VA ‘actively recruiting,’ but expects limited workforce growth

The Department of Veterans Affairs expects limited workforce growth in the coming years, but is still hiring at health care facilities across the country.

VA Secretary Doug Collins told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday that the department is “actively recruiting hundreds of people at every one of our hospitals, and will continue to do so.”

“Right now, we’re hiring every position that needs to be hired. There’s no hiring shortage, no hiring freeze of anybody. If they need the people, they can hire the people,” Collins told the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Subcommittee.

The VA eliminated 30,000 positions through attrition last year and saw its first workforce net decrease in recent years. VA’s inspector general office reported last year that severe health care staffing shortages are on the rise. The VA, as part of ongoing reorganization plans, also removed about 26,000 unfilled positions from its rolls.

Collins added that the VA, for the most part, has the staffing it needs to provide health care and benefits to veterans, and won’t see the surge in hiring it saw under the Biden administration.

“We were hiring at the VA based on possibilities in needs — not on actual assessments, not on, are we needing it,” he said.

The VA, in its fiscal 2027 budget request, is looking to increase its total headcount by about 6,000 employees — about a 1.5% increase from current staffing levels. Most of these hires would support its health care operations.

As part of the Trump administration’s Merit Hiring Plan, Collins said VA is looking to get hiring times for new employees down to about 30 to 40 days. The department’s data shows it takes about 48 days on average to hire a new employee.

“Right now, we’re in a process of redoing hiring across VA,” Collins said. “We will have doctors hired, nurses hired, food service workers hired quicker than that.”

Collins said the VA has prioritized onboarding steps necessary to get new hires started on the job and completing less urgent steps later.

“What we said was, ‘What do we have to do to get them a PIV card? What do we have to do to get them in the door? We’ll do that up front.’ We’re making sure all the security boxes are checked, all the credentialing boxes are checked, which is about five to seven days. And then we’re going to get them in the door, and they have to fill out the rest of it,” Collins said.

The VA has touted higher veteran trust scores and a significantly reduced backlog in benefits claims as signs that the department can do more with fewer employees.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said veterans in her state are “very satisfied” with the care they receive from the VA, and that “VA employees consistently rank our facilities among the best places to work.”

Collins said the VA’s reorganization plan is focused on addressing the “disparity” between veteran care in rural and urban areas.

The subcommittee’s ranking member Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) said the VA is seeing a disproportionate 17% increase in non-VA community care spending, compared to a 2% increase in VA care spending.

“We see growing demand for VA care, but we’re not seeing here the request for investments in clinical care to reflect that. And again, we have this huge imbalance in the requested funding for outsourced, privatized care versus direct care through the VA,” Ossoff said.

Collins said that VA staffing increases haven’t always translated into a meaningful increase in medical appointments for veterans. Between 2019 and 2025, the department saw a 14% staffing increase, while patient interactions increased by 6%.

Congress recently gave the VA the authority to go above a $400,000 salary cap for doctors in specialized fields. But lawmakers from both parties have raised concerns that the department isn’t making full use of this authority.

The Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act allows the VA to go above these pay caps for up to 300 physicians, podiatrists, optometrists, and dentists. Collins said the VA is setting higher pay caps, but said this new authority covers only about 1.5% of VA doctors.

“The program that came out of the Dole Act, I’m going to be very honest, was a good Band-Aid to, frankly, a weeping wound,” he said.

The VA is shuttering several outpatient clinics run by contractors. Collins said they were “not living up to their contracts.”

“For years, our veterans were going and being handed off, new doctors coming in all the time. There was no continuity of care. A lot of times, the doctors weren’t showing up. We were having to then schedule them in other places,” he said. “This is a problem. So I think the issue here is not, ‘are we closing a clinic?’ I’m not going to let a veteran step into a clinic that is getting care that they should not be getting.”

VA Assistant Secretary for Management and Chief Financial Officer Richard Topping said that out of 76,000 contracts it reviewed as part of a governmentwide effort led by the Department of Government Efficiency last year, the VA eliminated or reduced the scope of hundreds, saving the department tens of millions of dollars.

“We were very careful that it would be veteran safety, patient safety first, facility safety first, as the budget reflects, we are making the investments in the agency as we go forward, and in our infrastructure and in our workforce to ensure that that patient safety and veteran care don’t lack,” Topping said.

Meanwhile, the VA is moving ahead with the rollout of a new, multi-billion-dollar Electronic Health Record system at its health care facilities, after a three-year pause to address longstanding issues with the system.

In April, the VA rolled out the Oracle-Cerner system to four VA health care systems in Michigan ― Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit and Saginaw.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said the “reports have been very positive from the folks in Michigan,” and that he is “cautiously optimistic that future rollouts are going to be just as successful.”

Peters, however, said he’s concerned by the VA’s plans to accelerate EHR deployments through simultaneous go-lives, rather than launch the new system one site at a time.

Collins said the VA is moving away from the “bad experience” the department saw with this project under the Biden administration and the first Trump administration. The four sites in Michigan, he added, are running smoothly, and the VA is ahead of schedule in preparing upcoming sites for deployment.

“I commend them greatly. They took on what was told to them to be an impossible task because of our past failures. They overcame past failures, and not only raised the bar, they pushed the bar further,” Collins said.

The VA is asking Congress for $4.2 billion in discretionary funding for the ongoing rollout of a new EHR — an increase of about $800 million.

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