Collins Testifies at the House Appropriations VA Budget Hearing, May 15, 2025
May 15, 2025 · Forbes Breaking News · 2:03:14
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What happened
VA Secretary Doug Collins testified on the Department of Veterans Affairs’ fiscal year 2026 budget request before the House Appropriations subcommittee responsible for VA funding on May 15, 2025, in Forbes Breaking News’ carry of the hearing — his first appearance before the subcommittee, as its chairman noted in welcoming him. The chairman framed the morning around the priorities in the administration’s budget outline received at the beginning of May, and singled out the electronic health record modernization request of $2.2 billion, as he stated the figure: a program he said he strongly supported while acknowledging its implementation so far had been challenging, over budget, and behind schedule, and on which the subcommittee expected the department’s plan to support a rapid expansion.
The hearing ranged across the same ground as Collins’s Senate oversight appearance nine days earlier — the contract cancellations and personnel proposals the chairman described as a large part of the day’s conversation, with the majority’s stated condition that cutting inefficiency must not compromise the care and services veterans rely on. Collins closed by looking past the hearing itself, telling the subcommittee he looked forward to continuing monthly calls so the department and the committee could deal with each other directly rather than, as he put it, through innuendo and the press.
Why it matters
The appropriators write the VA’s check, and this hearing is where the fiscal year 2026 request met the subcommittee that funds it — with the electronic health record, the department’s longest-running modernization failure, named at the top of the agenda by the chairman himself. The $2.2 billion EHR figure stated here is the baseline against which the much larger fiscal year 2027 request, defended in the hearings paged elsewhere on this site, was later measured.
Scoreboard watch
Scoreboard watch: the fiscal year 2026 electronic health record modernization request of $2.2 billion, as stated by the subcommittee chairman on May 15, 2025, paired with his on-record assessment that implementation had been over budget and behind schedule. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.
Sources: Forbes Breaking News, “Sec. Doug Collins Faces Tough Grilling On VA’s Budget Proposal Before House Appropriations Cmte.” (carry of the May 15, 2025 hearing, embedded above; testimony as delivered by Secretary Collins and members of the subcommittee).
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