House VA Committee Chairman Mike Bost (R-Ill.) says chief financial officers from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) told the committee Monday that they face a $2.88 billion shortfall for the rest of this fiscal year, and a nearly $12 billion shortfall for fiscal 2025.

The VA gets funding for its mandatory health and benefits programs a year before the current fiscal year to avoid any disruption from a government shutdown.

The CFOs, Bost added, attributed the funding discrepancy to increased hiring and pharmaceutical costs.

In a letter to VA Secretary Denis McDonough, Bost said the $15 billion funding gap is the VA’s largest budget shortfall, “and a repudiation of the FY 2025 budget request that the Biden-Harris administration presented just four months ago.”

“Not only have your chief financial officers thrown out the dollar amounts requested for many key accounts, they have abandoned many of the estimates and projections that underpinned their budget. This is not just fiscal mismanagement; it is strategic whiplash,” he wrote.

VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes confirmed the department’s projected budget deficits in a statement to reporters Thursday morning.

“VA is working closely with Congress and the Office of Management and Budget to resolve these potential shortfalls in a way that prevents any adverse impacts on veterans — and allows us to continue to deliver care and benefits to veterans at record rates,” Hayes said.

The VA, he added, is delivering record levels of health care and benefits to veterans under the 2022 PACT Act, which expanded veterans’ eligibility for VA health care and benefits if they were exposed to toxic substances during their military service.

Since President Joe Biden signed the PACT Act, more than 710,000 veterans have enrolled in VA health care, a more than 34% increase compared to the same period before the legislation.

VBA also expects to break new records this year for the volume of disability benefits claims it’ll pay out to veterans.

“These important results for veterans and survivors exceeded initial expectations,” Hayes said.

The VA, in its FY 2025 budget request, planned to reduce its workforce headcount by 10,000 employees — with most of those jobs coming from VHA.

However, Bost said VHA is now looking at a staffing increase of 22,000 full-time employees over the same period. About 17,000 employees, he added, have already been hired, and VHA is looking to hire another 5,000 employees.

“Hiring quality health care workers is difficult enough without a constantly moving target,” he wrote.

VHA hired more than 61,000 employees last year — its fastest rate of growth in 15 years. The agency grew its total workforce by more than 7% and now has more than 400,000 employees for the first time in its history.

In addition, efforts to boost retention also led to a 20% decrease in turnover between 2022 and 2023.

McDonough told reporters in February that VHA is managing its workforce with a “tighter fiscal picture,” but added that the department is taking a more targeted approach to hiring, after the agency exceeded its hiring targets last year.

“Where we’re not hiring, it’s not because we haven’t been able to hire. It’s because we don’t have a need. Why would we not have a need? Because we just had a great year of hiring,” McDonough said Feb. 26 at a monthly press conference at VA headquarters.

VHA, in some cases, has rescinded tentative and final job offers it made to prospective hires. But the agency ordered a “strategic pause” on rescinding job offers in January, and later issued a memo directing VA health care facilities to only rescind job offers “as an action of last resort.”

VA officials have repeatedly stated the department isn’t under a hiring freeze. However, a lengthy hiring process — even by the federal government’s standards — is frustrating job applicants, especially those who have accepted tentative job offers, but have yet to receive a final job offer.

Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal told VHA employees, in a Feb. 5 email obtained by Federal News Network, that following last year’s record hiring, “we have the nationwide staffing level we need to accomplish this important mission — and we have the funding we need to care for veterans through 2024 and into 2025.”

“As responsible stewards of these funds, we must make thoughtful decisions about resource use at every level of the enterprise,” Elnahal wrote. “This means that we will not be hiring at the same rate we did last year but let me be clear: there is no hiring freeze, we will continue to hire in key areas, and we will do everything in our power to continue supporting our current workforce.”

Bost is asking McDonough if the VA is seeing “significant, unexpected changes in demand for in-house care” since Elnahal’s email to employees. If the agency isn’t seeing a sudden change in demand, he’s asking the department to explain the need for increased staffing.

“Given Under Secretary for Health Elnahal’s announced policy of nationwide hiring restrictions and managing by attrition, I think veterans and employees deserve a much better explanation of where these 22,304 FTE are being hired,” Bost wrote.

Bost said the VA has repeatedly shifted regular expenses out of its base budget and into the Toxic Exposures Fund, which was created under the PACT Act.

“VA’s budget has become increasingly complicated and reliant on gimmicks, apparently to compensate for the expiration of one-time, pandemic-related supplemental funding,” Bost wrote. “This has created a situation where one bad estimate or unanticipated event can create a shortfall in multiple accounts.”

The VA, for example, is seeing an increase in community care costs for veterans to receive health care outside the VA medical system.  But Bost said the department isn’t covering those increased costs in its base budget — “seemingly straining, if not breaking, the limits of what the Toxic Exposures Fund can pay for.”

Bost said VA’s compensation and pension costs are running below its budget projects, so far this fiscal year. But VBA typically sees those costs surge at the end of the fiscal year — especially with an increase in claims submitted under the PACT Act.

VBA processed 1.98 million disability benefits claims and issued $163 billion in total benefits in FY 2023. Under Secretary for Benefits Joshua Jacobs recently told reporters that VBA is on pace to process 30% more claims in fiscal 2024 compared to last year.

The agency, so far this year, has awarded $112 billion to veterans and their survivors in compensation and benefits. VBA also recently granted its millionth benefits claim under the PACT Act.

VA told the committee it anticipates a more than $3.8 billion increase in pharmaceutical and prosthetics spending across FY 2024 and 2025.

Bost said VHA’s chief financial officer also suggested that the Change Healthcare ransomware attack may be to blame for some of VA’s budget shortfalls. The ransomware affected many public and private health care systems across the country.

The VA is shifting $700 million in medical collections from this fiscal year to FY 2025 because of the ransomware attack.

The post VA warns of historic $15B budget shortfall. House committee says more hiring ‘above all’ is driving up costs first appeared on Federal News Network.

GSA launched two new initiatives to continue to relieve some of the burdens of getting cloud services authorized under the Federal Risk Authorization and Management Program (FedRAMP) that contractors and agencies have long-complained about.

Eric Mill, the executive director of cloud strategy at GSA, said the agile delivery pilot will choose about 20 contractors to test out how to use secure software delivery approaches to accelerate the “significant change request” process, which essentially is an approval gate for cloud providers to add new features or capabilities to a FedRAMP authorized service.

“For a lot of cloud providers, this can go on for a long time and really get in the way of what we know to be secure software deployment and delivery practices, which are agile software delivery practices and the federal government absolutely needs to get the benefits of these companies who we are relying on for them to be able to share as many security improvements and updates as possible, new security tools, new patches, and new technology and new capabilities,” Mill said at the GovForward conference sponsored by Carahsoft. “This is an area where we think we can take a look at the way that FedRAMP has operated to date and refactor the process to be one that is based on continuous assessment. I think that’s a phrase you’re going to hear us use a lot because we think we should be getting both more security and more speed at the same time. When we focus our attention on overseeing the process by which changes are made, rather than repeatedly exercising like a stop and go process on every point in time change that a cloud provider makes.”

The PMO says as part of its plan to limit the scope and potential impact of changes to agencies, the new features CSPs launched as part of this pilot must be opt-in.

The PMO says any changes to the fundamental underlying architecture, or new security control implementations that apply to the entire offering, will be excluded from the pilot.

For the purposes of this pilot, the PMO says agencies must choose to use the new feature and the new feature cannot change the:

• System’s fundamental architecture,
• Types of components used such as databases, operating systems, or containers,
• Tooling used to configure, secure, and scan those components, and
• Customer responsibilities for existing features or services.

The FedRAMP program management office will accept applications from vendors to take part in the pilot through July 26 and then make selections by Aug. 16.

The second new initiative is focused on bringing more automation to the program.

The new technical documentation hub will help CSPs in the development, validation and submission of digital authorization packages, and the developers of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) applications and other tools that produce and consume digital authorization package data.

Mill said one of the goals of FedRAMP more broadly is to reduce the time and costs to industry to get their services authorized.

“We’re still in a universe where we traffic 600-page Word documents and PDFs, which is really not how to run a data oriented organization,” Mill said. “We’ve made, what I think are, very concrete investments in changing that dynamic over time. Some of that is who we have hired and brought on to the program where we have a dedicated Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) and data standards lead. We already have more technical expertise and practitioner background in the program now than it has had historically, and we’re going to be increasing that very significantly in the near future. We think that by bolstering our technical capacity, we’re going to be able to move dramatically more effectively, and be a more empathetic and effective partner with the cloud providers and agencies who ultimately have the tools that need to integrate with our program so that we don’t have to have people emailing things around much less emailing things around with passwords and stuff like that.”

The website initially is focused on promoting the use of OSCAL and application programming interfaces (APIs) to share digital authorization packages with the PMO and among agencies.

The PMO says this technical hub site will help make the FedRAMP authorization process more efficient and accessible by:

• Providing faster and more frequent documentation updates
• Expanding the breadth and depth of available technical documentation
• Improving the user experience for stakeholders who are implementing OSCAL-based FedRAMP packages and tools
• Establishing a collaborative workflow that supports community contributions for improvements to the documentation

Mill added this approach isn’t necessarily new because FedRAMP is doing all of this work out on GitHub and open source development already.

VA proved out automation

FedRAMP has long held out for the promise of OSCAL. In May 2022, it received the first security authorization package using the framework. The National Institute of Standards and Technology released version 1.0 of OSCAL in June 2021 and in August 2021, FedRAMP released the first set of validation rules via GitHub.

But both the program and vendors have been slow to catch on.

Amber Pearson, the deputy chief information officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said at the event that VA was the first agency to deploy and submit a systems security plan using OSCAL.

“We were able to actually transform our standard 426 page system security plan from a text file to machine readable language. We’re really excited where automation is going to take us to help us speed up how we deploy our authority to operates (ATOs) in our environment,” Pearson said. “OSCAL will be the first step to explore automation during our assessment and authorization process because it allows us to programmatically look at how do we build in key metrics to do automatic control testing. We’re actually exploring that with our partnerships with NIST and others. How do we actually speed up from a 360-day ATO timeline to receive an ATO to maybe an assessment and authorization (A&A) in a day? That’s some of the efforts that we’re looking at and how do we quickly assess the security controls and most importantly, about automation, it comes into play when you think about continuous monitoring and being able to measure your risk in near real time.”

Drew Mykelgard, the federal deputy chief information officer, said he hopes OSCAL becomes common place for any organization building or approving software within the next year.

“At every stage, I hope people are like, OSCAL is saving me from Word flat files, PDFs and it is changing the game from one of the biggest points of friction that we feel. We also know that when like the federal government gets behind a standard, we can really push it forward,” he said. “When we have people like Amber and her team pushing this through their governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platforms to intake OSCAL more effectively, running the tests on it and increasing, we can write all the policy we want, but without people like Amber, it’s doesn’t happen.”

The agile delivery pilot and the automation hub are two of the latest efforts the program management office has released since January.

