Lance Glinn:
From Lake Las Vegas here in Nevada, welcome into another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Today's guest is Peter O'Rourke. He is the former acting US secretary of Veterans Affairs.
Peter, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House. Happy to have you here.
Peter O'Rourke:
It's great to be here. Thank you.
Lance Glinn:
I want to start at the beginning of your professional journey. You served in the military before later stepping into various leadership roles in the federal government. When you look back just at those early years of your time in the service, what are some foundational lessons that really shaped the way you just think about leadership, about teamwork, and about responsibility overall?
Peter O'Rourke:
That's a great question. So just as a bit of the biographical part, I joined the Navy as an enlisted guy in 1989, went straight out of high school, straight to working on probably the greatest aircraft in my opinion. It was the F-14. As you can remember, Top Gun was kind of popular back then. It was interesting because, at that time, probably about a 25 to $26 million aircraft, the responsibility you get at an incredibly young age starts to prepare you, I think, for understanding what it really means to not just lead yourself, in a sense, be responsible yourself, accountable for your own things that you have to do, but also then how that starts to grow with others.
Lance Glinn:
Sure.
Peter O'Rourke:
I had a chance even during that time to train other young guys that I was working with on how to clean canopies and change the oil in an aircraft engine, things like that. Minor task, but you start to understand how to work with a team and that stuff.
I then left the Navy. Mainly the Gulf War was getting over. We were having to draw down a little bit in the mid '90s. I decide to go to college and have that experience and try to get through that as quickly as possible. College was fun, but it wasn't really for me. I was ready to get back.
Fortunately/unfortunately, we were facing some other global conflicts in the later '90s, and the Air Force was hiring for what ultimately for me became a logistics job, which I wouldn't say I knew a lot about logistics and supply chain at the time. The Air Force taught me quite a bit, all the way from basic technical training, all the way through a good graduate degree. But in that job is really when it started to... You just really started to understand what leadership in the military is actually about. And then that translated later on into being in the government civilian world and how to lead there.
Really just even in business and industry, a lot of those lessons kind of carried all the way back from having the lesson of how you evaluate yourself or how you're evaluated by others and how that can sting the first time when somebody tells you, "Hey, you're not as good as you thought you were. You should get better, and here's how you can get better." Once you've learned that and you can humble yourself for that, it sets you on a good path.
Lance Glinn:
Did you draw inspiration at all from Top Gun?
Peter O'Rourke:
That was the whole reason to go to-
Lance Glinn:
Did that sort of push you to it? Yeah.
Peter O'Rourke:
I was fortunate, right? I not only got to work on the best airplane, but I got to actually be in NAS Miramar in San Diego. In fact, my barracks was right next to the volleyball courts. It was not where the officers played at all, I can tell you, but we had a good time there.
Lance Glinn:
Nice.
Peter O'Rourke:
The class six store was right next to that. Do you know what a Class Six store is?
Lance Glinn:
Mm-hmm.
Peter O'Rourke:
It's the big store.
Lance Glinn:
You get it.
Peter O'Rourke:
Yeah, yeah.
Lance Glinn:
After your service, over a number of years, you ended up ultimately transitioning into a leadership role at the VA. I want to dive into how your experience sort of transformed and informed that time of your career. What was just different about leading a federal agency? You talked obviously about leading people. What about leading a federal agency? How did you adapt to make decisions that affected millions of veterans and also thousands of employees that worked in the department?
Peter O'Rourke:
Yeah. No, those are some great numbers. Let's put some specifics. When I was at the department, we had around 390,000 employees across all the 50 states in the United States and 7 foreign countries. We had either main hospitals or clinics in all those different places all around the world, serving roughly around seven and a half million veterans, both on the benefits side for disability compensation and then also for healthcare, interacted with every major healthcare system in the United States in one form or another. Every research hospital in the United States has a relationship with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
It's like anything else in government, especially when it's not just the government side, but on the politics side. You get into these jobs, especially as a political appointee, typically through... My pathway was working on the campaign, so I did advance work and helped set up events, do things like that. And then they offer you a position, and you go in, and I started out pretty much not really at the bottom, but I was what they call a Schedule C, which is your entry point level. I was a little older, so I was at the high end of that point, but still I wasn't like a senior career person.
