Spending and workforce cuts will harm VA’s modernization work, Democrats say

Democrats on the House panel overseeing the Department of Veterans Affairs used a Tuesday hearing on biomedical innovation to voice serious concerns that proposed spending and staffing cuts at the VA would impact the department’s ability to effectively modernize and operate its IT systems. 

The House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing included witnesses from several private sector companies who were there to discuss their healthcare-focused tech solutions. Democrats like Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez, however, criticized the discussion as feeling like “a sales pitch instead of a real conversation about how we modernize the VA in order to provide the highest quality of care for our veterans.”

The hearing came after VA Secretary Doug Collins said last month that the department is looking to cut unnecessary contracts and let go of as many as 80,000 employees across its operations later this year to return to its 2019 staffing levels. Collins said the reductions would not affect mission-critical positions across the agency and would be tailored to enhance the delivery of veterans’ benefits and healthcare services. 

The top Democrat on the panel, California Rep. Mark Takano, however, said the overall spending cuts and workforce layoffs are “forcing VA to decide between keeping staff on the floor, and investing in expensive equipment that may sit idle without enough personnel to operate it.”

Rep. Nikki Budzinski, D-Ill. — the ranking member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Technology Modernization Subcommittee — also echoed Takano’s comments, expressing particular concern that cuts to the staffing and budget of VA’s Office of Information and Technology “will disrupt VA’s IT modernization efforts.”

“It seems tone deaf to engage in conversations about innovative biomedical equipment when the foundations of the VA are crumbling,” she said, noting, for instance, that VA is using systems from as far back as the 1980s to manage its medical equipment inventory.

Multiple committee Democrats also cited the fact that VA officials declined to attend the hearing as evidence that the department was not able to offer its perspective on its modernization needs or the staffing levels it believes are required to operate both legacy and new technologies.

VA did submit a statement for the record, which outlined several recent efforts to acquire and deploy biomedical technologies and briefly discussed its establishment of a National Equipment Contract last October that it said, in part, “allows for streamlined equipment access for all [Veteran Health Administration] facilities.”

Committee Chairman Mike Bost, R-Ill., and other Republicans pushed back on Democrats’ claims about VA workforce reductions and spending cuts, saying that efforts to enhance the department’s efficiency were long overdue and that concerns about widespread disruptions across its operations were unfounded.

“Let’s be clear: There’s no final number of any potential reduction in workforce. None,” Bost said. “What we do know is that, unlike the previous administration, Secretary Collins and the VA have been transparent with Congress every step of the way, and I expect [that] to continue moving forward. But this idea that we should start ringing the alarm bell before the plan even exists, that’s just more of the same fear tactics and political threats.”

In a statement, VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz noted that VA healthcare has been on the Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list for over a decade, and that — under Collins’ leadership — the department “is working hard to fix these and other issues.”

“Our message to Veterans is simple: Despite major opposition from those who don’t want to change a thing at VA, we will reform the department to make it work better for Veterans, families, caregivers and survivors,” he added.

This article has been updated to include comment from VA.