FedRAMP’s continued modernization march

In June, FedRAMP finalized its emerging technology framework, focusing initially on generative artificial intelligence.

In May, OMB and GSA detailed the new structure of FedRAMP, replacing the joint authorization board with the new FedRAMP Board and creating the technical advisory group.

And two months before that, the FedRAMP PMO outlined 28 near-term initiatives in a new roadmap for the future.

All of this started in October when OMB issued the draft policy update to FedRAMP.

The PMO is still without a permanent director after more than three years.

Mykelgard said GSA is close to hiring a new permanent director of the program management office after receiving more than 400 applications.

GSA’s Mill said these and other upcoming changes are all about making concrete investments to change the dynamic over time. He said speed and security don’t have to be polar opposites.

“If you look at the elements on our roadmap, a very healthy chunk of them are designed to chip away in different ways and different slices of the things that generate that time and cost,” Mill said. “What we really need when commodity services out there exist, which can do core functions by companies and other agencies sometimes, it’s the shared services strategy in another form. We benefit from a security perspective, as federal agencies and the federal government when we’re able to stop doing things ourselves. Now when we’re talking about software, we have different and new and exciting opportunities to start running fewer things that are held together by shoestring apps and use things that are given dedicated maintenance, love and security investment. That, in and of itself, is a huge security boon for the government, which should be able to focus its limited IT and security people on the things that cannot be commoditized, that are just unique and core to their mission. That’s the theory of FedRAMP.”

The post FedRAMP’s 2 new efforts target long-time vendor frustrations first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Veterans Benefits Administration is shifting to a system of mostly voluntary overtime where employees can work for a maximum of 20 hours of overtime each month.

VA Under Secretary for Benefits Joshua Jacobs told reporters VBA has relied on mandatory overtime for the past seven years to keep up with its increasing workload.

“We’re producing and delivering veteran benefits at a very high level. But as I’ve said before, I have never thought that mandatory overtime is a sustainable operating practice,” Jacobs told reporters in a call Tuesday.

VBA has delivered record-breaking level of benefits to veterans for the past three years, and is on track to break yet another record by the end of this fiscal year.

The agency processed 1.98 million disability benefits claims from veterans and their survivors in fiscal 2023 — a nearly 16% increase from the year prior. VBA issued $163 billion in total benefits in FY 2023.

VBA is seeing a higher volume of claims because of the PACT Act, a 2022 law that expanded VA health care and benefits eligibility for veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service. VBA recently granted its millionth benefits claims under the PACT Act.

Jacobs said VBA is on pace to process 30% more claims in fiscal 2024 compared to last year. The agency, so far this year, has awarded $112 billion to veterans and their survivors in compensation and benefits.

VBA currently has a claims backlog of about 277,000 — nearly 30% of its total inventory of claims.

VBA is also growing its workforce to keep up with demand.  Since October 2022, VBA has grown its workforce by nearly 33%, to more than 34,000 employees.

“Our growing workforce has gone above and beyond to deliver these earned benefits, and we remain focused on achieving our primary mission, which is delivering timely, high-quality and equitable decisions for veterans and their survivors with a world-class customer experience,” Jacobs said. “At the same time, we’re laser-focused on ensuring that our workforce can achieve these outcomes sustainably in the long term.”

Jacobs said VBA ended mandatory overtime, based on feedback from VBA employees and his own “personal concern about the ability of our workforce to sustainably deliver benefits at the scale that we have been doing for a very long time.”

“My goal is to leave this organization better than I found it. And I was concerned that a continuation of mandatory overtime perpetually would be very problematic for our ability to continue delivering at the levels we have been,” he said.

Jacobs said VBA plans to keep growing its workforce until it reaches 36,000 employees — but added that the agency is “constantly evaluating our numbers.”

“We are very focused on evaluating incoming receipts, the total production, and then making sure we revalidate that our assumptions and our goals remain accurate,” he said.

The Veterans Health Administration is becoming more selective with its hiring, after it saw record workforce growth last year. The agency is also seeing higher workforce retention.

VA is also looking to shed about 10,000 jobs in its fiscal 2025 budget request. Most of those job cuts would come from VHA. VA expects to achieve the reduced headcount through attrition.

Jacobs, however, said VBA has the funding it needs to continue workforce growth.

“We are fine from a discretionary perspective. We have the funds that we need to deliver the historical level of benefits that we have been delivering,” he said.

Jacobs said VBA is also seeing higher retention rates for its employees, compared to its six-year average retention rate. He added that as VBA continues to hire, employees have had opportunities to advance into higher positions.

“As we’ve increased hiring, that hiring has both come from employees outside of VBA, but also employees within VBA,” Jacobs said. “As we’ve provided more opportunities, more employees have chosen to stay — in addition to the mission.”

VBA will keep mandatory overtime in place for some employees. That includes workers who process claims for military sexual trauma, radiation exposure, Camp Lejeune contaminated water and pensions.

“We have a workload that requires more timely decisions, and so we want to focus on continuing to bring that work, the total inventory down to improve the timeliness,” Jacobs said.

“As we’re training those new employees, we’re going to continue the mandatory overtime,” he added. “We will assess, as we watch our work in those areas progress, if and when we can make changes to that policy, and transition them to voluntary overtime. But right now, our assessment is that we need to maintain that policy, to continue making improvements for veterans who have filed those claims.”

VBA held a national quality stand-down and wellness day last month, with a focus on addressing burnout and the mental health of its workforce, as well as improving overall work quality. Jacobs said the agency is also rethinking training for its new employees and “refresher” courses for existing staff.

“Investing in our employees matters and can ultimately yield significant returns for our veterans and survivors. Because we know what’s good for our employees is good for those we serve. This stand-down was a necessary part of our effort to improve the accuracy of our claims decisions and support our employees. But it’s certainly not going to stop there,” he said.

VBA expects its employees to work in the office at least five days per two-week pay period, adhering to a VA-wide policy and the Biden administration’s goal of bringing federal employees back to the office at least 50% of the time.

The post VA ends mandatory overtime for most employees processing benefits claims first appeared on Federal News Network.

The lawsuit claims VA’s new Oracle-Cerner EHR doesn’t work with assistive devices, such as screen readers that allow visually impaired users to access information on a computer screen.

Laurette Santos, a licensed social worker who’s worked at the VA for over a decade, is leading the lawsuit, which she filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last month.

Santos works as a Visual Impairment Services Team coordinator for the VA Medical Center in White City, Oregon. It’s one of six VA sites currently using the new EHR. Full deployment of the EHR would bring the system to more than a hundred VA locations.

Santos said in an interview that she provides therapeutic counseling to veterans who are experiencing vision loss or blindness.

“Any disability is difficult, but blindness is particularly isolating. My veterans, mostly who are visually impaired or legally blind, are older,” she said Tuesday. “So they’ve experienced seeing, and now they’re experiencing loss, bit by bit, and it’s very difficult for them to transition,” Santos said. “It is critical that they have a bridge from where they are, to where they want to go.”

Santos understands what many of these veterans are feeling. She’s legally blind from a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which allows her to perceive light, but she’s been unable to read text since 1988.

Santos said she uses the VA’s EHR to gather data from veterans’ medical records — such as their diagnosis, what items they have received from other VIST coordinators, and their particular challenges.

“It could be anywhere to not having a family, to being alone and blind, to lots of medical complications — physical, mental, emotional, combined with blindness,” she said.

Santos relies on the screen-reader software Job Access With Speech (JAWS), which reads out loud the text that’s on a computer screen. Santos said she’s been using JAWS for more than 20 years.

When the VA hired Santos as a VIST coordinator in 2019, her facility was still using the VA’s legacy Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), which is also called VistA.

VA’s legacy EHR is compatible with the screen-reader technology Santos uses, and allows her to independently perform the essential functions of her job, with only limited assistance from a sighted assistant.

“In my work, JAWS was very effective,” she said. “I could connect with other providers, which is a huge part of health care for veterans — that support of people who work with them to make sure all of their needs are met, such as pharmacy, social work, and primary care. I need access to all of those, I can no longer do that independently.”

StatNews first reported details of the lawsuit last Friday. VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes told Federal News Network that the VA is unable to comment on pending litigation.

Federal News Network also reached Cerner’s parent company Oracle for comment.

‘They took my eyes away’

The VA launched the new EHR in White City in June 2022, but Santos said she raised accessibility concerns before the launch that the department didn’t resolve.

“My screen-reading software cannot read anything in the Oracle Cerner platform,” Santos said. “I can’t even sign in,” Santos said. “Essentially, they rendered me disabled again. They took my eyes away. My screen reader was my eyes.”

Before the go-live, Santos said Cerner personnel asked her to provide feedback on the accessibility features back in 2019.

“It was requested of me to see how it interacted, which I did. And I immediately told them it doesn’t work. The codes that were written did not even recognize that there was another software in there,” she said.

According to the lawsuit, VA’s contract with Cerner required the EHR system to be compatible with accessibility-related software and assistive technology devices, including screen readers, screen magnifiers and speech recognition software.

Eve Hill, a partner with the law firm Brown Goldstein & Levy, which is representing Santos in the lawsuit, said the VA failed to ensure that Cerner was compliant with Section 508 before entering into the contract for its procurement and after its rollout.

“The fault here legally lies with the VA. Section 508 requires the VA to only purchase, use and develop accessible technology,” Hill said. “Anything since ages ago, when 508 was passed, they have to only buy things that are accessible. And they went and bought the Cerner system without it being accessible. And they might say, ‘We didn’t know,’ but they’re obligated to know.”

The lawsuit claims the Cerner EHR requires users to operate a computer mouse, which Santos and other blind employees are unable to use. The VA was also made aware that all training simulating the Cerner EHR was not Section 508 compliant.

Between November 2020 and November 2021, the VA’s Section 508 Office conducted several audits and found the Cerner EHR was inaccessible.

The lawsuit claims the Cerner EHR has “disastrous consequences” for Santos and her ability to do her job independently.

“I’ve gone through a million feelings, from really being angry to being really depressed and really hurt,” she said. “I knew that I would get what I needed and be a very successful employee, which I was. And then, in a blink of an eye, it was gone.”

Santos says she can no longer independently complete her clinician job duties, such as receiving and making referrals, or placing orders for devices, software, and other items for veterans.  Instead, she must delegate these tasks to sighted employees.

“Delegating such tasks, particularly to non-licensed staff, potentially jeopardizes Ms. Santos’s clinical license,” the lawsuit states.

According to the lawsuit, the VA allows Santos to keep using the legacy CPRS, but in a read-write-only format with assistance from sighted individuals.

“This response does not allow Ms. Santos to independently perform the essential functions of her job, nor has it allowed her to handle anything close to the workload she previously completed,” the lawsuit states.

Santos said the new EHR is also presenting new challenges to veterans with visual disabilities.

