, Bill. Q    Hi, this is Andrew Feinberg with Breakfast Media.  Thanks for doing the call.  Just for our own reference, could we have the name of the administration official?  It's unusual for even a source on background to be anonymous. MR. DEERE:  At this time, the call is on background, attributable to a senior administration official.  I have no change on that. Q    Hi.  Charlie Spiering from Breitbart News.  Thanks for having the call.  I'm curious about the President's announcement.  How is this not just another "more government bureaucracy" and how is this actually addressing the problem?      And secondly, do we have any update on the veterans suicide hotline -- how it's working and whether this will be included as part of the task force?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Thank you.  The intention is for it to not be government, as usual, by making it a national call to action and figure out how to empower the rest of non-government to play a participating role in this by laying out a strategy not only for the administration, but also for everybody else. The intention is to have a unified front.  And if the thesis of our problem is that 70 percent of veterans that commit suicide are not inside the VA, we have to come up with a pretty solid strategy for the community for them to be effective.  And so that’s what the intention here is.      Q    Thank you.  Jeff Schogol with Task & Purpose.  The senior administration official mentioned something about grants.  And there has been success with Housing and Urban Development, and VA support of housing grants.  And I'm wondering what type of grants is this task force going to look into to make sure that veterans get the mental health care they need?  Thank you.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Thank you.  Great question.  And that is probably the most analogous representation for where the task force will be going, is the HUD-VASH SSVF Supportive Services.  And the intention is to be able to issue a grant out at the state level or potentially lower, depending on the type of community that needs a response or meets the grant criteria, which hasn’t been developed yet.  But the assumption is that they will organize and align all of the efforts and resources that they currently have to provide a larger sense of navigation so that when a service member needs to find resources, there is no wrong door, if you will, and they can get connected and routed back to the resources either at the VA or -- and maybe it's potentially not something that's a resource of the VA; maybe it’s a housing issue or maybe something else.  So the intention is to be able to organize a community to respond effectively.      Q    Hi, it's Quil Lawrence with NPR News.  Is this going to be funded through an additional revenue stream?  Or is it going to take the place of current VA funding for suicide prevention?  And also, can you give us a quick update on the program from last year to enroll service members who are leaving the service within their first year in VA healthcare -- mental health care?  Thanks.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Yes.  It's unclear at this point.  The thought is that it would a new appropriation.  And it's unclear; it hasn’t been developed yet. And then, as far as the previous EO -- and for specificity, the previous EO on suicide prevention very narrowly focused on the transition space between DOD and VA in the one year.  And so, with that update, it’s moving along.  And the biggest list that was within there is to do outreach and figure out who is most at risk in the transitioning population.  And VA has currently stood up more than a process of standing up a call line.  And there was legislation that was passed in support of that EO with an NDAA last year that allowed Military OneSource to continue to provide services for the year after so there would effective overlap. Q    Hi, this is Susannah Luthi with Modern Healthcare.  Thanks for doing this call.  Can you drill down a little deeper into how you see the private healthcare system helping out with this?  Who they would be coordinating with, how they get the grants. SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  I'm not sure that it's private healthcare that would be getting grants.  I think this would be done at a government level with the states. And so when we say a public or private collaboration, the intent is to be able to engage across the system.  Right?  So you have state, local, territorial, and tribal officials that we need to be hitting private healthcare hospital systems, healthcare providers, clinicians, academic affiliates, educational institutions, faith-based community, non-governmental/non-profit veteran- and military-serving organizations. So the intention is to create an umbrella under which all people are able to come together and figure out how they participate effectively in coordinating resources that are needed, when and where they're needed.      Q    Hi, it's Quil Lawrence again, from NPR.  Have you identified -- I know with the HUD-VASH vouchers and the homelessness outreach, there are sort of already coalitions of community organizations that work on homelessness that VA was able to, sort of, tap into and then just plus them up with a huge infusion of government money.  Have you all identified some sort of -- is there a consortium of organizations that work on vet suicide, mental health, that kind of thing?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  I wouldn't say that there is a very one specific organization.  There are more than a handful of community collaboration models that were initiated through the SSVF and HUD-VASH program.  And so the impetus here would be not reinventing the wheel; just tapping into what already exists. And for everyone's awareness, last month we had -- in January, actually, we launched the Governor's Challenge.  So seven states were selected to incubate best practices for who is already doing good community collaboration models around mental health and suicide prevention. They came up to Washington, D.C. and participated in a policy academy and have then been sent back out to the states.  And SAMHSA is going to come out, as well as VA, and continue to provide them technical assistance over the course of next year so that, when these grants are starting to come to fruition, we have models that we can look to see how this works effectively. And because I'm sure there will be a follow-up question, I don't have all of the states that were selected off the top of my head.  It is Arizona, Montana, Texas, New Hampshire, Colorado, Kansas, and Virginia.  Actually, I do have all of them.   Q    Hi there.  This is Rose Thayer with Stars and Stripes.  I was curious about the HUD-VASH vouchers.  I know a lot of times people have trouble getting them -- using them in their community because they're not accepted at a lot of places and with landlords.  Do you have any intent to help with that?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  I'm not sure that that will be part of the National Strategy to Prevent Veteran Suicide.  As far as there are very specific issues within the HUD-VASH program at a state or local level, I suppose we would need more of a specificity and then try to resolve that with VA.      MR. DEERE:  Operator, we'll take one more question.      Q    Hi, this is Megan Howard calling from Bloomberg Government.  Can you hear me?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Yes, ma'am.            Q    I was just curious about the fiscal impact.  Do you have any idea how much money you are looking to put into the grant?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  At this time, no, not really.  I mean, the best analogous would be the SSVF programming.  But it's going to be up to the task force to kind of figure out what level of effort is needed and what level of grant needs to come down.  So, more to follow.      MR. DEERE:  Once again, thank you to our senior administration official for briefing us today.  As a reminder, the call is attributable to a senior administration official on background.  And the embargo lifts at the conclusion of the call.  Thank you all for joining us.                              END                10:20 A.M. EST