Herbert Hoover photo

The President's News Conference

July 08, 1930

VETERANS' ADMINISTRATION

THE PRESIDENT. As you know, we secured the passage through Congress of the bill authorizing the consolidation of all veterans' agencies, that is, the Pensions Bureau, the Veterans' Bureau, and the Soldiers' Home. As you know, the Pensions Bureau comes out of the Interior Department and the Soldiers' Home out of the War Department.

That bill places large authority in the hands of the President in the matter of rearranging those activities, and establishes a new official the Government, called the Veterans' Administrator--the whole establishment being known as the Veterans' Administration.

I have prepared the necessary Executive order for the consolidation of the bureaus, and it is proposed to continue the three agencies for the present, that is the Pensions Bureau, under the present Acting Director, to place an Acting Director in the Veterans' Bureau, and proceed slowly with the necessary administration changes. We will need to transfer some of the functions of each of those bureaus, one to the other, in order to bring about some very important economies. Also we will continue General [George H.] Wood as head of the Soldiers' Home. The Board of Managers of the Home have been hitherto managing it, but will become an Advisory Board, and I am appointing General [Frank T.] Hines as the Administrator of Veterans' Affairs. General Hines has had a very important commercial appointment offered to him, but he has agreed to stay on, temporarily at least, until we secure the effective foundations of the new organization.

As I have said, we would be able to effect considerable economies in the administration of the three bureaus by separating the domiciliary questions from questions of hospitalization, and consolidating fiscal relations between veterans and different segments of the bureaus. The whole of it will present a consolidated budget this year for the three services of about $800 million, so that the new establishment becomes one of the most important ones in the whole Government.

I regard that step in organizing of Federal machinery as the most important step we have had since this administration has come in

.And I have nothing more on this occasion.

Note: President Hoover's one hundred and twenty-fourth news conference was held in the White House at 12 noon at Tuesday, July 8, 1930.

On the same day, the White House also issued a text of the President's statement on the establishment of the Veterans' Administration (see Item 227).

Herbert Hoover, The President's News Conference Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/211005

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