The United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs is the head of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, the department concerned with veterans' benefits and related matters. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and second to last at 17th in the line of succession to the presidency (the position was last until the addition of the United States Department of Homeland Security in 2006). To date, all appointees and acting appointees to the post have been United States military veterans, but that is not a requirement to fill the position.
When the post of Secretary is vacant, the United States Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs or any other person designated by the President serves as Acting Secretary until the President nominates and the United States Senate confirms a new Secretary.
On December 8, 2008, President Barack Obama announced he would nominate retired army General Eric Shinseki to be the 7th Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate on January 20, 2009.
Read more about United States Secretary Of Veterans Affairs: List of Secretaries of Veterans Affairs, Acting Secretaries of Veterans Affairs, Living Former Secretaries of Veterans Affairs
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, secretary, veterans and/or affairs:
“Then the American flag was saluted. In general, in the United States people always salute the American flag.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Maybe we were the blind mechanics of disaster, but you don’t pin the guilt on the scientists that easily. You might as well pin it on M motherhood.... Every man who ever worked on this thing told you what would happen. The scientists signed petition after petition, but nobody listened. There was a choice. It was build the bombs and use them, or risk that the United States and the Soviet Union and the rest of us would find some way to go on living.”
—John Paxton (1911–1985)
“The truth is, the whole administration under Roosevelt was demoralized by the system of dealing directly with subordinates. It was obviated in the State Department and the War Department under [Secretary of State Elihu] Root and me [Taft was the Secretary of War], because we simply ignored the interference and went on as we chose.... The subordinates gained nothing by his assumption of authority, but it was not so in the other departments.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“My gentleman gives the law where he is; he will outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good company for pirates, and good with academicians; so that it is useless to fortify yourself against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as easily exclude myself, as him.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practiced by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)