It was really all about finding the opportunities, so you can get in there, some people and folks can see where they get hired for a specific job or they have a specific mission or they had a specific profile before they got hired and to do a certain thing. I don't think anybody even knew who I was, I was filling out a position, so you really have to look for opportunities. And I think that's the first lesson I learned that's helped me ever since then is to be able to differentiate between opportunities that make a difference to the leadership that you're working for, and in my case...
We had a secretary of Veterans Affairs, and ultimately that didn't work out for him. There was different things. I knew kind of where the president stood with veterans issues, and so I was looking for things that would make a difference where you have to differentiate yourself. I first worked on a piece of... There was a veteran ID card that was a piece of legislation that had been around for about two years. Nobody had done anything with it. I just looked at it and said, "Well, I think maybe we should be able to do it somehow," and I found out that the Department of Veterans Affairs, the secretary, actually can't accept gifts from anybody as long as it's used to serve veterans.
I decided to go to the great folks at Staples who were actually going through a turnaround at Staples at the time. This would've been right around 2017. I had a friend that had a friend, and I said, "Hey, would you guys be interested in printing these ID cards if I gave you the information?" They're like, "Yeah, we think that'd be a great idea." Got that cleared, had to kind of force that through the system, but we got this little ID card made. That was kind of really interesting. I actually could do something in the federal government, get it done.
And then the next thing was, "Hey, the president really cares about accountability in the VA." If you remember, they talked about firing bad employees, all this kind of stuff, and how hard it is to fire government employees. I got a one page, said, "Hey, how would you do this?" I don't even know how it really got to me, but I wrote up a-
Lance Glinn:
But it did.
Peter O'Rourke:
Yeah, but it did, and I wrote a couple pages on it and went up to the White House, and they're like, "Yeah, okay, let's do that."
So I got to do another kind of unique thing in the federal government, which was start a new organization, which... Typically, that's not always something that you get the opportunity to do, especially as a political appointee. We did that. We set up that new office. Then there was authorizing legislation that came soon about two months later. And then in the fall of that year, I got a call, said, "Hey, we're..." It was actually two calls. First call said, "Hey, you're going to get a phone call that says, 'Will you be the chief of staff of the whole department?'" And they're asking me, "What are you going to say?" And I was like, "Well, of course I'm going to say yes." So then about 10 minutes later, I get this call from Cabinet Affairs, and they asked me, "Hey, we want you to be the chief staff." And I'm like, "Yes, okay, I'll be the chief staff."
So then I got to move into a actual... The chief of staff at the VA, not the same as a lot of places, but that is like the number three position in the whole department. I build that role for a little while until they actually... There was a change in leadership at the secretary level. In that interim period, the gentleman that the president had nominated to be the secretary-
Lance Glinn:
Was still going through the process, yeah.
Peter O'Rourke:
... was going through confirmation-
Lance Glinn:
Find yourself in this.
Peter O'Rourke:
... and you're the acting secretary. So you wake up one day, glad to have a job. And then you wake up another day, and you're like, "Okay. Now, I'm running an organization of a few hundred thousand people responsible for huge... a national treasure."
Lance Glinn:
Yeah. You had mentioned earlier in your answer that there are people who are hired for specific jobs and they sort of go in with a perception of, "This is what I'm going to do. This is why I was hired. This is what my goal is," whatever that might be. You then said you were sort of just hired, and you didn't really have a specific job on the mind really. Do you think that there was a benefit to you not coming in already with sort of like a preconceived notion, with a perception? You had the ability essentially to mold, to a certain extent, right-
Peter O'Rourke:
Find it, yeah.
Lance Glinn:
... what you wanted to pursue.
