In Reply to: Dumb McNamara LOLs at Arlington Tomb... posted by Dr.J on November 11, 2026 at 13:13:11
in depth report from Pro Publica:
Despite the occasional scandal and persistent short-staffing, studies have shown that the VA — where the doctors coordinate with one another and have deep expertise on veterans’ needs — has better outcomes than private care.But in his second term, Trump has moved aggressively to upend this system, embracing a decades-long conservative campaign to effectively kneecap the VA’s government-run healthcare and shift veterans toward private doctors and hospitals.
Under Trump, the VA has increasingly acted like an insurer, paying doctors in the community for vets’ care. This, the reasoning went, would allow the government to cut thousands of needless bureaucrats while giving veterans more choices if the VA can’t provide the care.
“We love our veterans,” Trump said during an Oval Office photo op shortly after his inauguration. “We are going to take good care of them.”
Days after that pronouncement, a memo leaked showing the administration was considering sweeping job cuts at the agency. “Things need to change,” warned Doug Collins, Trump’s new VA secretary, in a video message to staff.
After pushback from vets groups and others, the administration retreated from its threat of mass layoffs. But it found another, less attention-getting way to shrink the VA.
If Trump’s appointees couldn’t lay off employees, they would make work conditions so untenable that staffers would leave on their own.
. . . .
Six months after Trump entered the White House, the VA had 3,800 fewer doctors, nurses and other “mission critical” staff than it did at the start of his term, according to the department’s own data. While the losses made up a small percentage of overall employees, the drop compounded longstanding shortages — and contrasted sharply with a hiring spree under President Joe Biden that had begun to address them. Many of the front-line workers who quit in Trump’s early days have never been replaced. Instead, the VA has eliminated thousands of open positions, including doctors, nurses and other providers.
The administration has denied that it is hurting veterans’ care. “There’s actually an excitement about what’s going on,” said Collins, a former personal lawyer for Trump, in congressional testimony this spring. A spokesperson said the eliminated jobs for healthcare providers were simply “not needed.”
That is not what we have found. Over months of reporting, ProPublica has watched the East Orange VA Medical Center — a typical agency facility — spiral downward. The hospital and its affiliated facilities in New Jersey lost nearly a tenth of the staff they had when Trump took office.
Over the past two years, a VA watchdog report shows, the number of roles with “severe shortages” in East Orange has tripled, from around 30 to roughly 90. Among them: oncologists, radiologists, surgeons, cardiologists, anesthesiologists, critical care doctors, nurses, mechanics, cleaners — nearly every job that makes a hospital run.
“It’s scary,” one East Orange administrator said in a meeting this year. “We have no one.”
While Trump babbles about how severely wounded veterans "made a mistake" in the jungles of Afghanistan, he has gutted their health care system.
VA employees across the country told ProPublica they are seeing remarkably similar issues at their hospitals.In Albuquerque, New Mexico, short-staffing forced the hospital to take many of its beds offline and stopped it from operating on severe heart attacks. Surgeries — on lungs and spines — have also been suspended for months at the VA hospital near St. Petersburg, Florida. At both hospitals, government reports found, Trump’s touted private care program was also overwhelmed and understaffed, further fueling delays in care.
Surgeries and other critical care have also been delayed at the Minneapolis VA. A staffer there shared a friendly looking notice tacked to a bulletin board in May: “No SOD coverage” — meaning, no surgeon on duty — “until further notice.” Radiation treatment was also suspended there because one of the machine’s operators quit. A Minneapolis doctor recalled that meant having to put a vet with cancer-riddled bones on a rattling ambulance ride every day, rather than simply wheel him down the hall. The doctor said each bump on the winter roads caused the vet excruciating pain: “It was miserable.”
A longtime oncologist who works with VA hospitals around the country told me, “Care is collapsing from the inside.”
Trump is pocketing billions of dollars and screwing the American people, veterans more than practically anyone.