In Utah, Biden praises expanded veterans benefits
SALT LAKE CITY — President Biden evoked the memory of his late son and praised leaders from both parties for unifying behind veterans Thursday as he and Utah’s Republican governor paid tribute to a year-old law that is delivering the largest expansion of veterans benefits in decades.
The president and Governor Spencer Cox visited the George E. Wahlen Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center to promote the PACT Act, which is intended to improve health care and disability compensation for exposure to toxic substances, including burn pits that were used to dispose of trash on military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More than 348,000 veterans have had their claims approved in the last year, and about 111,000 who are believed to have toxic exposure have enrolled in health care.
“Everything you can imagine is thrown in these pits and incinerated,” Biden said. “The waste of war, tires, poisonous chemicals, jet fuels, and so much more. Toxic smoke, thick with poison, spreads through the air and into the lungs of our troops.”
He said that when troops exposed to burn pits came home — “many of them the fittest and best-trained warriors we ever sent anywhere” — they were not the same.
The issue of veterans care is personal for Biden. He’s long believed that the brain cancer that took the life of his eldest son, Beau, was caused by exposure to burn pits while he served overseas in the Delaware National Guard. The president’s voice caught as he again noted during Thursday’s ceremony that Beau Biden had lived “about 400 yards” from a large burn pit during the year he was stationed in Iraq.
Biden’s visit to Utah was shadowed by violence. Only hours before Biden arrived in the state on Wednesday, FBI agents fatally shot a man suspected of threatening to kill Biden as they tried to serve a search warrant at the man’s home in Provo, about an hour’s drive south of Salt Lake City.
The man had posted online Monday that he had heard Biden was coming to Utah and made fresh threats against the president, according to court documents.
Before Utah, Biden declared a new national monument near the Grand Canyon on Tuesday in Arizona and slammed Republicans for not doing more to combat climate change. His next stop was Albuquerque, which included a fund-raiser and a visit to the future site of a factory for building wind towers. The facility had previously produced Solo cups and plastics, but has been shuttered in recent years.
Biden is trying to convince voters that his economic policies, which include tax credits for clean energy, have resulted in new jobs and lower inflation as he runs for reelection.