Newsday, August 2024
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has zeroed in on a plan that he contends would slash services at the Northport VA Hospital, as he attacked the conservative policy book Project 2025 as “a pile of corroded ideas.” The possible service cuts in Northport are found deep inside the 920-page book released last year by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank founded in the Reagan era. Democrats are using the project’s proposals to cast Republicans as extremists, even as former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump seeks to distance himself from the effort.
In a Senate floor speech on Thursday, Schumer (D-N.Y.) held up a photo of the Northport hospital and said he was “sounding the alarm.” He argued that a section of Project 2025 calls for revisiting a plan scuttled by the Senate in 2022 that would have overhauled VA hospital services across the country, including a proposal to close Northport’s emergency room and shift some services to other facilities in the region.