Peter O'Rourke:
Yes, if you are motivated in that way. I did know a lot of other folks that were in the same situation I was in. They weren't hired as the director of National Intelligence or something like that where you had a very... The expectations were already built in.
Lance Glinn:
Were this, yeah.
Peter O'Rourke:
Gosh, there's thousands of political appointments around, so there's lots of different positions. But if you're not looking for those opportunities and you're not looking to make a difference, I always was like, "Well, then, why are you here?" Even if you are in a Schedule C position, whatever, if there's nothing for you to do, then maybe you should go somewhere else, but there usually is a lot of stuff to get done. It's your own motivation to find that, and it's not going to be in the things that you expect. It's going to be kind of crazy, little things that are around. But working in that direction, I think if you're going to be in the public service, you need to find a mission or find a purpose, or you need to go somewhere else.
Lance Glinn:
Yeah, absolutely. You need to figure out a service that you need to do ultimately if you're going to be a public service. I would think that during your time as acting secretary of Veterans Affairs, one of the real highlights was working with lawmakers from both sides of the aisle on the VA MISSION Act in 2018 and getting that really across the finish line. What did collaboration look like, and how did you navigate the complexity of working with a bipartisan group of leaders in both the House and Senate? Because we see now in politics, during the first Trump administration, during the Biden administration, during the... it's so hard to get that collaboration, right?
Peter O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Lance Glinn:
But you were able to with this act, and you were able to get across the finish line.
Peter O'Rourke:
I would say, one, it was a team effort, myself, Darin Selnick, who's a senior advisor, several other individuals in the White House that were working toward this. I would say that while it ended up being a bipartisan piece of legislation, most pieces of legislation with veterans ends up being bipartisan.
Lance Glinn:
Sure. Makes sense.
Peter O'Rourke:
Whether it started that way or not is not usually the case. A lot of times, it's what's the best idea or what's the best way to do something. And then there's a lot of negotiation, a lot of back and forth. There was a lot of arm twisting, I would tell you, at that one. The idea, really for context, for the MISSION Act, you have to go back to 2014, really even a little bit further. The Department of Veterans Affairs has been doing care in the community since its inception, that's not new, whether it's specialty care or something else. But specifically for community care, it was really starting to shift the idea of what healthcare delivery and being a payer versus a healthcare provider was for the department, and that all started in 2014 when basically we had to admit that the VA system wasn't working.
Now, there's all different kinds of stories and sides of that story, but it did result in the CHOICE Act, which was this first piece of legislation that was rammed through. It was passed by a Republican majority in the House and Senate. It was signed by President Obama, which, to his credit, was the right thing to do, even though it was very contentious. It did signal that we were taking this seriously, and it did help us try to explore a new path for the VA. But the VA is a big place, it's hard to turn. It needed a little more help in 2018 with the MISSION Act, and it was more of a commitment to really shifting the model. The VA has really been, and really was from its inception, "You come to us because we're taking care of you, not because it's your last resort, but it's because of your public duty to do this," but it was more of a, "You come here, and then we kind of take care of you. You don't really have to worry about it. Don't make any decisions."
And it really started to shift to if we're going to actually have healthcare as a benefit for veterans that have been service connected, disabled, really they have a voice in that. When you think about Medicare, you think about private insurance, you think about the VA, there's several options for a veteran individual to take. Making the VA competitive in that environment, making it a place where veterans would want to choose that service there was going to require a change in the model. That's how we got to the MISSION Act. I think everybody kind of bought on. There'll be more legislation on this coming soon. There's actually a piece of legislation right now, the Veterans ACCESS Act, which improves the Mission Act even more, and it'll... Governmental policy is an ever evolving fixed things.
Lance Glinn:
Sure. Absolutely. Now, here at the conference, you spoke on a panel recently that looks at national security and looks at geopolitics. And leaders today are, I think, wrestling with balancing, right? You have global uncertainty across multiple areas of the globe, you have economic pressures, you have organizational stability. Those are all things that leaders have to sort of navigate across their businesses and across various number of different sectors. It's not just focused on one specific sector. It's across the real business landscape. How do you help those that you advise in your career now think about balancing all these competing pressures, the immediate operational issues versus the bigger picture geopolitical dynamics that are constantly evolving?
