G.I. Jobs CEO and Navy Veteran Chris Hale continued the conversation with senior leadership at the Department of Veterans Affairs by sitting down with Paul Lawrence, the agency’s 11th Deputy Secretary and an Army Veteran. As the VA’s second-in-command, Lawrence is tasked with turning Secretary Douglas Collins’ vision into action—and delivering results for Veterans.
A former Under Secretary for Benefits at the VA during the first Trump administration, Lawrence brings a unique mix of military experience and private sector expertise. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Virginia Tech and has held leadership roles at IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture, and Ernst & Young.
Lawrence spoke candidly about the VA’s top priorities, what “Veterans first” really means in practice, and how his personal connection to military service shapes his leadership.
The following are excerpts from our interview, edited for clarity and length.
G.I. Jobs: Secretary Collins has clearly stated the goal of the VA is to put the Veterans at the center of everything that you do. What does that mean to you?
Lawrence: One thing that means is timeliness and access to health care and benefits. Folks who come out of the military who file for service-connected injuries or disability want their claim processed quickly. So if we say Veterans are at the center of everything, we are concentrating intensely on getting their benefits.
Similarly they want access to health care. Great care is awesome doctors plus wonderful business processes that lead to it. Those are the kind of things we measure and we want to improve.
G.I. Jobs: You’ve done a lot of traveling. Has anything changed since you’ve taken office in terms of priorities?
Lawrence: No, the priorities are very clear. We want to streamline and hire more doctors and nurses. We want to streamline and find more people who can process claims.
G.I. Jobs: Are there any specific areas where you would like to apply some of your private sector perspective to the VA?
Lawrence: Almost everything VA does has a private sector counterpart. So in many ways, everything can be benchmarked. I think there’s been a tendency in VA to want to invent something that exists elsewhere and I think that’s delayed us and caused confusion and, quite frankly, frustration to Veterans.
G.I. Jobs: How does the VA compete for some of the best talent in healthcare?
Lawrence: First, the pay is not as big a difference as you would imagine. We actually do quite well. What we really draw on is the mission and how important that is. We know this matters to folks. We draw also on the VA research program. Some of the things you can do here as a doctor doing research are pretty amazing. Three VA researchers have won Nobel prizes.
G.I. Jobs: You’ve got a rich history of military service, including your own. Your father is a Veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. You bear the middle name of your uncle who was killed at Normandy in World War II. How does this personally affect the way you lead at the VA?
Lawrence: I think about this all the time. The experiences I observed through my father and my uncle really help me understand what Veterans want from us, what we are doing to help them and how we can make it easier to deal with us. It just shouldn’t be so hard sometimes. It really makes me think about what the Veteran is actually experiencing.
Read this full article and more in the June 2025 Issue of G.I. Jobs magazine.
