The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Chief Information Officer (CIO) Kurt DelBene told lawmakers on Tuesday that the VA’s Office of Information and Technology (OIT) budget for fiscal year (FY) 2025 is a “challenging” one with many significant cuts, but defended its funding increase to support the VA’s Special Salary Rate (SSR).
The president’s FY2025 budget provides $7.6 billion for VA IT systems and telecommunication support, including $6.2 billion in base discretionary funding. This represents a 3.3 percent budget cut relative to FY2024.
It features a 5 percent increase relative to the FY2024 level for its IT workforce to help support the VA’s Special Salary Rate. The budget also features a 21 percent increase in cybersecurity funding relative to FY2024.
However, the budget features several notable cuts such as a 99 percent cut to development, an 81 percent cut to IT modernization, and a 66 percent cut to its Infrastructure Readiness Program.
“It is a challenging budget for us, I’ll say that upfront,” DelBene said during a House VA Subcommittee on Technology Modernization Oversight hearing late Tuesday afternoon. “It will require us to be very focused in where we invest. We have taken the initiatives that the administration overall wants to focus on, and we agree with those initiatives.”
“The areas like cybersecurity, we are bolstering because that’s absolutely critical in the complexity of our organization,” he added. “At the same time, what we’re going to have to do is take the development and modernization funds and judiciously allocate those against the highest-priority projects that we have. My goal, and I think this is accomplishable, is we will not hamper veteran care as a result of this, but I will tell you, we are going to have to be very targeted in our investment.”
Subcommittee Chairman Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., expressed his concern over the budget cuts, noting, “It is by far the most unusual VA information technology budget that we have seen since this subcommittee was created.”
“I’m all for reducing spending, but even I don’t make recommendations about a 99 percent cut in development,” he said.
Chairman Rosendale said he was most concerned that the VA’s Special Salary Rate – which the agency launched last summer to increase the pay of its IT and cybersecurity employees – is putting pressure on OIT’s overall budget.
“I’m very concerned that the Special Salary Rate, which may have been well-intended, will become completely unaffordable when combined with this budget and undermine the organization,” Rep. Rosendale said.
Ranking Member Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., also voiced her concern on the issue, saying she’s worried the “modest” 5 percent increase “doesn’t keep pace with the OIT’s expanded authorities to provide Special Salary Rates for its people.”
“I fear supporting those SSRs will force OIT to decrease the number of its people it has,” she said. “Expecting VA’s IT folks to do more work with less people is going to have a lasting impact on retention. The pay raises won’t be enough to prevent people from resigning.”
Nevertheless, DelBene defended the SSR, saying “I would do the Special Salary Rate again, even if we have to find room for it … we have to pay people appropriately.”
Dewaine Beard, the VA’s principal deputy assistant secretary (PDAS) and deputy CIO for OIT, also defended the SSR. He explained that OIT executive leadership discussed the tradeoffs and collectively decided on the SSR “in order to recruit better talent and to reward the talent we had on board.”
“All the money in the world that brings in new equipment, printers, computers, they do not deploy themselves at hospitals and clinics around the country. We need talented staff out in the field in order to do that,” Beard told lawmakers. “So, starving salary for staff in order to do modernization, you have to do a balance between that. That’s what we do as a leadership team. We think through these issues, and we work very hard to make solid tradeoffs.”