“My veterans, consequently, are suffering, because they can no longer interact with this platform, either, and that’s my largest concern,” Santos said. “Yes, this is really frustrating for me, as an employee. But my goal is to be able to provide the veterans that I work with bridges that can help them transition into a different way of living. One of the things that I was able to do with them was let them know, ‘You can do this. We can do this, and I can help you.’ Well, I don’t feel like that anymore.”

“They’re depending on me to be able to do an excellent job and to support them in their endeavors to climb these militants that are theirs right now. And I can’t do it,” she added.

The VA is currently in a “reset” period and has put all future go-lives on the Oracle-Cerner EHR on hold until it addresses persistent problems at sites already using the system.

“I would really like to see them work on the 508 compliance. However, no new codes have been written for 508. They’re busy trying to put out the fires in the rest of the system,” Santos said.

The post VA employee files EHR lawsuit, claiming lack of accessibility features first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Department of Veterans Affairs isn’t done dealing with a February ransomware attack that had sweeping effects across public and private health care systems across the country, and at least some aspects of its operations will be affected until as late as next February, the department said Tuesday.

VA officials emphasized there were no known impacts to patient safety linked to the attack on Change Healthcare, a large data exchange provider. But like many other health systems, the Veterans Health Administration was forced to sever many of its feeds that transmit billing, prescription and other data to and from third-party providers and other vendors.

The last of those interconnections wasn’t fully restored until last month, and in several cases, the downtime created long backlogs, said Ian Komorowski, VHA’s executive director for strategic investment management.

“We have some providers that contract directly with VA. They were not able to submit [invoices] electronically for about five to 11 weeks, depending on the type of provider,” he told reporters Tuesday. “We have restored that connection. We’ve processed about 91% of those claims, and we will have full services and full payment operations for those providers back to normal by February.”

Many other data feeds affected

Other types of backlogs will likely be cleared sooner.

For example, VHA’s instance of a Change Healthcare system called Connect RX, which the department uses to process and collect payments from third-party insurance companies, was offline from late February until May 1, causing a backlog of about 1 million prescription claims. VA expects to clear that backlog by August, but it will take until October for the department to receive all of the still-outstanding payments.

Meanwhile, VA’s own payments to the two large administrators that manage its care in the community programs were also disrupted. But VA Secretary Denis McDonough said individual providers in those programs weren’t impacted.

“The biggest amount of community care referrals are through our network providers. Those two administrators, who generally split up the five regions that we have, were able to make payments to providers throughout,” he said. “So [the payment backlog] isn’t to the community providers, that’s actually to make the third party administrators whole.”

No known breaches of VA patient data

Last week, Change Healthcare began notifying hospitals, insurers and other institutional customers whose data was stolen in the attack, and said it would start notifying individual patients in July.

VA officials said that so far, the company has not been able to tell the department precisely what kinds of data may have been exposed.

“But we have been informed that we are not currently an ‘attributed entity,’ which means they cannot correlate the data that was extracted to anything specific to VA. So the knowledge of what data was exfiltrated is that it doesn’t fully correlate to VA,” Komorowski said.

And although the root cause of the cyber incident involved a vendor’s systems and not VA’s own, McDonough said the Change Healthcare episode served as something of a wake-up call, prompting the department to take new steps to shore up its own defensive posture.

“We’re being more vigilant about training, including very regular training of our personnel. I can cop to the fact that I failed a phishing test last week, so shame on me,” he said. “But the constant, very regular, unannounced training challenges for each of us are really important. We’ve been really vigilant about multifactor authentication at VA. This looks like a very elaborate attack, and it just underscores the fact that not only is this a very complex and high risk environment, but there are a lot of very highly-capable nefarious actors in the space. So we’ve got to be using all the tools available to us.”

Indeed, just last week, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a bulletin that warns about a new ransomware-as-a-service organization, likely based in Russia, that has been specifically targeting the health care sector. According to HHS, the “Qilin” operation has claimed responsibility for 60 successful ransomware attacks this year alone.

“We have lots of data that talks about threats to the health sector, because when they get hit by ransomware, they pay,” said Lynette Sherrill, VA’s chief information security officer. “So every time we see an attack on the health sector, we get the indicators of compromise from those attacks through our interagency partnerships, we bring them into our environment, we scan our entire enterprise for that same vulnerability, and we eliminate it within a couple of weeks. That’s no small feat, but my team is excellent at what they do, and they really have taken on that continuous learning culture from every single incident.”

The post VA still dealing with fallout from Change Healthcare ransomware attack first appeared on Federal News Network.

Dogs are more than pets. They assist the blind, the emotionally troubled, and people stuck in hospitals. Dogs do countless tasks in law enforcement, military operations and national security. Now a bill in Congress would instruct the U.S. Mint to make coins that commemorate service dogs. Surcharges would go to an organization called America’s Vet Dogs. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with John Miller, the President and CEO of America’s VetDogs.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin  And your organization is concerned with those dogs that can help veterans in their needs and get them matched with dogs that can help the veteran with whatever his or her problems might happen to be.

John Miller  Absolutely. So, our organization, America’s VetDogs has been around for 20 years now. We just celebrated our 20th anniversary last year. And we’ve placed over 1000 Dogs throughout the country, you know, with veterans and first responders. You know, we work throughout the country, all 50 states, and ultimately, our service is free of charge to all veterans and first responders. So, it’s a great service. And we look forward to helping and you’re trying to keep working to get the bill all the way through the Congress.

Tom Temin  And the status of the bill. Now it has passed the House and now there’s a Senate version.

John Miller  Correct? Yep. So, HR 807, passed last week. And now we’re on to the Senate. You know, these coin bills, as we’ve learned have special rules, you need a certain number of co-sponsors before they’ll act on them.  In the house, we needed 290. We wound up right before the vote with 299. In the Senate, we need 67 co-sponsors, all bipartisan, you know, on both the House and the Senate. And currently we’re at 29. But we’ve really just gotten started.

Tom Temin  And what would the bill specifically do?

John Miller  So the bill, as you mentioned authorizes the mint to create a three coin series that basically honors the service of working dogs and military dogs throughout the country, we had the opportunity to be contacted by the House Financial Services Committee to determine your level of interest after they’ve done some vetting, if we’d be interested in working with them to get the co-sponsors necessary to get this across the finish line.

Tom Temin  And do we know specifically what the coins would be that is silver dollars or quarters or what?

John Miller  All the final details are done once the bill is actually the passed by the Senate and signed by the President. But you know, the House version, you know, has it’s a three-coin set gold coins, silver coins, and what they call clad coins, they would have a different design on each and you can buy them individually or as a set. But all of those details really we don’t get into until after the it’s becoming reality.

Tom Temin  Right, but what we know now won’t be like quarters, like the states are silver dollars.

John Miller  No, no, it’ll be it’ll be gold coins, silver coins, and what they call clad coins, which are fairly common in you know, these collectible series that the mints produce.

Tom Temin  Right, collectible series, and then we don’t know what they would charge but all of the money would go to your organization.

John Miller  No, so the way it works is there’s a surcharge associated with these coins. So, each level of coin will have a surcharge associated, the mint sets the pricing and the quantities. Once you know the coin goes to market, we’re anticipating if we stay on track here that this would happen in 2027. And so, you know, for instance, I know the surcharge on the gold coins would be $35. That’s what we would get, you know, the mint, you know, and the government doesn’t really have any financial risk at this, you know, they get fully paid back first. Once whatever it costs the mint to produce, then, you know, we would get the surcharges from the coins.

Tom Temin  So, in other words, the surcharge is what dealers or resellers would charge on top of what the mint basic price is?

John Miller  Yeah, I think the surcharge starts with the mint, the way I understand it. And so that’s what our opportunity would be.

Tom Temin   We’re speaking with John Miller, President and CEO of America’s VetDogs. But your release said that America’s VetDogs would get all of the surcharges. There’s lots of organizations that connect dogs and veterans and servicemembers. How is it that just that dogs of America is the recipient?

John Miller  So, America’s VetDogs as I mentioned was. . . We were reached out to by staffers of the House Financial Services committee to determine our level of interest in working with them and the program. We spent quite a bit of time with our volunteers and veterans up on Capitol Hill to ensure we get the requisite number of cosponsors. And try to get it over the finish line, which we did in the House last week. So, it’s not like we were campaigning for something like that. The opportunity came towards us, and we learned what needed to be done, and learned what needed to be done to move forward.

Tom Temin  Yeah, so your organization has a pretty good ratio of benefit to overhead.

John Miller  Yeah, we’re at 82% And if you look at all the stuff that we’ve done and some of the relationships we’ve had, you know, we have the highest ratings on you know, all of the charity watchdog type of agencies were four stars on Charity Navigator, platinum on Candid and yeah, we’ve had some opportunities to work in different government entities, you know, we had the one of the most famous dogs we’ve had was Sully HW Bush, from former president George HW Bush towards the end of his life after Mrs. Bush had passed away. Sully is actually now at Walter Reed Medical Center, you know. We’ve had a relationship with the Washington Capitals, down there in DC, and their second dog Biscuit is actually with Sully at Walter Reed. We have a facility dog, Charlie, over at the Pentagon. We’re not new to this type of, you know, environment. And it’s really interesting, because, as I mentioned earlier, everything we do is free of charge. So, we have to basically raise almost every you know, every dollar we spend, and you know, each dog costs us over $50,000 to get set. But every part of the process, you know, from breeding, to training, to placing, you know, to making the right match for the veteran and the dog, all of that is covered by the organization. So, there’s zero outlay from a veteran.

Tom Temin  And how does it work, by the way, someone is in need of a dog, and they apply. Are all the dogs the same breed, like golden Labrador Retrievers, or then where do the dogs themselves originate? And how do they get trained and transferred to the recipient?

John Miller  Sure, so we breed all the dogs that we use, and all of our breeds are predominantly Labs, Goldens and crosses of Labs and Goldens. And that’s predominantly because all of our training is positive reinforcement, which means food motivated. And those breeds, you know, have the best temperament and take to the food-based training the best we found in our history.

Tom Temin  Wow. So, you breed your own? And who trains them? And how do you do the match?

John Miller  Yeah, so it’s actually a very, you know, intricate process, you know, we have the capacity to breed about 400 dogs a year. you know, it’s a two-year cycle, you know, for us. So, we’re breeding dogs now for a year from them. And when you look at the cycle, I’ll run you through it. So, for the first eight weeks, the dogs are based, you know, here with us, you know, primarily on Long Island, you know, we make sure that they’re healthy, well adjusted, you know, get the first set of shots, you know. And then we have one of two tracks, you know, that we go on. right track One is we have about, you know, somewhere between 12 to 1600 volunteers across the country who helped us raise the dogs and, you know, their first year of life. or, you know, alternatively, we have 14 different prison programs, you know, we work with, you know, throughout the country, and some of the best dogs, including Sully have come out of prison, you know. Sully came out of a prison in Maryland. So, the dogs will be with them until about the 16-month part, it’s not your exact date specific. Each dog is a little different based on the cycles. And that’s when the dogs will come back here and what we call in for training to be assessed. And that’s really where the matching process begins. For instance, President Bush received Sully when later in his life after Mrs. Bush had passed, and the President was primarily in a wheelchair when he was out in public. So we needed a very certain type of dog for that are very relaxed, very, let’s say, chill, you know, type of dog to work with the President, as opposed to a gentleman who is usually with me on Capitol Hill, who happens to be an amputee, but also now a competitive bodybuilder, who leads a very active lifestyle. So, we needed a very different type of dog for that gentleman. you know, he needed a bigger, more energetic type of dog and then Sully was.  So that’s really the key step in all of this, making sure we find the right match, because if we would have matched those dogs the other way, it probably wouldn’t have worked for either one. So, we take a lot of time and effort there. And so, once we know what that match is going to be, then we have professional accredited trainers, who we work with here will train the dogs custom to what is needed for that veteran.

