When I left the Army in 2013 I had a terrible experience with the VA. Despite having a simple profile and a graduate degree, it took me years to navigate the system after a comedy of administrative errors. I lived the dysfunction that was in all the headlines in 2014. Yet years later, whenever I re-engage, it’s a transformed experience for the better. Things just seem to work and I go back about my life.
When government services work, they stop feeling remarkable. We move on to the next problem instead of asking what made that success possible. VA’s story of improvement from 2015-2025 is a rare example of durable transformation at the full agency level (and in this case, a massive agency), not just one project or one team. This is the type of reform we need across government, so we must learn the right lessons.
Over a decade, the VA team built and sustained a hugely improved capacity to deliver on its mission across multiple administrations. This case study, “Built for the Veteran” answers how they did it. The research and insights in the report are a significant contribution to the evidence base largely missing in the conversation about how to make government work better.
The Niskanen Center created a dedicated team a little over two years ago to focus on the shared challenges facing policy implementation across government, from housing to energy to immigration. Our State Capacity Initiative advances reforms to help the government deliver on its promises. Niskanen supported this work on the VA because our country faces daunting challenges and we believe we need an effective government to overcome them.
At the heart of so many of our government failures has been our inability to effectively develop and integrate software to improve mission delivery. But what started, at least in my mind, as a story about how the VA used the product model to do software better became something much more.
This isn’t a story about tech; it’s about people and how those people organized, prioritized, and made decisions. This is a story about using the product model approach for the whole organization, not just a particular service. It’s about resilience and continuous improvement. It is a story about earning veteran trust through effective, consistent service delivery. The lessons from this work should inform every modernization effort in the next decade at the federal, state, and local levels.
In this Substack series and the upcoming September report, the case study team will bring you inside the VA to understand how the transformation started, what went well and what didn’t, why trust kept everyone focused on the right things, and how improvements were sustained and built upon across multiple administrations and senior leaders.
The lessons from this VA case study can and should inform changes at every agency right now. There are actionable learnings here for everyone from new hires to senior leaders. The VA set the bar for sustaining drastic improvement over multiple administrations. Now it’s time to create more success stories.
