Veterans Affairs committee  I will run through this as quickly as I possibly can. I apologize that you can't see the PowerPoint. That would have been much easier, but let me go ahead. I'm Ann Patterson. I'm the acting chief of staff here. I've been acting since the presidential inauguration, so not for very long.

Veterans Affairs committee  I can hear you. Let's get the PowerPoint up very quickly.

Veterans Affairs committee  What I wanted to do was introduce myself to all of you and find out a little bit about how much of an overview you need. Some folks around here this morning, as we were talking about it in the undersecretary's morning meeting, indicated.... Dr. Cross mentioned that he may have met some of you previously, so I don't want to go into a real basic overview if many of you already have a sense of our organization and what we look like.

Veterans Affairs committee  Let me just do this. I think we have about 45 minutes. I have a PowerPoint presentation that does go a little bit into how we're organized, what we look like, the budget, and some of our most important and key initiatives right now. I think that should do it. Then if there are some topics as we go through this--and I move along fairly quickly--that you want us to focus on, maybe we can arrange for another time where we could go through some of the key topics in a little bit more detail.

Veterans Affairs committee  Well, I will tell you that we planned an hour. If you want me to do just an overview, yes, we can skip some slides and just move right along. Let's do this. You stop me at any time. If there's something you want me to focus on, I can. Otherwise, I'll just go through the slides very quickly.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's not a problem.

Veterans Affairs committee  Good afternoon. How are you?

Veterans Affairs committee  Excellent.