About 100 days ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was led by Biden administration officials who had lost sight of what matters most to veterans. VA was dabbling in DEI and gender ideology, abusing telework and remote work privileges to the detriment of veterans, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on duplicative and unnecessary contracts, and slow-walking critical programs like electronic health record modernization.
The results of that experiment in poor management were clear. Wait times for VA health care got worse under the Biden administration, as did the department’s disability benefits claims backlog.
One hundred days into the second Trump administration, and VA is no longer content with poor results. Under President Trump’s leadership, we have already stripped away many of the costly distractions that were coming between VA beneficiaries and the benefits they have earned. And we’re looking to make even more historic reforms to better serve veterans.
President Trump’s mandate to shake up Washington and make it work better for the American people is guiding our efforts to put veterans first at the department. In the first week of the second Trump administration, we stopped VA’s wasteful spending on DEI initiatives, which only divided veterans and staff. The most important identity to us is “veteran,” and by ending DEI programs, we now have $14 million more to spend on our core constituency.
VA has since phased out treatment for gender dysphoria, a commonsense step that should have been taken years ago. We will continue to serve all eligible veterans, but VA should not be in the business of helping people try to change their sex, and the vast majority of Americans agree.
VA moved quickly to make sure thousands of employees are working from the office and not simply phoning it in from home. We do a better job for those who depend on us when we work side-by-side with our colleagues, and we’ve set a schedule to make sure most of our staff will be back in the office no later than this summer, space permitting and barring reasonable exceptions.
We are also managing VA’s finances in a way that’s never been done before. We’ve already cut hundreds of wasteful and duplicative contracts, allowing us to redirect hundreds of millions of dollars back to services for veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors. Our work in this area has just begun, as we continue to review the nearly 130,000 VA contracts from fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
The department has also refocused on its core mission and key priorities, like the implementation of VA’s electronic health record modernization program. The program seamlessly manages data exchange between VA and the Department of Defense, improving customer service and convenience for VA and DOD patients. This task has never been easy, but the program was nearly dormant for almost two years under the last administration. In March, we picked up the slack and announced VA would bring the system to nine additional medical facilities in 2026, with deployment at all VA medical facilities as early as 2031.
One of the worst traits of the Biden administration’s VA was the naïve belief that spending more money and hiring more people could solve the department’s complex problems. Clearly, that wasn’t the case, as VA’s performance deteriorated under President Biden.
That’s why we’re undertaking a top-to-bottom review of the department with the goal of reforming it to eliminate waste and bureaucracy, increase productivity and efficiency, and make sure we’re delivering care and benefits to VA beneficiaries better than ever before.
The reaction to our commonsense review has been about what you’d expect from Washington these days: government union bosses, the legacy media, and some in Congress don’t want us to reform anything. They are working together to use rumor, innuendo, and disinformation to spread fear in the hopes that the department will just keep in place the status quo.
Despite the opposition, we will not stop working to put veterans first. They are our customers, and their satisfaction is what matters most to us. Veterans deserve better than a VA that has been on the Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list for a decade. We’ve got our work cut out for us for sure, but this is exactly what we signed up for.
We will reform the department to make it work better for America’s veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors – that I can promise you.
And just like President Trump, we will keep fighting until we get the job done.