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Instead of asking Annie if she is okay, what if Annie asked you? That is the case now for veterans receiving treatment from the VA. The mobile and interactive service known as “Annie” is being deployed nationwide to help vets keep up with their healthcare protocols via text message. The service, created by Accenture, has gotten a lot of positive feedback. To learn more, Federal News Network’s Eric White talked with Dr. Ron Moody, Chief Medical Officer for Accenture Federal Services.

Interview Transcript: 

Eric White  Instead of asking Annie if she’s okay, what if Annie asked you? That’s the case now for veterans receiving treatment from the VA. The mobile and interactive service known as Annie is being deployed nationwide now to help vets keep up with their health care protocols via text message. The service, created by Accenture, has gotten a lot of positive feedback. To learn more, we welcome Dr. Ron Moody, chief medical officer for Accenture Federal Services. Dr. Moody, thanks for taking the time.

Ron Moody  I appreciate you having us and having an opportunity to discuss Annie today.

Eric White  Yeah, so first question, why Annie? Is Annie a love lost in your past, or what’s the story there?

Ron Moody  [It’s named after a nurse named Annie Fox.] But why Annie, right? I mean, we have a problem in healthcare. You know, U.S. health care costs have been high. Getting engagement to people has been difficult, improving quality, you know we have a doctor and nurses shortage. So we have to find new ways of doing things. And I have called the VA and their anywhere to anywhere care. They’ve had videos, just last week did over a million video visits. But Annie is a way to engage people in their home in new ways of being addressing the problems that have come up for not only sicker population, but with the veteran with the VA having the PACT Act, making more veterans eligible, as well as the Mission Act for veterans have more access to care. This gives a way for the VA to be a companion in interacting with veterans on a continual basis to improve health care. So eventually, you know, it’d get to the point where we don’t have not enough doctors or nurses, we have a better way of delivering health care.

Eric White  All right, so let’s get into how the service actually works. It kind of nudges those in care of the Veterans Affairs department to make sure that they’re keeping up with their health protocols. What does that mean? And yeah, how does Annie do that?

Ron Moody  Right, so Annie was a project the VA started several years ago, and simply stated, she’s a protocol-based text messaging system. So that basically means she responds, the VA can create protocols, or what in sometimes might be considered care plans, for veterans to be engaged. They get a message from Annie, which can then remind them to do something such as with diabetes to send in their blood glucose. And they would text back … right? So it does several things. It engages them with cognitive and behavioral practices to have them engaged and to remember what they’re doing. So, much more engaging than simply monitoring you. It gives the VA an opportunity to remind people about everything from preventive health services to preparing for procedures, such as the recent colonoscopy study, which showed that improving that ability for that services to be delivered. It can do administrative things also. So the VA can create any protocol based upon a health or administrative need, and then be engaging that veteran continuously. So, the good news is, it can really assist the veteran and be their companion from one place to the other. The studies are showing that often, right, you’ve made the joke, but oftentimes the veterans are perceiving Annie as a real person, because she’s regular, she’s consistent with them. The messages that we’ve worked with the Office of Connected Care to VA are tailored to veterans need to keep them engaged. And these protocol-based messaging systems have been shown in across demographics and across countries to improve medication adherence, to decrease readmission to the hospital, and do a whole host of other benefits. So, evidence-based, low cost, using the most common form of communication on the planet almost, at least if you watch my my grandkids sit around the table, they’re texting and they’re not talking.

Eric White  We’re speaking with Dr. Ron Moody. He is the chief medical officer for Accenture Federal Services. And yeah, on that technology side, I know you’re a medical doctor, but can you just give us the basic overview of how this technology works? Is it just something that the veterans automatically sign up for when they receive care, or is it something they’ve got to jump on voluntarily?

Ron Moody  Oh, great, great question. So Annie uses a, so first the technology behind it, Annie uses a combination of government software and commercial software. It’s using just the Twilio platform for SMS text dialing out to the veteran has that machine. That’s the same way that veterans receive text. We have a very, very awesome program. I’m a veteran myself. To give people appointment reminders through that text, and so that veterans are used to receiving that. For Annie, right, they have to do two things. They can self they can self enroll into Annie using the Annie web app that comes in both a web app, or you can just engage by text. But clinical staff typically register the patient into Annie. They then taken and can assign them a protocol. The veteran could self subscribe to a protocol and that’s a protocol of interest to them or needed for their care. And then Annie would start messaging them with some frequency and those messages can vary, everything from, as we were talking about earlier with blood glucose, to it could be helping with post-hospitalization reminders, procedural type preparation, preventive services, and it can remember your birthday card, and remember your birthday and send you a reminder on your birthday. And although that may sound why would you want to do that, but it’s about engagement, right? Annie as a platform is really about communication, collaboration. And health care is about communication, collaboration and trust. And what the VA has really been invested in, right, and we’ve been supporting them, is that ability to create an extended, trusted health care network to be able to really engage veterans, anywhere they are, anytime. Annie is just one of the tools in that arsenal, to be able to help them do things differently, and to lessen the burden on both the health care system, but more importantly, on that patient having to come to a clinic. You know, the other big thing recently, people talk a lot about remote patient monitoring. Think about Annie as remote patient support device, right? You can text, you can ask them how they’re doing. That’s occurring without human being in the loop until a human needs to be involved.

Eric White  Yeah, on that experience side, you’ve gotten positive feedback from the patients who did use this. I’ll be honest, in this modern world, sometimes I sign up for stuff and nine text messages later, I go, why did I sign up for this and how do I get out of this? How do you maintain that balance when it comes to public health engagement? Because, you know, nobody wants to be nitpicked to death.

Ron Moody  Oh, absolutely. So, in tailored messaging and marketing, and essentially what happens to be a technology company is one of the world’s largest marketing companies. So if you look at how people respond to text, what they want to respond to, again, I don’t need that 17 barrages of messages, I should be able to select what I want. It starts with a trusted relationship, you know, not just that vendor, sending me, you know, 17 reminders that they have something to sell. But this is your health care system engaging and then becoming what Annie becomes, and although it has a name, the studies show that it becomes a relationship that people have. Annie can be become anything from your old drill sergeant, to your teacher back in school, to your grandmother. Being that person that nudges a reminder to you like you want. So the engagement is almost self sustaining, in part because it’s value add. And I think that’s some of the times what some organizations who go into health IT miss, right? It’s just not about communication. It’s communication, collaboration, trust.

Eric White  What does the future look like for Annie? Is this going to be nationwide and become a staple for VA?

Ron Moody  Yeah, so Annie has been out for a while she’s been getting increasing usage in the VA. There’s just over, I think, if my numbers are correct, it’s just over 250,000 veterans who are actively enrolled in Annie as users and about a quarter those are currently on protocols. It’s getting expanded use now that people are searching the evidence come from that. And as you mentioned earlier, people, both the staff, health care has got to change and veterans have to come around. I believe you’re going to see Annie because of its very nature, right? It’s a way to provide health care at low cost, across bandwidth, give equitable health care so no matter where a veteran is, or what their bandwidth, most of us can receive a text. And so you’ll see more of that engagement across the continuum. And Annie will move to involve now, it’s, it is not an AI-based system. Doesn’t need to become an AI. It’s not meant to be a chatbot. It’s meant to be very specific, scientific-based protocols, the tailored messaging, but it can be improved, and that’ll happen. AI will allow it to be multilingual and other things, while maintaining the value that it has. And I see it only expanding across the VA services, used in multiple lines. Again, everything from the Veterans Health Administration where it’s currently mainly used, but it could be extended over to help with, assist with things and Veteran Benefits Association, reminding people about the status of of their benefits. Where their things are in process, actions they need to take. So, a lot of utility, she’s versatile, and she’s valuable. And I look forward to seeing her continued use for all my fellow veterans out there, because again, proven ways to improve health care and health engagement.

Eric White  Dr. Ron Moody is chief medical officer for Accenture Federal Service, thank you so much for joining me.

The post Veterans Affairs hopes non-human entity can help keep tabs on patients first appeared on Federal News Network.

One challenge for the Veterans Affairs Department is basic. Veterans themselves typically don’t know about all of the benefits they’re entitled to. A book by a former VA under secretary for benefits aims to fill in the gaps.  The Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked in studio with author Paul Lawrence.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin
One basic challenge for the Veterans Affairs Department. Veterans themselves typically don’t know about all of the benefits. They’re entitled to. A book by a former VA Undersecretary for benefits aims to fill in the gaps. Author Paul Lawrence joins me now in studio. Paul, good to have you in.

Paul Lawrence
Hey, great to be with you again, Tom.

Tom Temin
Well, why do people not know this? We see this all the time.

Paul Lawrence
Yeah, well, it’s sad. It’s often hard. And so what I realized in writing this book is what was needed was a laypersons explanation of benefits. We all love lawyers, but most of the documents are written by lawyers, and nobody can understand it. And then you need an explanation of all the benefits in one place. So that’s what the book has. Easy to read, how you access your benefits, what they are, and then they’re all in one place so you don’t have to go, oh, another benefit, I gotta go find another resource. So that’s the book.

Tom Temin
And do you cover the health side, as well as the benefits side?

Paul Lawrence
Not so much, it focuses on the benefits. But the benefits enable you to get health care. But the benefits, there’s eight of them. They’re very complex, and they’re really the bulk of the VA budget. So it’s important veterans know what they are, especially as they think about life after military, these can really help you thrive, pursue your American dream. So it’s really important they know what they’ve earned.

Tom Temin
Yes. And I guess the question begins with does the military do a good job of, they have programs. Certainly, it’s not for lack of trying, but how effective do you think they are in preparing outgoing members, especially at the lower ranks that people that may not have 25 years of service, as an officer, and so on?

Paul Lawrence
Well what you’re talking about is a call the transition assistance programs offered a DoD basically six months before service members exit. So I would say they’re moderately effective. In many ways it’s like a fire hose. It gets shot at you, some you retain, some you don’t, it’s a real challenge to get service members to attend. Don’t forget, DoD is engaged in retaining service members to protect our country, when they have been talking about transition, it’s just often not in their DNA. And so there is a dilemma on a service member who will do well and they’ll transition. Sometimes they won’t.

Tom Temin
Right. And its ranked in some way associated with how effective they are.

