VA’s top tech and AI official announces departure

The longtime tech and artificial intelligence lead for the Department of Veterans Affairs announced on Thursday that he is leaving the agency.

​​VA Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer Charles Worthington said in a LinkedIn post that “the time is right for me to step down” from his role. He did not immediately say what he will do following his departure.

“I came to government to close the gap between what the best companies in the world were doing with technology and the way our government delivers services,” he wrote. “I'm proud to say our team made a dent.”

Worthington helped spearhead a number of tech and AI initiatives across VA since joining the agency in 2017, many of which he referenced in his post. 

Among these, he noted that his team launched the VA: Health and Benefits App, which was designed to make scheduling healthcare visits and accessing benefits information more efficient for veterans, and it has reached 4 million downloads. Worthington also worked to modernize VA.gov to make it more accessible and veteran-friendly. 

“When I joined VA, the Office of the CTO didn’t exist, and the VA Digital Service team didn’t have an institutional home,” he wrote. “Today, our 100+ engineers, designers, architects, and [product managers] have built something I’m immensely proud of, and I will be rooting for every one of them.”

As the agency’s AI lead, Worthington has also helped to drive VA’s embrace of the emerging capabilities to enhance internal operations and veteran-facing services and healthcare.

In an October 2024 interview with Nextgov/FCW, he said his approach was to identify key areas that could best benefit from use of the emerging capabilities. 

“For our most important problems — for example, clinician burnout is one of these problems that we’re trying to tackle — we’re thinking about ways in which technology, including AI, might be able to help with that,” he said, adding that “I like approaching things that way, where we're starting with the problem in mind and then figuring out what tech might fit and then going and acquiring it if we need it.”

VA’s 2025 AI use case inventory, released in January, lists 367 examples of the agency looking to adopt AI tools. In his LinkedIn post, Worthington called the inventory “one of the most transparent AI inventories in health care,” and said the agency has been “using AI-powered document processing to help [the Veterans Health Administration] eliminate a 70,000 case application backlog.” 

The agency’s AI inventory includes several use cases focused on using predictive models and other advanced capabilities to identify veterans at risk of suicide. As part of a reporting project, Nextgov/FCW previously explored in-depth how VA is using AI to enhance its suicide prevention efforts. 

During a House hearing last year, Worthington told lawmakers that one of these use cases, the Recovery Engagement and Coordination for Health-Veteran Enhanced Treatment — or REACH VET — program, “has used AI algorithms to identify over 130,000 veterans at elevated risk, improving outpatient care and reducing suicide attempts.”

Prior to joining VA, Worthington served as a founding member of the U.S. Digital Service — which has since been rebranded as the U.S. DOGE Service under the Trump administration — and as a senior advisor to the federal CTO. He first joined the government in 2013 as a presidential innovation fellow.

“Serving at VA has been the most rewarding chapter of my career so far, but I'm equally excited about what's next,” Worthington wrote on LinkedIn. “We are in the early innings of the most important technology shift since the Internet. The deep integration of AI into the systems that power how we live, work, and experience critical services has barely begun, and I plan to be building at this frontier at scale.”