A Statute Without a Landlord
The Department of Veterans Affairs likes a good map. It uses them to calculate how far veterans must drive to reach care, to plan where facilities belong, and to keep track of who is buried where in the national cemeteries. It is therefore a little awkward that, according to a new audit from the VA Office of Inspector General, nobody can quite say who owns the map room.
The audit, published October 2, is the biennial review of VA’s compliance with the Geospatial Data Act of 2018. VA met 10 of the 12 requirements that apply to it. The two it missed are the ones the others depend upon, namely a current strategy and the people to carry it out.
On strategy, VA never updated its spatial data strategy to match the national plan for 2025 through 2035, which was revised in October 2024. An acting deputy chief information officer told auditors the update had not even started, in part because of limited resources. On staffing, the finding is a repeat from 2024. VHA no longer has a permanent chief strategy officer or deputy chief strategy officer, the Geospatial Service Support Center has no permanent director, key geospatial staff left in 2025, and the department is still running on an acting geospatial information officer.
The OIG ties part of this to a September 2025 memorandum from the Secretary, cited in the audit, that dissolved the Office of Enterprise Integration, the office that had overseen geospatial compliance. Its pieces were scattered between the Office of Information and Technology and the Office of the Secretary. The governing paperwork was never told. Directive 0900, which assigns these duties, has not been updated since December 2020, and the Data Governance Council charter from April 2022 still reflects an organization chart that no longer exists. A statutory duty now sits in a drawer labeled with the name of a dead office.
Promissory Notes Payable in 2028
The previous audit, in 2024, was titled as though VA were gliding toward full compliance. The new one finds that VA has generally not improved since, and that the staffing failure is a repeat.
VA’s response is concurrence, which costs nothing. The deputy secretary agreed with all three recommendations in a memorandum dated September 22. The corrective action plans carry target dates of September 30, 2027 for the updated strategies and the staffing plan, and March 31, 2028 for revising directives, handbooks, and procedures, including Directive 0900. The reorganization that orphaned the duty took place in September 2025, so the repair of the directive is scheduled roughly two and a half years after the damage.
Consider the sequence. OIT officials told auditors in April 2026 that they were actively updating policies, Directive 0900 among them. The action plan now says that review will finish no later than the second quarter of fiscal 2028. Actively, it seems, is a flexible term.
The staffing recommendation fares no better. VA officials say the requirements are already documented in a five-year GIS staffing and resource management plan, yet the auditors still found the staffing inadequate. The OIG asked for a comprehensive plan, and VA has agreed to deliver one by September 2027. That plan will identify staffing gaps and look for ways to use automation and artificial intelligence to extend staff capacity, a team that its own officials say lacks the resources to do the job.
What the Map Is Actually For
Geospatial data sounds like a niche concern, the sort of thing that matters to cartographers and procurement officers. It is in fact the raw material of VHA planning. The MISSION Act requires VA to conduct market assessments, and in its report to the AIR Commission VA describes how those assessments informed its recommendations for modernizing and realigning facilities. The market recommendations lean heavily on drive times, reporting market by market what share of enrollees live within 30 minutes of primary care and 60 minutes of secondary care. The Government Accountability Office has reported that VHA’s guidelines for placing new mental health programs combine demand projection models with geographic data and drive time thresholds, with the Chief Strategy Office responsible for that kind of analysis. An earlier OIG audit of the market assessments cites that same office’s geographic dataset in explaining how market areas were drawn.
The AIR Commission itself is dead. Twelve senators declined to advance it in 2022, and VA told Government Executive in 2023 that it would modernize anyway, building first and treating closures as a secondary matter. But the map room did not close with the commission. In the audit’s own Appendix B, VA states that the geospatial team plays a critical role in the Chief Strategy Office’s forecasting for VHA market assessments and other planning functions, and that VA is still finalizing the team’s roles and resource needs inside that office as part of the Restructure for Impact and Sustainability Effort, known as RISE.
RISE is no small thing. Military Times reported that Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz put its cost at $312 million over five years after an initial investment of $521 million, and Marine Corps Times described it as the largest reorganization of VHA since the 1990s, shrinking the regional networks from 18 to 5. VA says no offices or positions will be eliminated through RISE. The OIG does not say that RISE caused any of the vacancies, and neither do I.
Now an inference, offered as one. The OIG did not audit the market assessments or RISE planning. But VA’s own management comments say the geospatial team is critical to the Chief Strategy Office’s forecasting, and the audit reports that VHA lacks a permanent chief strategy officer and deputy, presumably the leadership of that same office, though the audit does not say so. It is reasonable to infer that the forecasting beneath the largest VHA restructuring in decades rests on a thinly staffed team with acting leadership. That reasoning rests on those two passages in the audit and nothing else, and I found no published document that measures whether the shortage has degraded any forecast.
Questions the Audit Did Not Ask
Fairness requires some caveats. This was a compliance audit, not a damage assessment. It puts no dollar figure on the shortfall and speaks in the language of risk and missed opportunity, such as failing to exploit artificial intelligence or to build interagency partnerships. The auditors also worked from VA’s FY 2024 self-assessment, because the FY 2025 version was not released until May 2026, after fieldwork on the 13 requirements was finished. The OIG says it did not change the findings.
Two judgment calls deserve a raised eyebrow. VA still does not publish its geospatial metadata on the federal GeoPlatform, citing the sensitivity of veteran data, and the OIG counted it compliant on that requirement regardless. And the 2024 privacy finding was closed in part because OIT reassessed the earlier incidents and judged the risk factors unwarranted, alongside genuine fixes such as raising the VHA geographic information system from a low to a moderate security categorization. The OIG accepted that outcome, and readers may weigh it as they wish.
The questions worth putting to VA are simple. Who is accountable today for geospatial compliance under the law? How long have the chief strategy officer and deputy posts been vacant, and why? Did RISE change the reporting line of the geospatial team? Has any market assessment, forecast, or facility planning product been delayed or revised for want of staff? A department that can compute a veteran’s drive time to the minute can surely locate its own org chart.
