Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins faced off with NewsNation’s Chris Stirewalt on The Hill Sunday, digging into proposed cuts at the VA and how he’s navigating advice from the Trump-backed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Collins stood firm, “I receive it as I’m the Secretary of the VA and at the end of the day, I’m going to make decisions best for my employees and best for the veterans. And they’re [DOGE] giving us some good advice, looking with fresh eyes.”
Collins tackled the hot-button cuts head-on, framing them as a rethink, not a slash-and-burn.
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“We’re going to do everything we possibly can to make sure that the veteran experience gets better. And I think that’s the biggest issue that we have,” he said. “And so look at what I found in this town so many times, is the people that say you can’t or you want are also the people that are most fearful that you will and so when you take something like the VA, in which so many in Congress and others have just sort of thrown money or issues at it and said, Do we get better? We’re now actually saying, Is there a better way? And I think, from my perspective, that’s helpful.”
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He promised to shield veteran-facing services like healthcare and claims, targeting waste—think 16,000 contract workers—and eyeing a staffing model overhaul. “We’re hiring over a thousand or more people every two-week pay period. So we’re hiring at the VA, we’ve exempted over 300,000 jobs on the front facing medical and disabilities claim.”
The VA’s long rap sheet with the Government Accountability Office—flagged for a decade as “high-risk” for fraud and poor care—lit a fire under Collins.
“So the question just comes is reports tell us what we know the VA is broken, but we’re not gonna be the whipping post anymore. We’re not going to be the people that say, you know. VA, you’re bad. You’re not doing this,” said Collins. “Your wait times are terrible. But then when we start to do something, oh, you can’t touch VA, well, we’re not going to be that person anymore. We’re not going to be that department. You’re not going to scare my veterans, and you’re not going to scare my employees. We’re going to do this in a way that helps them.”
Collins shared a hands-on win on modernizing the VA’s creaky health records.
“Everywhere else has modern systems—except us,” he said. After the Biden administration paused the Oracle-led rollout, Collins locked VA staff and Oracle in a room.
“Three days later, we had communication. A week after that, standardization doubled sites by next year, and years shaved off the timeline.”
He aims to have over half of VA hospitals online by 2028, with the ball moving in 2025, not 2026.
It’s a balancing act—streamlining a behemoth without breaking it—rooted in a vow to boost the “veteran experience” over bureaucratic inertia. Whether Congress buys in could make or break it, but Collins is betting on a leaner, sharper VA by decade’s end.
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