VA Acquisition Overhaul: Sweeping Consolidation Centralizes All Construction and Buying Under Two Directors Within One Year

The newly proposed Department of Veterans Affairs Acquisition Reform Act of 2025 is a massive internal reorganization plan designed to fix what Congress calls a messy, redundant system for managing VA construction and buying supplies. Simply put, this bill takes all construction, leasing, procurement, and logistics functions currently scattered across the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), and National Cemetery Administration (NCA) and shoves them under two central bosses within 12 months.

The Great Consolidation: Who’s in Charge Now?

If you deal with the VA for construction or supplies, your life is about to get simpler—or potentially more bureaucratic, depending on how this rolls out. The bill creates two huge central chains of command. First, the Director of Construction and Facilities Management will now oversee every single VA facility project, from planning and design to leasing and maintenance, for all three administrations. Second, the Chief Acquisition Officer gets control of all buying, contracting, supply chain management, and logistics across the entire VA system (Sec. 4, Sec. 5).

Think of it like this: If the VA needs a new clinic built in Texas, the construction planning team, the leasing team, and the maintenance crew currently working for the VHA will all stop reporting to VHA leaders and start reporting to the centralized Director. The goal is to eliminate the current system where the VHA, VBA, and NCA might be running three separate, inefficient construction or buying departments.

New Regional Power Players

To manage this centralized power, the bill mandates the creation of new regional leadership positions. The Chief Acquisition Officer must establish a new regional structure, appointing Regional Directors of Acquisition, Logistics, and Construction—who are required to be career civil servants, not political appointees. These regional directors will oversee all buying and logistics in their area. They, in turn, will have a Regional Director of Construction and Leasing reporting to them to handle all the building projects on the ground (Sec. 5).

For the thousands of VA employees currently handling these tasks, this means a major shift in who signs their performance review and who sets the priorities. Your physical location won't change—the bill explicitly says no one is forced to move—but your reporting structure, and therefore your day-to-day focus, will be entirely dictated by the new centralized regional leadership instead of your previous VHA or VBA bosses.

Fixing the Hiring Pipeline

Beyond the structural changes, the bill takes a direct shot at fixing the VA’s shortage of acquisition staff (the people who handle contracts and buying). The VA must now prioritize using its existing internship programs as the main way to fill entry-level acquisition jobs. Furthermore, the number of participants in these programs must, at minimum, double (and potentially quadruple) the number seen in fiscal year 2025 (Sec. 6).

This is a huge win for students or recent grads looking to get into federal contracting—the VA will become a major hiring pipeline. However, it also means that until the VA proves to Congress that the internship program is meeting all its staffing needs, the department’s hands are tied when it comes to hiring experienced people from outside the internship track for entry-level roles. The VA is betting big on growing its own talent.

The Trade-Off: Efficiency vs. Centralized Control

This bill addresses a genuine problem: the VA's construction and procurement processes are notoriously slow and complex. By consolidating everything under two directors, the VA hopes to gain efficiency and accountability. If a construction project is delayed, there will be one person to blame. However, this level of centralization also concentrates immense power over billions of dollars in contracts and facilities management into a very small group of leaders. The success of this entire overhaul hinges on whether these new regional and central directors can manage a massive, newly merged bureaucracy without creating new bottlenecks. Congress requires detailed reports on implementation, due 390 days after enactment, to ensure this massive internal restructuring actually delivers on its promise of better service for veterans (Sec. 7).