Paul Lawrence
Generally speaking, but there’s exceptions to everything. General Officers get special treatment. Officers are a little more savvy about it and better understand the crosswalk to a civilian career. Enlisted folks are often just there for four years. And so this is just delayed. They’re sort of being involved in the civilian world. So it does take some time to reintegrate.

Tom Temin
Yes, because for some senior officers, there’s kind of a world awaiting you and beckoning for you. Consultancies and board memberships. Even nice corporate positions.

Paul Lawrence
That’s certainly true for the very top. But you’d be surprised, I’ve talked to a lot of general officers at the one and two star rank. Not so much.

Tom Temin
Yeah. It’s a tough life for everyone. And in your experience, what’s the most important benefit people should make sure they avail themselves of?

Paul Lawrence
Well, they’re all there. And it’s important to remember these are earned benefits, not entitlements. Anybody can get them as long as you serve honorably in the military. So it’s a special sort of cut. I would point out sort of three things. The one that most people sort of think about is filing a claim. That’s a slang for disability compensation, you’ve been injured or hurt in service, and there’s money for expenses in walls, forgone income, that’s the one people tend to sort of vacillate towards. The other thing, of course, though, is the GI Bill, essentially a free ride to the State University. He served honorably for three years. And of course, now, with education, there’s credentials and certificates that really can help you. And of course, the ability to purchase a home with no money down, the Home Loan Guarantee. This is wealth changing. The home is generally our largest, most valuable asset in our portfolio. And a lot of veterans use the equity in their home to start a business. So I pointed those three, but there are many more benefits.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Paul Lawrence. He’s former veterans affairs Undersecretary for benefits and author of Veterans Benefits For You, a paperback book. And it can get complicated like dependency indemnity compensation payment.

Paul Lawrence
You really picked on a important one. That’s really important. That’s a long word, sometimes referred to as DIC, that basically provides benefits to a service members family, if something happened to him while in service or as a veteran, because of something you are service connected for. So you develop cancer while you’re in Vietnam, or in the Middle East. You pass from that, your family receives benefits. So that’s a very important benefit. And I always tell veterans, don’t just think about benefits for you, hey, I’m fine. I don’t need anything. Think about it for your family in the event something happens to you.

Tom Temin
And you mentioned hidden benefits, you did not know about, what are some of the hidden benefits.

Paul Lawrence
Here’s one. If you fall on hard times, you can receive what’s called the veterans pension. Pension sounds like retirement, but basically it’s a needs based payment. If your assets fall below a certain level, and the level is only $150,000, which seems like a lot of money. But when they do this counting, they exempt your home, they exempt your car, and very quickly you can realize this isn’t a lot of money once you take these out. So you think about homeless veterans, this is how you get them some money to get them out of homelessness. But more importantly, Tom, perhaps there’s somebody in your family, the extended uncle, the neighbor, who you wonder how can they stay there in their home? This can really help those folks.

Tom Temin
And what’s your sense of how well VA has handled some of the congressional mandates of recent years, burn pit victims, blue water, napalm, and so on. Fairly recently added.

Paul Lawrence
So I was there when the Blue Water Navy law was passed. So I got to implement that. So I can tell you that was implemented on time. And as the law required, the PACT Act from 2022 that they’ve struggled with, that’s taken a little bit longer to roll out. People are waiting longer. And while they processed a lot of claims, I think they’ve been kind of coy about not talking about how many are waiting? And how long are they taking? So I think it’s just as a hard law, I’m surprised they didn’t learn from the Bluewater Navy experience would be prepared more, because my thinking is promising veterans benefits is not the same as delivering them. And if you really want the organization to have a high trust factor, you actually have to do what you say. So I think there’s been a lot of learning at Veterans expense.

Tom Temin
And there’s also been a initiative on several fronts to make it easier for people to say upgrade their discharge status if they were not honorably discharged. And thinking of ways to give at least partial benefits, partial health care coverage to people that are less than honorable and retrospectively changing that.

Paul Lawrence
I kind of see both sides of this. What you’re referring to is folks who get what are called Other Than Honorable (OTH). And so you sort of imagined, ok, might that just have been it’s a very difficult experience. So for example, the classic example was person serves honorably, comes home one night, learns his wife wants to divorce him, gets drunk, gets a DUI and gets in trouble and gets an OTH. And you go, well, most of the service was fine. One incident, ok, VA does what’s called a character of service review. Weighs it all in and say for the purpose of benefits, were going to allow you to have it. You’re called not dishonorable for the purpose of benefits, the language gets to be really circular. That sort of makes sense. We also understand that during a period of time when you were gay, and that was not allowed, you might have gotten an OTH. And now that we have a different view of that, that might be something to correct. At the same time, though, I do think we have to be careful not go too far. Because of course, if you truly did not receive an honorable discharge, or you did get OTH for reasons that merit that, we should also make sure that we are true to the consequences. And again, my view is we dishonor good public servants when we sort of tolerate the not so good. So I understand that. But you’re right, they’re making an effort to kind of go back and make sure, for example, the classic example is, you had PTSD, nobody knew it, you act it out from time to time. You got Other Than Honorable discharge, that doesn’t seem appropriate.

Tom Temin
Fair to say that, again, this is more on the medical side, perhaps than the benefit side. But there is recognition of the real mental damage that can happen to someone that is not of their doing.

Paul Lawrence
And they’ve made an effort, and the VA hospitals to say, hey, regardless of your discharge, if you are having mental issues, please come and see us. So you’re exactly right.

Tom Temin
And then there’s the seemingly intractable issue of veteran homelessness.

Paul Lawrence
Nothing sadder than, I’m sure everybody’s seen this. You come to the light, there’s a person with a cardboard size as a homeless veteran, so let’s assume they’re not lying. And you really want to help. I guess what I would point out is two things. VA has lots of resources for homeless veterans. So it’s not as though they’re understaffed. And, as you know, Tom, from your work across government, I think GAO had a report, there’s like 17 Different homeless programs at the federal level. So there’s actually a wealth of resources. The real challenge continues to be finding homeless veterans. So I would just share this phone number with your listeners who are concerned about homeless veterans. When you see that person with the sign, pick up your cell phone and call this number 877-424-3838. I’ll say it again. 877-424-3838. That’s VAs homeless veteran hotline. And if you say the location of somebody, well, this is what I’m seeing first and main. They’re supposed to send somebody check out if he or she is a veteran, and figure out how to help them. So again, I think there’s a lot we can do to sort of eliminate this problem.

The post What veterans sometimes don’t know about VA could fill a book first appeared on Federal News Network.

It’s now on the House floor and forming in the Senate committee: The National Defense Authorization Act for 2025. This week, though, will also bring some important matters forward, like the congressional baseball game. For an update on military defense and national-pastime offense,  the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Bloomberg Government Deputy News Director Loren Duggan.

Interview Transcript:  

Tom Temin
It’s now on the House floor and forming in the Senate Committee, the National Defense Authorization Act for 2025. That is, this week though we’ll also bring some important matters forward like the congressional baseball game, an update now from Bloomberg Government, Deputy news director, Loren Duggan. And the NDAA is kind of leapfrogging through the House and Senate to the house maybe a little bit ahead. What’s the latest?

Loren Duggan
Yeah, we’re going to see a vote this week on the House floor on that legislation, pretty sweeping. And one of the must pass bills this year, where not a lot is likely to get done. This is one of the bright spots, usually, where no one wants to be the armed services chairman who doesn’t get the job done. So what we’ll see this week is probably a lengthy debate on the House floor with a lot of amendments, I think more than 1300 were submitted by Friday to weigh by the Rules Committee and potentially debate on the floor. But it’s wide ranging, of course, obviously sets defense policy and how much later they will provide through the appropriations bills, but also a number of policy issues at the Pentagon and abroad, which could be one of the sticking points, obviously.

Tom Temin
What are some of the top policy issues that are outside of pure defense authorization?

Loren Duggan
Well, always Ukraine will come into play and whether there will be amendments around that and what to do. Obviously, we had the lengthy debate earlier this year about how much to fund and what conditions to put on it. But anytime a bill like this comes up, that’s a natural place to look for that. There’s also a lot in here for the Defense Department about improving the quality of life for service members, whether it’s a pay boost for younger troops, or are trying to find ways to attract more people into the military. That’s been one of the focuses. And it’s actually in the title of the bill, about quality of life there. And some diversity issues have come up as well, that’s been a sticking point in a lot of the bills with House Republicans in particular, looking to curtail DEI programs, things like that. And because the Defense Department has its own schools, there’s definitely a nexus there. So we’ll be looking there and just what other things may hit you right as it moves forward.

Tom Temin
Sure. And then on the Senate side, there’s just because of everything else going on in the two parties, is likely to be different, leading eventually to some tough reconciliation.

Loren Duggan
There could be. It’s worth noting that despite the partisanship in the house, the committee there approved the 57-1, with only one Democratic vote against it, that could change as the bill gets loaded up with different provisions. We’ll be looking for that final passage vote for that indication of how it can be reconciled with the Senate, where often the starting position in the Senate is a little more bipartisan, just because that’s the only way to get a bill across the floor. Much of the work in the Armed Services Committee has a secret, they do it behind closed doors, and then tell us when they’re done. So we’ll be looking to see what they’ve agreed upon as they work through that bill over the course of the week.

Tom Temin
And we did see a slice of the houses version of regular appropriations for 2025. And for the sliver of government that they have in general government work, there is significant cuts, again, proposed from the House side, is that likely what we’re going to see in the large agency appropriations work? And will that be coming out any of it this week?

Loren Duggan
Yeah, we’ll be seeing more there. So the House passed one bill last week for military construction projects, a small sliver of what DoD gets plus the Veterans Affairs Department. Veterans Affairs, there are some increases there, which is the usual, but as we get more bills that are more in the true domestic agencies will likely be seeing more cuts, as we did with Bill funding the IRS where I think there was a $2 billion cut. And as we see the bills covering the Ag department, and eventually when we get to the Labor HHS Education bill, which is all domestic, that’s where if you’re going to meet this top line number of reduction, there’s probably going to be a lot of chunks there. So we’re planning to see I think six bills move through either subcommittee or full committee over the course of this week. So a lot of action to come there in the house. Their goal is to get them all out of committee by July 10. Pretty tight, but we’ve seen them make a lot of progress so far.

Tom Temin
And they’re around yet for another few weeks, right until the July 4 break?

Loren Duggan
Well next week is going to be a little broken up because of the Juneteenth holiday. I think the Senate might be coming in around that, and the House might be actually out of town so that people can be back in their districts for that. But it is kind of a choppy summer as we saw last week. It was a short week because of D-Day. There’s a lot on the agenda between world events and conventions coming up later in the summer.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Loren Dugan, deputy news director at Bloomberg Government. And then speaking of broken up week, they do have, it’s not a bipartisan event. It’s partisan versus partisan, but maybe not quite as Ill themed and that’s the baseball game.

