During a House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Rep. Tom Barrett (R-MI) asked Acting Assistant Secretary for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs Eddie Pool about efficiency at the VA Office of Information and Technology.
00:00Statement you provided will be entered into the hearing record.
00:03From there, from here rather, we will proceed with questioning.
00:07I'll recognize myself for five minutes.
00:10And thank you all for participating in today's hearing.
00:14Mr. Poole, I wanted to begin with your statements and have some questions for you.
00:20The FY2026 budget document that OIT has laid out a smarter, not bigger IT strategy.
00:27Can you give me some examples of how OIT is not being as smart as they could be currently?
00:36Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the question.
00:40To your comments that you made in your opening remarks, I believe it was the stuff that's never used.
00:47That's stuff that we are no longer doing.
00:50So our budget for 26 and beyond will be spent on things that, again, have drive maximum.
00:57Value to the to the veteran community and things that don't have a use or don't provide value or maximum value.
01:05Those will be repurposed and reinvested where, again, we're getting the biggest bang for our buck for the veterans of this country as they deserve.
01:13Thank you. I appreciate that.
01:15From there, can you tell me how you are reorganizing your workforce to deliver services more efficiently through the process improvement that you kind of touched on in your opening remarks?
01:27Sure. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, again, for OIT's reorganization, we are focusing, again, not just our investment capital, but our human capital as well,
01:41making sure that our organization is aligned to effectively deliver the most significant outcomes that we can for the department.
01:49So where we have things that, again, are not driving significant value, we are looking, analyzing, and realigning those functions to, again, bring that, bring those outcomes that we're after.
02:02So essentially, we're simply making sure that every decision that we make, every dollar we spend, every realignment, repurpose, everything that we do,
02:13again, our North Stars, that we're driving absolute maximum value for the department, and in turn, the greatest impact we can make on the veteran community.
02:22Thank you. Would you agree with me that, essentially, IT and this technological improvement is done to alleviate the need for more manual, human-driven processes,
02:37that we can rely more on automated features or more technology-driven process improvement, thereby requiring us to have fewer manual processes in there,
02:49and as a result, fewer people involved in that chain of activity going on?
02:53Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, absolutely. It is about automating, where we can automate, working smarter, not harder. Absolutely.
03:02Yeah. I don't think we're, and it's not the position of me or certainly of others, I assume, on this committee to completely automate anything
03:11to the point that we don't have human interaction in the process to bring about the best outcome necessary,
03:17but I think since the dawn of technology, we've used it to do things that alleviate the necessitation of manual, you know, processes and labor along the way.
03:28The discussion around reduction in some of the IT staff, around 12%, I think Ms. Harris pinpointed it a little bit more at 11 point something close to 12%.
03:43Can you give us some insight into what that would involve and who exactly would be impacted by that?
03:51Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the question. Yes. In terms of the overall staffing numbers today, we are at approximately 8,205 FTEs.
04:04As part of our organizational reshaping, a lot of those billets are being looked at, analyzed, and like I said, the goal is not to reduce necessarily any numbers,
04:15but it's to make sure that we're optimizing how we allocate those resources.
04:19I will turn it over to Ms. Devin Beard, who can speak a little bit more about the breakdown of the numbers for you.
04:27Thank you, Eddie.
04:28So, yes, we are currently about a decrease of 100 employees from the start of January,
04:34and we did participate in the OPM VA and VERA program within the VA.
04:39Those were sprinkled across our organization, but we were able to sustain those without any impact to our veterans
04:46due to succession planning, cross-training, upskilling, reassignments, the tools that are in our toolkit
04:51to make sure that we every day have the resources that we need to meet our MET veterans.
04:59Can you briefly, I've only got about 15 seconds left,
05:02can you confirm that no position with actual IT application, like interfacing, coding, things of that sort,
05:11are being eliminated throughout any of this process?
05:15Once again, we're going through the workforce reshaping activities.
05:18Those are all being focused on are they delivering the largest value.
05:22So as long as they align with our guiding light, then absolutely we are retaining those so we can meet to our mission.
05:27Okay, I was told in some briefing ahead of this that it was mostly in support, not direct IT interfacing positions,
05:38but more in the supportive roles of that.
05:41Can you confirm that?
05:43Yes, I can confirm a lot of the back office or administrative type support functions are absolutely being evaluated.
05:51As you mentioned in your opening, do the processes that we have today need to remain in the way that they are?
05:57Are there redundancies that have built up over time that we need to reevaluate
06:01and make sure that we can accomplish what's still needed, but do it in the most effective manner?
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