Rita Reed

Veterans Affairs
Rita Reed
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Budget

Rita Reed, who has been working at the Veterans Affairs Department for 28 years, would love to be able to tell a good story about how she came to the agency. But really, she says, it was because a friend referred her. "It was only later that I came to appreciate the mission," says Reed, deputy assistant secretary for budget.

She began working at the agency in 1978 straight out of college, handling the budget for VA construction. During the past 11 years, she has managed operations for VA's benefits program and now oversees a $70 billion budget.

It's not an easy task. An internal review in April found that the VA is facing a $1 billion shortfall. Agency officials told Congress it had to shift $410 million intended for use in fiscal 2006 as well as $600 million from maintenance, repairs and equipment to meet this year's health care needs. The president has asked Congress for an additional $1.97 billion to make up the shortfall, but the request has not yet been approved.

Veterans Affairs has assisted about 103,000 veterans returning from Iraq. Because of new types of body armor and medical advances, more are surviving severe wounds than in the past, but that also places a potentially greater burden on the VA health care system, Reed says. "They are not creating an astronomical cost," she says, "but there is a great difference in the veterans returning from this war" in terms of health care needs.

Reed, whose brother is a Korean War veteran, says she feels one of the great successes of the VA has been "appropriately ensuring resources are available." For example, she notes, the VA increased the number of outpatient clinics nationwide from 673 in December 2003 to 702 a year later.

Reed earned a master's degree in public administration from George Mason University in Virginia in 1984.