Loren Duggan
Yeah, they band together in a different way where the Republicans and the Democrats will take the field at Nationals Park for this annual event. It’s pretty sacred on the calendar for them to keep that and try to clear floor votes to allow it. We actually saw one subcommittee hearing for one of the appropriations bills moved two weeks into the future to make sure that everybody could get to the game who wants to go. And even if the members aren’t playing, they usually come and sit in the audience or take part in that and it’s kind of a fun little DC tradition that I always tell my interns from out of town. We’re swinging by if you want to see kind of a little slice of DC life.

Tom Temin
And there’s a few members that actually have some baseball chops?

Loren Duggan
Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s people who either played in college or whatever. I don’t think there’s as many pros as in the past when Jim Bunting was in the Senate or something like that. But some people are really good and take it very seriously with practice and trying to keep their record going, and get as many strikeouts or hits as they can. So people take it very seriously.

Tom Temin
And getting back to more serious business, the Senate has some FERC nominees. And that’s a big deal, because obscure as FERC is, it does have a new multi 1000 page rule out there that completely changes governance and regulation of the grid. And so those nominations matter.

Loren Duggan
Absolutely. And it’s a commission that’s a five member commission with a mix of Democrats and Republicans. The folks coming in here now our were approved last week by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee with a pretty solid support. So we’ll see if they can all get over the line in the Senate this week that would fill the void and make sure that it’s got all the members that needs to do the kind of work you were talking about, but kind of odd to see all three back to back to back like that in one week. But they’re moving quickly to try to get that done as soon as possible.

Tom Temin
Right electric car charging, subsidized by one state to another is at stake here. But the vote on those nominees from the committee wasn’t totally party line.

Loren Duggan
No it wasn’t. There was one senator, I think Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who voted against all three. And he said he was disappointed in some of the answers they’ve given. But there could be some at least bipartisanship here, when they have the votes.

Tom Temin
All right. And then the other place that is having some problems, FDIC, the workplace culture, interestingly, the Chairman said he would resign when there’s a successor, which means he’ll be here for the rest of the Biden administration. What’s going on a hearing coming up?

Loren Duggan
The House Financial Services Committee is digging into that. And they say they’re looking at both the failed leadership and the workplace culture. And as you noted, it does get pretty low marks. I think it was 25 out of 26 in a recent survey, and there’s some concerns about how harassment claims have been handled. So a lot to talk about there. And there are definitely people who would like to see Greenberg go sooner. And he lost support among Democrats, which is I think what pushed this forward different Committee, the Senate Banking Committee, where Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio.) is the democratic chair there and up for re election and a pretty tight race was one of the people to come out against him and say he needs to go. So I think this is an agency that will have a lot of discussion around and this will be a concentrated look at the issues there.

Tom Temin
And there’s also a vote on IVF legislation. And that has something to say about the federal employee health benefits plan.

Loren Duggan
Right. This is the second bill in two weeks that Senate Democrats are trying to push. They’re more messaging because the dynamics been there likely won’t get across the finish line. But this one is about IVF coverage, including requiring carriers and the FEHBP to offer IVF services as part of this broader guarantee of access to IVF services.

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The Department of Veterans Affairs is giving veterans more options to get health care and benefits from the department — in some cases, through just a few taps on their smartphones.

VA’s nearly three-year-old health and benefits app recently saw more than 2 million total downloads. The app also surpassed more than a million monthly users.

Among its features, the app allows veterans to message their doctors, view upcoming health care appointments and check the status of benefits claims.

VA’s app has a 4.8-star rating on Apple’s App Store, with over 138,000 ratings, and is at 4.6 stars on Google Play, based on nearly 40,000 reviews. Those positive ratings are on par with apps such as Uber or Amazon.

Charles Worthington, VA’s chief technology officer and chief AI officer, said the app’s launch stemmed from the department’s 2018 relaunch of VA.gov and the “culmination of VA’s digital modernization effort.”

Worthington said the idea of a VA app started when VA’s Office of Information and Technology noticed a greater percentage of VA.gov traffic came from smartphones each year.

More than half of all federal website users use mobile devices.

“We saw this trend, and it led us to ask ourselves, and ultimately to ask veterans,” Worthington said. “Even though we had invested a lot of energy in making VA.gov an easy-to-use website on mobile phones, we wanted to ask ourselves the question: Is this the best experience we can provide to smartphone users?”

Christopher Johnston, VA’s deputy chief technology officer for digital experience, said younger generations of veterans are driving demand for mobile-first digital services at the VA.

“Today’s veterans are very tech savvy, and they want to be able to access these things …  in the grocery store, or at the beach with their family, or when it occurs to them, in a very, very quick and easy way,” Johnston said.

Among its features, veterans can use the app to view upcoming appointments, message their doctors and manage their prescriptions.

Veterans can also upload photos of documents and submit them as part of the disability benefits claim process. In some circumstances, the VA requests more information from veterans to complete their claims.

“The old way that would have worked is the VA sends a letter, saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got your claim. But there’s this missing piece of evidence’ — maybe a marriage certificate, or could be anything. And when the veteran receives that letter, they read it, and then they can mail it back. And you can obviously imagine how much faster that is, if suddenly now you can see in your claim status, ‘Oh, there’s this piece of evidence missing.’ And right there in the app, you can upload a document, you can take out your camera, you can take a picture of the document, hit send, and suddenly a transaction that previously would have taken days can be done in seconds,” Worthington said.

The VA OIT team said providing a higher level of customer service to veterans is part of what’s leading to higher trust scores across the department.

The VA announced last month that veteran trust scores in the department reached an all-time high of more than 80%. That’s up from 55%, when the VA first conducted this survey in 2016.

The VA is basing its scores on survey responses from more than 38,000 veterans who obtained VA services between January and March this year.

“The VA is a big place, but efforts like this are a small reason for those improvements in trust. It’s meeting veterans where they are and trying to make it easier for them to access the benefits of certain services that they’ve earned,” Worthington said.

In user feedback sessions, veterans told the VA they valued the simplicity and ease of quickly accessing some of the most common services on VA.gov — and the ability to access those services from their phones.  VA soft-launched the app in August 2021.

“We put it in the app store, but didn’t make a lot of noise about it, because obviously, we try to pilot things early in their development. And over time, we have added features and become much more public about the app,” Worthington said.

Johnston said some veterans also prefer the app because they can get push notifications.

“You can imagine that I get a push notification that says your doctor has responded to your message. I look at my phone, I’m logged in instantly. I see that response to my doctor while I’m standing in line at the grocery store. It’s all very quick and happens instantly, and reduces a lot of anxiety for veterans who are frequently waiting for responses from VA.,” Johnston said.

After logging in with a username and password or another credential, veterans can log into the app quickly using Face ID or using their fingerprint for the next 45 days.

“It’s a faster login process, once you’ve done it that first time with whichever credential you use, the same that you would use on VA.gov,” Worthington said.

Johnston said the VA OIT is making sure veterans experience a seamless transition between VA.gov and the smartphone app.

“We’re not rewriting the same things over and over again. The secure messaging system is the same secure messaging system that’s on VA.gov. It’s the same database, it’s the same business logic. It’s the same delivery groups that you can choose, and what we’re doing is creating a native mobile layer on top that reaches that same database,” Johnston said.

“It’s a lot easier for them to just open the app and get right into messaging their doctor or checking their appointments, maybe a claim status. That was one feature that people were really excited about.”

Rachel Han, a product lead with the U.S. Digital Service working with VA OIT, said the team focused on reducing the amount of time it takes for veterans to access some of the VA’s most commonly sought services.

“We really want to make sure, for example, with push notifications, or the human-centered design process, that we reduce the number of clicks and reduce the amount of time work overall,” Han said.

Han said the app also supports assistive technology, such as text-to-voice tools.

“We want to make sure that this experience is really simple for everyone. We want to make sure that the letters that veterans get from the VA can be read by mobile phone to these veterans, and that they wouldn’t have to wait in the mail for a physical letter, or ask someone who can see to read that letter to them,” she said.

Worthington said VA OIT always ensures veterans who need assistance technologies are part of the user-testing phase of the app’s features.

“That’s a real way to know for sure how well the tools are working,” he said.

The VA is looking to roll more to the mobile app later this year. They include improvements to how veterans submit travel claim submissions, in order to be reimbursed for traveling to appointments, as well as improvements to the process of submitting a disability claim.

“Those are some of the highlights that we’re looking forward to this coming year,” Worthington said.

The post How VA’s flagship app got to 2M downloads in less than 3 years first appeared on Federal News Network.

As House appropriators outline plans to make steep government spending cuts for fiscal 2025, Democrats are warning that reduced agency budgets would lead to federal employee layoffs, and by extension, worsening federal services.

The fiscal 2025 financial services and general government appropriations bill is now heading to the full appropriations committee for consideration. Members of the GOP-led House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee advanced the legislation — along party lines and without amendments — during a markup Wednesday morning.

But Democratic subcommittee members opposed to the spending cuts said they’re concerned about the ability of the relatively small agencies included in that specific appropriations bill to handle large budget cuts.

“Our agencies often have smaller budgets, and thus less flexibility to deal with the cuts,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Wednesday during the subcommittee’s markup of the legislation. “Larger agencies under the jurisdiction of other subcommittees can scale back grant programs and shift funding around to make ends meet. It’s tough, and perhaps may not be appropriate, but it is easier than this bill.”

Hoyer warned that the House GOP bill, as is, would leave many agencies with no choice but to implement staff reductions to make ends meet.

“Our agencies have to lay off staff, severely undermining their ability to function at the most basic levels,” Hoyer said. “That has direct consequences on the American people.”

Under the 2024 enacted budget, which included significant spending cuts, some agencies are already limiting new hires and in some cases considering plans to reduce their workforces. The State Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, are looking to make staffing cuts in the Foreign Service and the VA health care workforce.

The House appropriations legislation comes in stark contrast to the White House budget request proposed in March. House Republicans proposed a discretionary spending allocation totaling $23.6 billion, which is close to 20% below the Biden administration’s request. The bill would cut spending to 10% below the enacted level for 2024.

Subcommittee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) called the spending levels and several GOP policy riders “unacceptable.”

That steep of a budget cut, Hoyer added, “belies the importance of the agencies for which we appropriate money.”

For the government’s lead agency on all things workforce, House Republicans’ spending plans would give the Office of Personnel Management a budget of $477 million for 2025. It’s an increase of $29.1 million over the enacted 2024 level — but the number still falls $31.4 million short of the White House’s request for the coming fiscal year.

At the same time, House Republicans, in the bill are calling for OPM to specifically aim to modernize IT and strengthen the government’s acquisition workforce.

The bill doesn’t include any language related to the federal pay raise for 2025, appearing to align with Biden’s 2% raise proposal for most General Schedule employees next year.

The draft bill also includes IRS spending cuts and proposes completely defunding IRS’ free Direct File platform. The legislation would cut the budget for IRS for 2025 to $10.1 billion, which is $2.2 billion below the enacted level for fiscal 2024.