Peter O'Rourke:
Yeah, yeah. It's hard to keep your focus, right, sometimes?
Lance Glinn:
Yeah.
Peter O'Rourke:
We talk about threats now in a way, even when I was in the Navy. I went from port of San Diego to the Persian Gulf. I didn't even know where I was going, and I really didn't quite know what I was doing there other than supporting the aircraft operations of the Persian Gulf War as it ended. But now, when we talk to folks, whether they're existing clients, or talking to new folks about things, "Where do you keep your focus, and what are you trying to accomplish?" is usually where I'll start. "Do you have some expectations of what you're trying to do? Do those expectations match reality, whether it's a threat profile or the risks that your business or your services inherently have?" And then really trying to just stay focused on, "Let's get you from point A to point B." Yes, we could worry about what's going on in Iran. We could worry about what's going on in Venezuela. We could worry about maybe what's going to happen in Cuba. We could worry about a lot of things.
If you don't really understand what your position's at, whether you're running a business, whether you've got a service that you want to provide, keep your expectations in line, understand how to change those based on maybe emerging policies that are coming out of the federal government, the current thought processes, or really just the way they think. I think the biggest thing I've always noticed is some people, not all, they struggle with trying to figure out, "How does this administration..." whether it was the first Trump administration, the second, but really it's even the Biden administration and the Obama administration before that, "How do they think? How do they make decisions? Am I making the right decision in my business based on the decision that these guys are going to make tomorrow?"
Lance Glinn:
Decisions they make, yeah.
Peter O'Rourke:
And that's really more just an understanding of kind of, one, how government works, two, how this flavor of government works, whether Democrat, Republican, individual, whatever, and then sort of matching that along. Some people do that great. I've met business leaders that-
Lance Glinn:
They get it.
Peter O'Rourke:
... they just get it, yeah. It's natural for them. Either they understand the way President Trump works or they understand how President Obama works, they just get it and they just need help around the edges, maybe access, things like that. But most folks, it's really just trying to figure out how to get their thinking aligned with where this government's going. And then you can start setting some good expectations, some good goals, maybe look at what policies you want to see changed or adjusted, those kind of things.
Lance Glinn:
You mentioned in your answer, you can worry about Iran, you could worry about Venezuela, you can worry about these big things that are happening that are also evolving on almost a regular basis now too, to really navigate it, especially for those who don't just automatically get it, is it sort of as simple as just taking it one step at a time? Not necessarily focusing on, "Okay, it's Monday, this is what happened with Iran. On Tuesday, this is what happened with it"? Is it just focusing on, "Okay, here I am right now," like you said, "point A. Here's how I get to point B. I don't need to worry about point C, D, and E yet. Let's just get to point B, and then we'll worry about point C"?
Peter O'Rourke:
Yeah, the intermediate kind of planning. You can do good strategic planning to understand those things, and you'll incorporate some of that information, not really ready for threats and things, but really it is. It's like, "I'm not really worried about where you're trying to go in three years. If you can't get past this year," especially in public companies, things like that, "you can't plan out that far because you don't know where your investments might be coming or you might not know where your market's going to be in a year," so it's really understanding... It's much easier for me to help apply the government kind of pressure that you might feel as a company or as a business leader in a short-term environment versus if you want to do a long term. Midterms are coming up in November.
Lance Glinn:
Yeah, exactly.
Peter O'Rourke:
"Well, what's the world going to be like in January?" It's like, "I don't know."
Lance Glinn:
Who knows?
Peter O'Rourke:
Yeah. I can tell you what I would think it would be if there's a Democrat-led House incentive, but really how the tactical piece of it, the stuff that really affects a business, I don't know, dude. Those are things we're going to have to work out on the ground.
