Oracle has also reshuffled its leadership amid the cuts. The company on Monday announced it hired Hilary Maxson as its new chief financial officer, bringing her over from Schneider Electric. Oracle said Maxson will receive a base salary of $950,000 and be eligible for a performance-based bonus with a target of $2.5 million.

The timing is especially sensitive. The VA is moving forward with its next phase of deployments, a site-by-site rollout of its EHR modernization program. New sites are now going live in Michigan as part of a broader restart of the rollout after it was paused under the Biden administration in 2023 following a series of system failures and patient safety concerns.

In a statement to the Washington Examiner, VA officials said the layoffs will not affect the rollout and emphasized that the department is moving forward with deployments.

“Regarding the layoffs, this will have no effect on VA’s EHR rollout,” said John O. Stapleton, deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the VA.

Stapleton added that the VA is restarting deployments this year, including the current expansion to four sites in Michigan, and said the system is expected to improve coordination of care, reduce duplicative testing, and allow clinicians to spend more time with patients.

Oracle declined to comment on the layoffs or their impact on Oracle Health.

The limited response has done little to ease concerns on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers say they are still seeking clarity on how internal changes at Oracle could affect staffing, investment, and long-term support for the system.

Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-WA), whose district includes VA facilities that were among the first to implement the system, said he has yet to receive clear answers from either the VA or Oracle.

“I have not gotten a really good grasp or report from the VA on how well the rollout is going,” Baumgartner said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I still have more questions than answers on it.”

Baumgartner said his concerns are rooted in the program’s troubled early deployments, particularly in eastern Washington, where facilities were among the first to adopt the system.

“Our VA hospitals in eastern Washington were picked as essentially the guinea pigs … and it just doesn’t seem to go that well,” he said. “It still seems to be an ongoing problem.”

While he stopped short of calling for another pause in deployments, Baumgartner said the lack of transparency from both the VA and Oracle is troubling, especially as the system expands to new sites.

“We just want it to work,” he said. “Our veterans have good care and make sure things don’t get caught up” in broader corporate changes.

In a letter to VA Secretary Doug Collins, Baumgartner also raised concerns about reports that Oracle may be exploring strategic changes to its Oracle Health division, including a sale or restructuring. He warned that any shift in ownership or priorities could have far-reaching consequences for the VA program.

“Any material change in ownership, financial posture, or strategic direction … could have significant implications for program continuity, system performance, cybersecurity, workforce stability, and vendor accountability,” he wrote.

Those concerns are amplified by the system’s track record.

The EHR modernization effort, launched in 2017, was meant to streamline care and reduce costs by creating a unified electronic health record system across the VA and the Pentagon. But the rollout has been plagued by technical failures, usability issues, and patient safety concerns.

At an early deployment site in Spokane, Washington, problems surfaced almost immediately after the system went live in 2020. Clinicians described the platform as slow and difficult to use, forcing doctors and nurses to spend more time entering data and less time caring for patients.

In one case cited by the VA’s inspector general, a provider placed an order for follow-up care for a homeless patient at risk of suicide, but the order was never processed. The patient was later hospitalized after threatening self-harm. Investigators traced the failure to an “unknown queue” that captured undelivered orders without alerting staff, and found VA employees had not been adequately trained on how the feature worked.

Federal oversight reports have documented hundreds of major performance incidents tied to the system, including cases linked to patient harm and deaths.

Costs have also climbed sharply. The VA originally signed a $10 billion contract with Cerner in 2018, but that figure has since grown significantly, with lawmakers now estimating lifecycle costs in the tens of billions and some projections reaching as high as $50 billion.

A separate development has also raised additional oversight concerns. Federal prosecutors last month charged a former senior VA official who oversaw the EHR modernization program with concealing gifts and cash received while in government, according to court filings. The VA did not respond to a request for comment on the charges.

At a January hearing, Collins sharply criticized how the program was handled under the Biden administration, calling the rollout an “unmitigated disaster.”

“The previous administration just frankly gave up, threw their hands up in the air and said, ‘We quit,’ after billions of dollars being spent,” Collins said.

Still, the administration is now pushing ahead with deployments, arguing that improvements made during the pause have addressed earlier issues. Whether those fixes will hold as the system expands remains an open question.

Beyond the current Michigan rollout, the VA is planning additional deployments throughout 2026, including sites in Ohio and Kentucky later this summer, followed by expansions into Indiana in the fall. Further rollouts are scheduled in Cleveland and Alaska by October, underscoring the department’s plan to continue scaling the system nationwide despite concerns.

VA STEPS UP ROLLOUT OF NEW ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS SYSTEM AMID CONCERNS OVER COST AND SUPPORT 

For lawmakers like Baumgartner, the combination of a troubled history and new uncertainty at Oracle underscores what is at stake.

“We’re not talking about splitting the atom here,” he said. “Medical records … it just shouldn’t be that hard.”