Fact check: Madison Cawthorn falsely claimed there are ‘zero dollars’ spent on
Kathryn Monet, chief executive officer of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans nonprofit, said Cawthorn’s “zero dollars” claim is “absolutely untrue.” Tom Porter, executive vice president for government affairs at the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America advocacy organization, said it is “simply not true.” Porter added that the American Rescue Plan has an “enormous amount of money for veterans in it” and that it’s important for officials to “be accurate” about government spending given that veterans are listening.
Cawthorn’s office said it could not speak on the record about the tweet because it came from the congressman’s campaign Twitter account, not his official congressional account. But a source close to Cawthorn who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the tweet was actually an assertion that zero dollars of this particular ICE contract to house migrants is going to homeless veterans — not, in other words, a claim that the government is spending zero dollars on homeless veterans period.
But Cawthorn did not make that clear at all. If he had wanted to say that zero dollars of an immigration contract unrelated to veteran homelessness is going to veteran homelessness, he could have explicitly said so — though this would have made the tweet sound pretty bizarre. The words Cawthorn actually tweeted left the impression that he was talking about the government’s overall spending on homeless veterans.
Spending in the billions
The VA planned to spend $10.2 billion in fiscal 2021 on mental health services. Even though this is not anti-suicide spending specifically, some of it very possibly helps prevent suicides.
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