Lance Glinn:
To your point there, obviously, there's 2,400-plus listed companies at the NYC, and we talked to CEOs every day on the podcast about what they're focused on, what the next chapter of their journey is, of their business. And one of them said to me recently on a podcast, I asked him, "What is the next year, two years, three years..." and he goes, "I can't even look at that. I'm just looking quarter by quarter. I can't even focus on-"
Peter O'Rourke:
Every 90 days, yeah.
Lance Glinn:
"... what '27 is going to look like or what '28 is going to look like. I'm worried about what Q2 of 2026 is going to look like," and that was even before any geopolitical tension or anything like that. I was just focusing on the day-to-day of what his business is, trying to make sure that, as a public company, they're continuing to do what's in the best interest of their customers, their stakeholders, their investors.
To your point, you really can't focus on the far out because, as you said-
Peter O'Rourke:
It's fun.
Lance Glinn:
... who knows what it's going to be like in January? Who knows what's going to happen in midterms? Who knows what it's going to be like in January, and what the world and what the country will look like when that time comes for the next few years?
Geopolitics right now, I think, feels more complicated than ever as conflicts emerge because you also have the interconnectedness of the entire world and all the technology that is bringing everyone together, at least makes communication and makes what we see and what we hear so much more instantaneous than really ever before. From your perspective, how has this changed the overall, I guess, perception of threats, the overall perception of geopolitical risk, because now information is so easily at our fingertips? Some of it's wrong, some of it misinformation, some of it correct, and that's obviously sometimes subjective too, depending on how you feel. Just this instantaneous access, I feel like, completely changes what people's intention is.
Peter O'Rourke:
Intentional sometimes, as well, right?
Lance Glinn:
Mm-hmm.
Peter O'Rourke:
I think if you're looking at drones, 10 years ago, we think of drones as something we're going to buy our kid and they're going-
Lance Glinn:
And play around with, yeah.
Peter O'Rourke:
... to fly around that kind of stuff. Now, with the access to almost immediate pictures and video, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's the Black Sea, those kind of things, we get to see what people are thinking about and how they're going to use these, and it's almost instantaneous.
Somebody comes up with a new approach to using a drone. In this case, obviously it would be in a war shooter kind of thing. And then you see it, you can pretty much evaluate all the tactics of it. You can kind of understand the strategy behind it, or at least assume why they're doing this, and adapt to it. So if I was just to give you a battle damage report or give you an after-action report that came back from a unit that goes out, does a mission, comes back, now, that's a 24-hour cycle. Now, to evaluate that, to go verify it, that's another 24, 48-hour cycle, so I'm not making another decision probably for a week, and that's in a wartime environment. Now, I can watch this real time, I can see all the different things that are capabilities, and it's changing during a mission.
And I think that's what we see on the commercial side too, is you have this access to all this information and you have to decide, "Is something happening in this geopolitical location going to affect me? Is it going to affect my business? Is it going to affect the other people that are in my supply chains business? And is there anything I can do about this? Or, am I just watching this train wreck happen, and, at some point, it's going to get to me, what's going to be the impact?"
Lance Glinn:
And it's really hard because I feel like it's something you can't really be proactive for. You can see it happening, and I guess, to a certain extent, you could try to, on the spot-
Peter O'Rourke:
State actors are the only ones in, yeah.
Lance Glinn:
... make some adjustments. Especially if you're in a public company, things take time, right?
Peter O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Lance Glinn:
You can't really, if you see something happening, be proactive and try to change the core of what you do to deal with a specific conflict or issue. And that's not only geopolitical, that's just in any issue that you really deal with. I would think that it's so difficult, and these leaders that you talk to really have trouble trying to figure out, "Okay, well, this is happening right now. How do I adjust to what's happening right now?"
Peter O'Rourke:
In a lot of it, I think, they need the association with or the proximity to strength in a sense. I talk to a lot of folks, obviously, that want to talk to the federal government in some form or capacity. A lot of times, it's because, "Hey, we have something, but we need to associate ourselves with the federal government," even though they might have a private sector product or service, "because we need that resiliency. We need somehow to understand how we can strengthen what we're providing to protect ourselves against," and I think sometimes it's an assumption that, "Hey, if we're working with the federal government, it's not a protection, but it's like we'll be able to deal with threats better."
