VA Secretary Praises World-Class Presidential Transition Efforts

The Department of Veterans Affairs has conducted “a world class [presidential] transition,” VA Secretary Denis McDonough told reporters on Jan. 9 during the final press conference of his tenure.

McDonough said the VA’s transition team has been set up since the summer of 2024 and has provided president-elect Trump’s team with “detailed briefings and memos on every part of VA” since the day the transition began.

McDonough said the agency has closed out 74 requests for information from the transition team, and VA is actively working on an additional 80 requests.

“We’re responding to every question quickly and transparently. We’re sharing everything we know with the transition team, detailed information about VA operations, risks and opportunities, including on VA’s budget, on West LA, on EHRM, on staffing, on physical infrastructure and more,” McDonough told reporters this week.

McDonough said that the transition has been “seamless,” adding that the transition team has all the tools it needs to hit the ground running on day one of president-elect Trump’s administration.

Last month, McDonough emphasized that the turnover of political appointees within the agency would not dramatically impact initiatives the department is already engaged in like EHR modernization, and he fully expects the changeover to be without incident.

“Remember that there is a relatively small number of political appointees here at VA. The overwhelming majority of VA professionals who work on EHR will be working on EHR on January 21, just as they were on January 19,” McDonough told GovCIO Media & Research at the time.

Reflecting on the rollout and reset of the EHR program, McDonough honed in on lessons learned from the modernization effort and reiterated the importance of serving the veteran throughout the process.

Since the VA halted the deployment of the EHR program in April 2023, it has conducted a deep dive into six sites across the country to improve the system’s reliability, which McDonough has said has led to higher outpatient trust scores, decreased wait times, less interruptions in patient care for clinicians and increases in clinician and staff satisfaction.

The VA announced in Dec. 2024 it would restart the rollout at four sites in Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit and Saginaw, Michigan in mid-2026.

“It’s a very difficult thing in a new system to make any kind of change that needs to be uniform across the system that basically prides itself on its non uniformity,” McDonough told reporters. “My wish for our providers and for the VA system is that we not lose sight of the ‘why.’ The ‘why’ is that veterans need an integrated, modernized electronic health record for better health outcomes and for better overall engagement with VA.”

Deputy Secretary Tanya Bradsher, who toured all six sites across the country after inheriting oversight of the program, praised the system’s ability to link Defense Department service records to VA health records seamlessly.

“I really would love to see a time where that service member can just easily have all of their information and data when they go to their very first VA appointment, just pull up everything on their record, and that is the ultimate goal,” Bradsher said. “We’re moving in the right direction, and to be able to start the pre-deployment activities for the four sites in Michigan and be able to look for deployments in middle of 2026 is an exciting next step.”

McDonough also highlighted the debate over community care. He emphasized that questions will need to be asked about the VA’s role in providing care.

“Ultimately, how we fund the reimbursement to community providers comes from the same pot in the budget for how we fund, for example, the people we hire at VA,” McDonough said. “One could see a period at which the demand for care in the community, for funding for appointments in the community, is so significant that you have to pull back on the amount of the budget you’re dedicating to hiring and maintaining VA providers.”

Trump’s first administration passed the bipartisan MISSION Act in 2018, expanding access to community care clinics to veterans and improving VA’s ability to recruit and retain talented medical providers.

Experts have argued that while policies like the MISSION Act provide more avenues for veterans to seek care outside the VA network, they also create difficulty in maintaining standards of care outside the VA.

“If that is indeed a choice that we make as a country, that we would reduce the number of providers at VA, how would you do that? What would be the rational basis for that?” McDonough told reporters. “Each of those [questions] would end up creating a different scenario for veterans, and each of those has significant costs, and so we have to decide what, as a country, we want the VA to look like.”