Veterans Administration eyes technology upgrades amid scrutiny

Under the administration of President Donald Trump, the Department of Veterans Affairs plans to modernize its information technology systems and believes it can be done with fewer people and a tighter budget.
The strategy has raised concerns with a federal watchdog agency that has tracked the VA’s IT acquisition, implementation and support strategy for decades, with auditors concerned that the department must first address its shortcomings to successfully modernize.
Congressional Scrutiny
During a July 2025 hearing of the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization, the VA’s acting chief information officer, Eddie Pool, said the VA has conducted a review of its Office of Information Technology (OIT) budget and all IT contracts, allowing it to reallocate $89 million for other programs and make plans to shift another $100 million for “strategic reinvestment” elsewhere.
Also, as of July 2025, according to the VA Deputy CIO Devon Beard, 1,172 of the OIT’s 8,205 employees had accepted the federal government’s deferred resignation offer or were approved for voluntary early retirement this year, resulting in a force reduction that VA officials say will not affect veteran services.
But Carol Harris, director of information technology and cybersecurity at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), says that to effectively improve the VA’s IT infrastructure, the department must fix longstanding issues across the office with analysis, workforce planning and purchasing efforts.
Failing to do so could result in the VA not seeing success in overcoming what Harris calls a “history of ineffectively managing IT resources.”
“(GAO has) 26 open recommendations that relate to VA’s IT operations and cybersecurity posture,” Harris said during the hearing. “They are foundational in nature, so I strongly urge the department to get those fully addressed quickly. Doing so will put them in a stronger position to succeed in many of their planned reform initiatives.”
Technology Budget Tightening
The VA has requested $7.3 billion for its Office of Technology for fiscal 2026, down nearly $300 million from previous years. Under the prospective budget, the VA plans to invest more than $3.5 billion to improve and implement its troubled electronic health record program and retire outdated old systems, leading to what it expects to be $40 million in savings.
Lawmakers overseeing VA’s policy and budget proposals have raised concerns regarding expenditures on IT systems that don’t appear to improve service delivery or never reach their full capabilities.
The department’s electronic health record system has been of top concern. The initial $10 billion program, developed by Oracle Cerner, was introduced in the Pacific Northwest in late 2020 but sustained a problematic rollout that affected patient care, prompting the VA to pause further adoption while the company addressed the issues.
The program remains on pause, other than implementation of the system in 2024 at a hospital the VA shares with the Department of Defense, but is set to restart at multiple sites in 2026.
“Major IT projects that support health care systems, education benefits and financial management are ways — are way over budget and have consistently fallen below expectations,” said Rep. Tom Barrett, R-Michigan, the subcommittee chairman. “I was pleased to see that President Trump’s VA budget request for fiscal year 2026 laid out a brand of ‘smarter, not bigger,’ and a strategy for OIT that takes direct aim at many of OIT’s problems.”
VA officials said during the hearing that the department was able to trim costs by finding expenditures that were outside the office’s “pure IT-focused mission.”
But the subcommittee’s top Democrat, Rep. Nikki Budzinksi, D-Illinois, said she can’t see how cutting the IT budget and reducing staff will help improve services.
“More work with less resources is never a recipe for success,” Budzinksi said. “Ultimately, I’m concerned that if VAs IT foundation is allowed to continue crumbling, the department won’t be able — won’t be there for generations of veterans. We cannot allow this to happen.”