The Veterans Affairs Department currently supports roughly 140,000 teleworking employees per day—heaps more than the 30,000 to 40,000 that worked remotely daily prior to the pandemic.
Over the last couple months, the agency swiftly switched into gear providing personnel with technological capabilities and equipment that now underpin the new and necessary socially distant posture, and according to VA’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for IT and Deputy Chief Information Officer Dominic Cussatt, deliberate modernization efforts that predated the pandemic enabled the agency to rapidly adjust to its remote-working needs.
“Since the COVID crisis broke back in the middle of March or early April, we expanded our capabilities in weeks, doing things that would typically take us months or even years. We really scrambled and looked at what our customers needed and got the remote work and remote capabilities in place, working very closely with our industry partners,” Cussatt said during a virtual panel hosted by FCW Wednesday. “And all of the work we did in our digital transformation really helped make sure we had an infrastructure that could accept all of these enhanced capabilities, and scale to what we needed to get to to support a very sudden and very abrupt remote workforce.”
Cussatt detailed—down to the numbers—the initial outcomes of a range of early pivots the agency pursued to support both its workforce and veterans during the global health crisis, and shared how insiders plan to continue to boost its capacities, even beyond the pandemic.
VA is America’s second largest federal agency and boasts massive size and scope. Cussatt noted that the agency has an annual budget of more than $220 billion and encompasses more than 400,000 federal employees in the U.S. and abroad. That personnel serves almost “20 million U.S. veterans at any giv ..
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