2025 Marks the Year of Tech, Talent Reinvention at VA

The first year of President Trump’s second administration brought dramatic changes to the Department of Veterans Affairs as it navigated AI enhancements, workforce reductions and set the stage for an expansion of federal health record modernization deployments.

Preparing for EHR Deployment

The agency continued its work on modernizing the federal health record, with plans to deploy at select sites in 2026.

Dr. Neil Evans, acting program executive director for the Department of Veterans Affairs Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office, said at the 2025 GovCIO Health IT Summit in September his office is deploying the EHR in waves throughout 2026, with a goal of full deployment at 2031.

“When we go live in a local market, and there’s a period of time where a medical center that collaborates very closely with its neighboring medical center are on two different electronic health records, it introduces all kinds of complexity with regard to training … with regard to technical interfaces … during this period of transition. And so, there’s a real opportunity, we realize, to say, ‘Let’s start to think more in a market-based fashion,’” Evans said.

Navigating Workforce Reforms

Reductions in force across the government also affected the VA, but leaders within the department said that emerging technology would aid in shoring up any lost personnel.

The agency lost nearly 17,000 employees between Jan. and June 2025, with the agency expecting an additional 12,000 to have departed since Sept. 30, 2025.

Eddie Pool, VA’s acting CIO in the Office of Information Technology, told GovCIO Media & Research in Aug. 2025 the agency streamlined its workforce and prioritized “cyber dominance,” to safeguard data and bolster veteran trust.

“It’s process efficiency. We’re streamlining a lot of our operations and leveraging automation in a whole new way. In doing so we’re maximizing our efficiency and productivity with a much leaner and more capable workforce,” Pool said at the time.

Overcoming a Historic Government Shutdown

The federal government faced the longest shutdown in history in fall 2025, but VA was mostly functional throughout the closure. The VA Human Capital Contingency Plan estimated that 97% of employees continued to work despite the shutdown.

VA Secretary Doug Collins told reporters in Oct. 2025 that the shutdown had limited impact on veterans’ health care services, but strained other parts of the agency’s operations and workforce, such as the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) and National Cemetery Administration (NCA), even though disability payments and burials continued.

Advancing Artificial Intelligence

The agency is also adopted significant AI use cases across the enterprise, with a goal of delivering “speed, quality, efficiency and accuracy,” while “fundamentally transforming the delivery of health care and benefits for veterans,” according to its updated AI strategy from Oct. 2025.

The strategy focuses on five key areas of innovation and the adoption of “high-impact” use cases, which falls in line with Trump administration directives to define, implement and then adopt minimum risk standards across government agencies.

“VA is taking a dual-track approach by enabling early AI experimentation while allowing those lessons to inform future standards,” the strategy states. “As AI tools are validated and show worth, they will be incorporated into the EHR and many other information technology platforms through coordination between innovators and the teams managing those systems today.”

Kimberly McManus, deputy chief AI officer and deputy CTO at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said in a LinkedIn post. “Our goal is to lead in effective, reliable and safe AI, delivering measurable improvements in speed, quality and efficiency for veterans.”

One of the major use cases centers around ambient dictation, which takes notes of clinician-patient interactions and synthesizes them, saving clinicians hours of work they would otherwise spend reviewing and writing notes.

The VA announced in Sept. 2025 it would launch the first pilots of its ambient listening program at 10 facilities nationwide by the end of the year.

Dr. Evan Carey, acting director of the National Artificial Intelligence Institute, told congressional leaders in September 2025 that criteria and evaluations focusd on “user acceptance testing, veterans’ perceptions of the tool as it’s used in their ongoing trust in the care they receive, and just overall performance of the tool,” would be tracked.

“We are measuring clinician burden and getting clinician feedback, both synchronously and through survey mechanisms to understand the impacts,” Carey told leaders in Sept. 2025.