Lance Glinn:
Sure.
Peter O'Rourke:
I think sometimes that's the case. Sometimes I think it's just a good security blanket in a lot of times. I don't think the federal government usually helps the private sector in addressing threats. The threats are there, but it does, I think, provide some reassurance.
Lance Glinn:
So I want to go back to your journey a little bit, because you have had an eclectic career.
Peter O'Rourke:
It's a great way to put it.
Lance Glinn:
You spent a lot of time in business, you obviously spend time in the military, worked in the federal government, oversaw an organization that, like we talked about, serves millions, oversees hundreds of thousands of employees. You continue to go, you continue to push, you continue to move forward. You're advising, you're working with different companies, you're working with different leaders. Is there a common thread or a common theme among all that you do that sort of ties everything together that makes you see an opportunity or see an option or see something, and you're like, "This ties into what I know I do really well. This is what I want to pursue"?
Peter O'Rourke:
No, I appreciate that. It's always been, and probably to the consternation of some, just being able to take risk. That's different in different places. Taking personal career risks, yeah, "I'm going to quit a job, I'm going to go try another job," I think that's part of... You read any great entrepreneurial story, I'm not an entrepreneur per se, but they always are either trying to fail or trying to push the limits of what they can get into. I love that model. For me, it was really just, "Hey..." I was in the Navy, had a... Very much, if I could go back and work on F-14s if they still existed, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Fun job, but at some point it was like, "I don't think this is enough. It's not the same thing." And then when I was in the Air Force, same kind of thing, you kind of max out on your capabilities, you max out on what the system has to offer, and you start pushing the edges.
As you can imagine, in the government, it's a little harder to push the edges if you're in the operational side of it. So I just realized at some point, I was like, "Hey, I'm not going to..." I had done some pretty oddball stuff for an Air Force officer, especially in the logistics world, worked with GE aircraft engines on their process improvement stuff, and started doing that in the Air Force, and kind of running a little bit against the grain, and so I said, "You know what? I love this place. I love the people. I love what we have as a mission. Maybe I should go do something else." I jumped out and started doing some other work and then finally got into politics.
And then by the time I got into the VA, it was, "Well, you're here, you have this opportunity, make the most of it." I just took the approach of, "Hey, President Trump said he wanted this," I'm just going to try to deliver that. You learn some lessons in that process where some people don't always agree with that. But if you just stay willfully oblivious to some of the risks that Washington, DC sometimes likes to throw around, you can get a lot done, and I love seeing those examples. I think there's a lot of folks in this administration that are doing the same thing, and they're just ignoring a lot of the noise or just driving to the signal of it and just getting it done. Is it all going to be perfect? No, but things change, and for the federal government, that's a good thing.
Lance Glinn:
As we begin to wrap up our conversation, I want to touch for a minute on the next generation of leaders. The world, as we talked before, we're living in as more interconnected and really complex than ever before. What skills or mindsets do you think future leaders need to develop to really operate effectively in a world where global issues really impact organizational strategy?
Peter O'Rourke:
And it's come to me even recently, especially with current events with Iran, it's a historical perspective. It's not that you have to be a history nerd or that kind of stuff. But if you can have a broader understanding, not just your lifespan, be curious about... If you're looking at a specific region or even in just an industry, find the whole history of it, where it came from. I can't tell you how many times, whether it was in government or other places, where you run across that one guy that's like, "Yeah, we did it that way 10 years ago. What you're proposing is what we did." That's not always been correct, but it was correct enough. If I had known that history, and this is where I learned that, then I would've modified it a little more, or at least been able to explain, say, "Hey, I know we did this back then. This is what makes this different."
