There's no requirement that government-created or government-funded research be published in open-access journals. It would cause lots of problems if that were the case (until the big journals are open-access, anyway).

WhiteHouse.gov:

That’s why, in a policy memorandum released today, OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.


It's not clear that the VA Health System does $100M in R&D each year, so even this it might not apply to them.

HTH.

Cheers,
Scott.