The cuts would be most severe for IRS enforcement, which would see a $2 billion reduction in funding, House appropriators explained in a summary of the draft 2025 spending bill. Hoyer took particular issue with that component of House Republicans’ plans for IRS.

“The authority to transfer funds are not provided for in this bill,” Hoyer said. “In other words, we’re cutting our collection department by $2 billion. That’s the very essence of trying to be able to afford that which we’re buying and not paying for.”

The General Services Administration would see spending cuts for its use of the Federal Buildings Fund in 2025, according to the draft legislation. Lawmakers are calling for a cap of $8.9 billion to come out of that fund, which is nearly $1.8 billion below the 2025 budget request.

In one policy rider on the appropriations bill, House Republicans rejected the Biden administration’s request of $3.5 billion to build a new FBI headquarters in Greenbelt, Maryland. The draft bill would also withhold current funds allocated for the massive construction project.

Already, GSA has said construction on the new building will take more than a decade. Construction on the new FBI headquarters is not expected to begin until 2029, and FBI employees would not be working out of the new space until 2036. But in the spending bill, House Republicans said GSA should either continue operating out of the current building, or choose an existing, federally owned building in Washington, D.C., as a new headquarters.

The Executive Office of the President would receive $815.5 million for 2025, according to the spending bill. That’s $105.6 million below the budget request. As part of that appropriation, the Office of Management and Budget would get $126 million.

Several of the bill’s other policy riders specifically target Biden administration policies that Republicans have opposed for years. The legislation in its current form would ban the implementation of President Joe Biden’s executive orders on climate change, as well as diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA).

Additionally, the Small Business Administration would not be able to fund any climate change initiatives under the bill. In total, the House subcommittee proposed about $854.1 million for SBA, a cut of $117.1 million from the White House’s request, and $187.6 million below the enacted level for 2024.

Once the Senate subcommittee releases and votes on its version of the draft appropriations bill, House and Senate lawmakers will have to reconcile any differences between the two versions of the bill before voting on it, or sending it to the president’s desk for a signature.

The post Democrats warn layoffs ahead as House GOP proposes agency spending cuts first appeared on Federal News Network.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough says a “series of massive mistakes” led to his department approving nearly $11 million in bonuses to career executives who weren’t eligible to receive them.

“You cannot read the statute and say that this was an acceptable use of that statute,” McDonough told members of the House VA Committee at a hearing Tuesday.

VA’s inspector general office, in a report released last month, found the department improperly awarded $10.8 million in critical skills incentives (CSIs) to more than 180 executives last fall.

Congress authorized these incentives under the toxic-exposure PACT Act to help the VA retain employees with in-demand skills, or skills that are in short supply, and serve a mission-critical need.

“It’s hard for me to read the statute and conclude that there’s no executives in headquarters that could qualify for a CSI. And consistent with that, we will look at that if there are places we need a CSI,” McDonough said. “Similarly, there is no way to read the statute to conclude that every senior executive in headquarters absolutely deserved one.”

McDonough said the VA has recouped about 92% of the bonuses paid to executives, and that the department has new procedures in place to ensure it awards incentives in a way that’s “very specific, individual and skill-driven.”

“This is why we are reviewing the entire process on these,” he said.

The VA, however, is not canceling critical skills incentives that went to 197 career executives in the field, outside VA’s central office in Washington, D.C.

“I’m not ready to opine on this completely, because the review is ongoing. But the evidence to date suggests that they were handled in a process much more consistent with the policy that we laid out in 2023 — meaning with individual justifications, based on those individuals with specific market analyses to make the case that this is a particular skill in those markets to keep those personnel,” McDonough said.

McDonough said the VA can justify these awards as retention incentives, given “churn” among VA network and medical center directors.

“I have believed and continue to believe that those investments are important to keep that critical leadership cadre,” he said.

‘They blew the whistle’

McDonough said he found out about the bonuses to VA executives on Sept. 13 last year, after getting a call from VA’s chief financial officer.

“They blew the whistle, because they saw these large payments going out of the Finance Service Center. That was speaking truth to power. That was calling out a challenge. That was an important internal check — one we rely on, on a regular basis,” McDonough said.

After learning about the bonuses, McDonough notified VA Committee Chairman Mike Bost (R-Ill.) in a phone call, and asked the VA’s inspector general office to investigate.

“In fact, it was me who called you to tell you about it. It was me who asked the inspector general to investigate, and it was me who stopped and recouped,” McDonough told Bost at the hearing.

In addition to canceling and recouping the bonuses, McDonough rescinded his delegation of authority, which allowed VA under secretaries to approve their own senior executives’ awards.

Under the current process, McDonough must approve any decision for a senior executive to receive a critical skills incentive.

In addition to implementing the VA OIG’s recommendations, McDonough said he’d be open to Congress advancing legislation that would allow lawmakers to have a more active role in overseeing these critical skill incentives.

“If you all think that it’s appropriate to take a hard look at how we administer these, we’d like to work with you on that,” he said.

‘The blame rests with me’

McDonough, however, rejected calls from Republicans to fire Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal, Under Secretary for Benefits, VA Deputy Secretary Tanya Bradsher or top human resources officials.

“I continue to have confidence in our under secretaries because of their strong performance and the performance of their team on the implementation of the many authorities that we have — and because of the forthright way we’ve handled this scandal — naming it, owning it, learning from it, including appearing before you today,” he said.

The committee called on Elnahal and Jacobs to testify at Tuesday’s hearing. However, McDonough said he chose to testify before lawmakers because the decision to award these bonuses happened under his leadership.

“At the end of the day, there’s blame to go around here. but the blame rests with me. I should have put this into it the governance structure that I’ve built,” McDonough said.

Among its recommendations, VA OIG says McDonough “should take whatever administrative actions, if any, he deems appropriate related to the personnel involved in the process for granting CSIs for VA central office executives.”

“It is not a recommendation that we do lightly,” VA Inspector IG Michael Missal said, adding that agency IGs don’t have any authority to take disciplinary action, or even recommend disciplinary action.

Bost (R-Ill.) said “VA employees feel betrayed and let down” by VA’s handling of these bonuses.

“I know that some of the bonuses have been clawed back, but as far as I see, the same leaders who allowed, planned, and made these poor decisions remain in power,” Bost said.

Ranking Member Mark Takano (D-Calif.) said the VA “missed opportunities” to stop the improper bonuses, but said the bonuses account for 0.3% of the total critical skills incentives awarded under PACT Act authorities.

“I’m grateful to those VA leaders and employees who voiced their concerns. And I am grateful to Secretary McDonough for heeding those warnings, course correcting and self-reporting to the inspector general and promptly informing Congress once he became aware of the issues,” Takano said.

As of this April, the VA has awarded more than 41,000 CSIs worth $340 million. The average award is about $8,319. More than 90% of CSIs went to housekeepers, food service workers, police and HR specialists eligible to receive them.

McDonough said pay incentives under the PACT Act remain crucial to retain employees with “very critically important skills to veterans.”

“Retention rates are the highest they’ve been in years. Quit rates are at the lowest they’ve been in years. So we have demonstrated our ability to find that balance,” he said.

‘There were large failures’

VA senior executives received the maximum 25% of base pay allowed under the PACT Act. The awards ranged from $39,000 to $100,000.

VA OIG found the Veterans Health Administration and Veterans Benefits Administration authorized the maximum incentive to these executives without data or market analysis supporting those decisions.

VA HR officials had to review the awards before they went out, but Missal said they “gave undue deference to VHA and VBA leaders and signed off on the awards without elevating or resolving staff concern.”

“Staff within human resources had real concerns, identified the problems here, elevated it to then the head of the office, who then essentially ignored the concerns and just moved forward,” Missal said. “So the controls that were in place just didn’t work here. There were large failures.”

Senior executives in VA’s central office received bonuses meant for employees with high-demand skills. But Missal said VHA provided a short, identical paragraph on a single form to justify the bonuses to 148 of its senior executives. VBA, he added, provided more detail, but not enough to justify the bonuses.

“They had one explanation for all the VBA executives, one explanation for all the VHA. That’s taking all those people who have different roles and responsibilities, grouping them all together and saying, ‘We think they should because of this reason.’ Neither one of the explanations for why was adequate,” he said.

Missal said the PACT Act “gives a lot of authority and discretion to VA” to define a critical or high-demand skill.

VA required its leaders to provide market analysis to justify CSIs based on high-demand skills — but VHA and VBA didn’t provide that data.

Missal said VA policy did not require the Office of General Counsel to review the approval of the critical skills incentives, and likely would not have gotten a review for its attorneys, had the acting deputy secretary not requested such a review.

“This was a new authority. And you would think you would want to look at it very carefully as you’re implementing it, including having people with legal expertise to review it,” Missal said.

Among his recommendations, Missal urged the VA’s Office of General Counsel to have greater oversight of these payments.

“You had more junior lawyers reviewing it who just missed the issues. Our recommendation is to make sure for things that have reputational financial risks, to make sure you have a senior lawyer looking at this to make sure things are done properly,” he said.

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VA announced Tuesday that veteran trust scores in the department reached an all-time high of more than 80%. That’s up from 55%, when the VA first conducted this survey in 2016.

The VA is basing its scores on survey responses from more than 38,000 veterans who obtained VA services between January and March this year.

The Veteran Signals (VSignals) survey, conducted every quarter, asks veterans who obtained a wide range of VA services — including health care, disability compensation benefits, memorial affairs, GI Bill benefits and home loans — whether they trust the VA to fulfill its commitment to veterans.

Deputy Chief Veterans Experience Officer Barbara Morton told reporters Tuesday that the latest trust scores show VA is measuring its performance “not how we think we’re doing, but how veterans are telling us we are doing.”

“It signifies a long-term, year-over-year organizational commitment to earning trust with veterans by keeping the veteran at the center of what we do each day, to build and sustain a lifelong relationship with them — now and in the future,” Morton said.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said the Veterans Experience Office’s work on improving veteran experiences at VA has led to a “major culture change,” and that the department’s workforce is “taking this to heart.”

“We strive to be an agency that fits our programs into veterans’ lives, rather than expecting veterans to change their lives to fit into our programs — which I think, frankly, for a long time, is what government programs did, and what VA did,” McDonough said.

VA recently announced veteran trust in its outpatient care increased to nearly 92% — another all-time record for the department. But VA’s trust scores extend beyond just health care.

McDonough is also tracking veteran trust scores on pension and compensation delivery.

“We are now measuring ourselves across the entire enterprise,” he said.

The VA sees room for more progress. It’s looking to bring its veteran trust score up to 90%.

Meanwhile, McDonough said women veterans and veterans of color are more likely to give lower trust scores to VA, including for outpatient care.

“We are saying to the individual veteran that we judge ourselves not on averages, but on that individual veteran’s experience. And hopefully, that accrues over time,” he said.

Morton said the VEO is working with the Veterans Benefits Administration to incorporate human-centered design into its service delivery.