So when I look for folks either to join our team or work on projects, it's always, "Do you look at the problem differently than your peers?" And if you try to do that, whatever way it is, take personal ownership of that and differentiate yourself from your peers and look at the problem differently, that curiosity, that part of it is always as attractive to me because it means that that person's actually engaged. They're not just trying to tell me the answer that they think I'm looking for, they're not just trying to give something superficial, and they're not asking AI for an answer. They're actually kind of being curious about it, and that curiosity, even if it takes a little more time, is definitely more valuable.
Lance Glinn:
And as we wrap up, I want to return to something that has been at the heart of so much of your career, and that's Veterans Affairs. From your perspective, what steps can the government and government agencies, not just the VA, but government agencies across the spectrum, take to strengthen the support for veterans in the years ahead? What are the biggest real opportunities for meaningful improvement?
Peter O'Rourke:
Well, you know what's interesting about that, and this answer may be, I won't say confusing, but it might be a little odd, one of the things I was able to learn in the position I was in was the actuarial tables for veterans. Again, you go back to history. We had World War II where we had, 20-plus million people engaged in that. We had just this huge bulge of veterans that all were between the ages of, sometimes 16, but usually 18 to 25. I would say unfortunately, but life moves on, and we're losing those folks that are... Well, we were losing them. We don't have many World War II veterans, our Korean and Vietnam veterans are moving, but that was a much smaller part of the population. And when you go to the Persian Gulf War that I was in, even smaller. So we're not producing veterans at the rate that we did in World War II, so really around 20, 40-ish. The number's going to be around 12, 13 million veterans.
So my concern is the proposed budget for next year for the department is $444 billion for roughly somewhere between 16 to 19 million veterans that we currently have, depends on how they're counted, all this kind of stuff. My fear is that we're going to wake up 10 years from now, and we're going to say, "Oh, wait a second. We're spending half a trillion dollars on this such small population because we've held onto a concept of the department that now is... It's not just maybe wrong, it's untenable now. We can't afford it." I'm looking forward to it. Secretary Collins, right now, is putting a lot of effort into kind of relooking at how the VA operates. We're looking at whether it's reorganization of the health side, bringing in new technology to the benefits side, it's everything. We have to really... I won't say change, because I hate saying change things, but we're going to have to relook at the way we serve.
And veterans, I think, is a good example because we look at that and we say, "This is a honored class. This is a special class of folks that we want to take care of," but really you can extrapolate some of these ideas to all of our social safety net issues. What I hope is, given that it's probably the most, I won't say in crisis, but it's the one that gets the most attention, that we learn some lessons out of reshaping and rethinking about the Department of Veterans Affairs, and then we were able to apply those lessons everywhere else, because we know where this is going. It's one of those things where it's not a guess. It's not like if you're at the Department of War and it's like, "Well, we don't know what the new threat actors are going to be," all that stuff.
Lance Glinn:
No, you see the trends. You see what's going on.
Peter O'Rourke:
Yeah, it's straightforward. We know where it is. There's different things that change day to day.
We have probably one of the best CFOs we've ever had. Well, I know he's the best CFO we've ever had at the department with Richard Topping who came from the industry and has reshaped, in still an amazingly short amount of time, the thought process around how we're going to be a payer as the Department of Veterans Affairs, how we're going to do community care, how that's going to work, how we're going to restructure ourselves to be more effective on the business process side. I just want that to move through all the rest of the departments so that the veterans we have and veterans that we'll create anew can really see the VA as not probably what they used to see it as, but as something that's really a good part of their life, a good part of their development, a real benefit to them as to their service.
There's a lot of that good stuff now. It's just as these things change, I'm trying to look forward and just not have it be this big interruption because some congressman or somebody says, "Hey, we can't afford this anymore," and they won't be wrong. It'll force a conversation that'll be much more abrupt and much more painful 5, 10 years from now than if we start having these conversations now. But how do we ease ourself there? That's what I'm looking forward to there.
Lance Glinn:
Well, Peter, I appreciate all your thoughts, all your insights. Thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Peter O'Rourke:
Appreciate it. Great to be here.
Speaker 3:
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