Washington Sen. Patty Murray grilled Collins about a lack of transparency under his leadership, including a new policy that prevented her from meeting with veterans and health care providers at the Seattle VA hospital in April. She also questioned his goal of cutting 15% of the department’s workforce while accelerating the rollout of the electronic health record system that has hamstrung Spokane’s Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center since it became the testing ground at the end of the first Trump administration.

“As you know, fixing EHR and getting it right for our veterans is about patient safety,” Murray said, using the acronym for the system. “Did you ask these VA clinicians and hospitals about how those cuts would affect future EHR deployments?”

Collins replied that the planned layoffs and the computer system’s accelerated rollout “are separate,” brushing aside concerns about cutting staff and terminating support contracts while more aggressively deploying a system that has contributed to thousands of cases of patient harm, according to the VA’s own internal data.

Ken Kizer, who ran the Veterans Health Administration during the 1990s and oversaw the last major overhaul of VA health care, has said it would be “lunacy” to ramp up the system’s rollout while conducting mass layoffs.