Two nominees for offices in the drastically restructured Department of Veterans' affairs claimed independence from the current administration during a Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee confirmation hearing June 3. Gary Shatswell is up for the top technology post and Michael Tierney contends to head the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection. The Trump administration is pushing both nominations forward even as Democrats on the panel raised sharp questions about the Department of Veteran's Affairs (VA) troubled IT record and an underfunded whistleblower protection office.
The hearing arrived at a moment of institutional stress at VA. The department's Electronic Health Record (EHR) Modernization program resumed after a three-year pause to address system issues, with nine additional site deployments planned for 2026 after the original four in April and a lifecycle cost that has grown to an estimated $37 billion. Shatswell is Trump's third nominee for the VA Chief Information Officer role since the start of his second term, following the withdrawals of Ryan Cote and Alan Boehme. The pace of turnover that drew scrutiny.
On the accountability side, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published July 2025 found the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection (OAWP) could not consistently track corrective actions in whistleblower cases and lacked accurate settlement data. A Democratic minority report released in...
The relator managed to connect alleged upcode overcharging to the submission of bills to the government that would have necessarily contained inflated charges. A qui tam relator who did not plead ...