“We know from doing some human-centered design research with veterans that the compensation experience can be a little bumpy at times. It’s a very legal process,” Morton said. “We’ve been working with them to really understand the moments that matter most in that journey. Some of them are really centered around communications. Are we setting expectations properly with veterans who are filing for compensation? There are other elements of medical exams. How might we be able to improve that experience?”

VA links employee satisfaction to higher vet scores

The VA is seeing higher trust scores as it’s providing historic levels of health care and benefits to veterans under the 2022 PACT Act, which expands eligibility for veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service.

In some cases, the PACT Act is leading to veterans receiving VA health care or benefits for the first time. More than half of the 19 million veterans in the U.S. are currently signed up for some VA services.

“I hope that part of what’s reflected in these numbers is a sense from veterans that we want to have a relationship with them,” McDonough said. “It could be that we do have new relationships with veterans, and they’re finding it better than they might have otherwise feared or experienced themselves in the past. But I also hope that our efforts to reach out to veterans, to say to them, ‘We want a relationship with you,’ are conveying a sense that we want them in our care, that we want them getting their earned benefits, that we want a relationship with their caregivers and their survivors and their families.”

The VA is also seeing a strong link between employee satisfaction and veteran satisfaction in VA services. Recent VA research shows a 10% increase in its Employee Engagement Index scores resulted in a 4% average increase in overall hospital ratings.

Meanwhile, VA recently scored fifth among large agencies in the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings.

“Landing on the number-five spot for large agencies in Best Places to Work, to me, is a testament to our workforce feeling such a strong sense of purpose,” Morton said.

“We know from internal surveys that purpose is the strongest sentiment. So there may be other pain points that employees feel, but having that sense of connectivity to the mission, of the population we serve, is really something that consistently employees feel really, really good about,” she added.

McDonough said the VA is seeing historically low quit rates and historically low turnover, “meaning we have historically high retention.”

“We need our employees to feel that there is a connection between what they say their experience is and what we do about it,” McDonough said. “To date, we’ve been able to show changes resulting from their feedback. And it’s really incumbent on us to continue to show that. And if we don’t then we’ll have problems>”

‘Responsibility for this rests with me,’ McDonough says on improper VA bonuses

Next week, the House VA Committee is calling VA leaders to testify in a hearing on how the department awarded nearly $11 million in bonuses to more than 180 ineligible career executives.

The VA inspector general’s office recently found breakdowns in communications — and leadership — led to the bonuses being paid out last year.

McDonough said the IG “wrote a very clear, very helpful report that includes a series of important steps,” and that “we are moving with dispatch, not just having concurred with them, but to implement them.”

“I’ve been very clear that responsibility for this rests with me,” McDonough said. “I made clear that I should have put this into governance to make sure that everybody is tracking, and we’re able to move forthrightly and with full transparency on this issue.”

McDonough said VA has recovered about 90% of the improperly awarded bonuses so far.

Republican senators have called on some VA officials to step down because of the improper bonuses. However, McDonough said he has confidence in two of the officials called to testify — Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal and Under Secretary for Benefits Joshua Jacobs.

“I have communicated to Dr. Elnahal and Mr. Jacobs that they have my confidence, and I would hope that we can count on them staying in their jobs, because I think it’s really important that we continue to perform at this high level,” he said.

The post VA touts engaged workforce as key to highest-ever veteran trust scores   first appeared on Federal News Network.

• House lawmakers are demanding answers from VA officials, after they approved nearly $11 million in bonuses to ineligible career senior executives. The House VA Committee is calling on the under secretaries of health and benefits to testify at a hearing next week about the “bonus blunder.” The committee also wants to hear from senior HR and legal officials to explain why they didn’t flag these bonuses sooner. VA awarded the bonuses last fall and is still trying to recoup some of the money. Republican senators have called on some VA officials to step down because of the error.
  ( Chairman Bost Announces Oversight Hearing on VA’s PACT Act Bonus Mess - House VA Committee )
• Innovation in federal acquisition gets the spotlight in a new report from Office of Management and Budget. Agencies are using an assortment of innovative techniques and technologies to reduce the time to make contracting awards and lower costs for vendors. OMB detailed many of those efforts in a new congressionally-mandated report. In the Acquisition Innovation and Small Business Participation in Federal Procurement report, OMB said many of these tools — such as a market research bot, and hosting remote and interactive capability briefings with vendors to expand the field of bidders — have expanded opportunities for small businesses, including new entrants into the federal sector. OMB said agencies have been collecting and sharing these new approaches in the Periodic Table of Acquisition Innovations, which highlights 29 use cases that could help agencies increase speed, improve accuracy, reduce administrative cost, and lower risk across the acquisition lifecycle.
  (OMB details innovations that are speeding up acquisitions - White House)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is developing new physical security goals for critical infrastructure. CISA’s physical security goals come amid rising threats to the electric grid and other critical infrastructure. CISA is raising awareness about good security practices as it prepares for national safety month in June. “It’s time for us to focus on how we keep working environments safe and free from danger,” CISA Executive Assistant Director for Infrastructure Security David Mussington said. “When it comes to running workplace safety, planning is central to what we need to do to avoid foreseeable and unforeseeable risks.”
  (Amid rising threats to critical infrastructure, CISA developing ‘physical security’ goals - Federal News Network )
• The Department of Veterans Affairs is driving down wait times for veterans to receive health care. The Veterans Health Administration in April saw an 11% decrease in average wait times for new patients in VA primary care, compared to last year. It also saw a 7% decrease in average mental health wait times. Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal said these improved metrics come at a time when VA is delivering more care and more benefits to veterans than ever before. "We've been able to meet that increasing demand for care, all while we're seeing greater demand from our existing base of veterans, as they get older and get more chronic conditions and need more care," Elnahal said.
  (VA sees more patients, cuts wait times, despite higher workload - Federal News Network )
• Federal agencies are preparing for a busy hurricane season. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has opened up a new distribution center in Pennsylvania to ensure supplies can be deployed more quickly along the East Coast. FEMA is also updating its contingency contracts to support rapid response and recovery operations. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there is an 85% chance of above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic this year. NOAA is forecasting the potential for eight to 13 hurricane-strength storms. The hurricane season in the Atlantic runs from June 1 to November 30.
  (FEMA prepares for 2024 Atlantic hurricane season - DHS)
• African American men and women interested in working for the FBI will have a better opportunity to understand what it takes to join the bureau. A new memorandum of understanding between the FBI and the Blacks In Government (BIG) Future Leaders in America’s Government (FLAG), or the BIG FLAG program, will expand the collaboration and information sharing between the two organizations. The FBI will do more to share details about the variety of internships and programs open to college students, as well as hiring opportunities for seniors and recent graduates.  The members of the BIG FLAG program will have access to webinars focused on the FBI’s mission, awareness information, hiring and application processes.
  (FBI, Blacks in Government agree to expand access to job opportunities - FBI News)
• The Government Accountability Office is once again a Best Place to Work in the 2023 rankings from the Partnership for Public Service. This time around, U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro credits the agency's high score in part to its telework practices. GAO has been working with its union over the last year to implement a generous work-from-home policy. Many GAO employees are allowed to work fully remotely, and others can telework up to four days a week. GAO has maintained its spot as the number one midsize agency in the Best Places to Work rankings for four years in a row.
  (3 promising pockets of success in Best Places to Work - Federal News Network)
• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is back on the job after briefly relinquishing his duties over the weekend. The Pentagon said Austin transferred his authority to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks for a few hours on Friday night while he underwent a medical procedure at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. This time, Congress and the White House were notified in advance, and Defense officials said there were not any complications. Austin came under fire in December after a separate health issue sidelined him for two weeks. In that case, lawmakers, the White House and the public were not notified that the secretary was in the hospital until complications emerged. After that, Austin and DoD promised to change the department’s transfer-of-authority procedures and make them more transparent.
  (Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin resumes duty after undergoing procedure at Walter Reed - Associated Press)

The post Scrutiny intensifies regarding VA ‘bonus blunder’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

VA’s National Cemetery Administration is hosting Memorial Day ceremonies at more than 130 national cemeteries, to commemorate service members who died during their military service, as well as all veterans buried at national shrines.

The VA operates 155 national cemeteries and 34 soldiers’ lots and monument sites in 44 states and Puerto Rico. About 4.1 million veterans, from the Revolutionary War to the present day, are buried in VA national cemeteries.

“We can never underestimate or underappreciate the sacrifice made by the brave men and women who died in service to our country,”  former Under Secretary of Memorial Affairs Matthew Quinn told reporters on May 20, shortly before his retirement from the agency.

“Likewise, it is our duty to show our appreciation to our Gold Star family members. We can never repay them for their sacrifices. The least we can do is memorialize those heroes with some solemn words, laying wreaths to remember them and pausing in silence to pray for their souls,” he added.

Beyond providing a final resting place for veterans, NCA is giving their survivors more options to preserve records of their service achievements.

Launched in 2019, the Veterans Legacy Memorial allows surviving friends and family members to create an online page where they can share memories and photos of a veteran in their life who has passed.

Soon, the site will give living veterans more ways to leave behind digital records that will live on after their deaths.

VLM now includes a memorial page for nearly 10 million veterans laid to rest in all VA national cemeteries, VA grant-funded cemeteries, Defense Department-managed cemeteries (including Arlington National Cemetery), Park Service national cemeteries, and thousands of private cemeteries where veterans have received a VA-provided gravesite marker since 1996.

“This benefits the veteran’s surviving family members, as they can read the tributes and know that fellow citizens understand and appreciate the veteran service,” Quinn said.

Quinn said NCA plans to keep expanding and improving VLM. By the end of the year, the agency plans on adding options that will allow living veterans to upload their own photos and other memorabilia, “so they can have a hand in preserving their own legacies.”

“A veteran can go in and fill out the information on their service that they want the family to be aware of, or others to be aware of. And then that page, upon the veteran’s passing, will go live,” Quinn said.

About 94% of all veterans live within 75 miles of a national or grant-funded cemetery — close to NCA’s goal of 95%.

“NCA will continue studying demographic shifts and related information to ensure we are providing the best possible coverage,” Quinn said.

Quinn briefed reporters shortly before he stepped down from the role. His last day was May 23.

“I’m very proud of what NCA has accomplished over the past three years —especially reducing wait times for applications, improving our IT systems overall, maintaining our outstanding customer satisfaction through unprecedented challenges, surpassing the $1 billion mark in grants to help states territories and tribes establish and maintain cemeteries, and so much more,” he said.

NCA ranks top among all public and private organizations on the American Customer Satisfaction Index — a distinction it’s held for eight years in a row.

“It’s obvious why this organization has scored the highest ever on the American Customer Satisfaction Index. I know NCA will continue to top that survey,” Quinn said.

More than 70% of NCA’s 2,400 employees are veterans — the highest percentage of any federal agency.

“Our team members, whether or not they’re veterans, understand the importance of providing vital honors, and dignified burial benefits. Meeting these team members and working with them has been the highest honor and the most fulfilling experience for someone who has had many great honors and experience.”

The post VA to give veterans more ways to leave digital legacy when they’re gone first appeared on Federal News Network.