The Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides medical care for roughly 9 million former members of the U.S. military, has eliminated thousands of medical positions left vacant after retirements and resignations last year, according to a report.
A New York Times analysis of internal agency records found that VA had chosen not to hire replacements for approximately 14,400 unfilled vacancies in healthcare positions, a total that includes 1,500 doctors and 4,900 nurses and accounts for five percent of its total medical staff.
A 2025 report by the VA’s own inspector-general meanwhile discovered that more than 90 percent of the department’s facilities were already suffering “severe shortages” of doctors and nearly 80 percent had a severe shortage of nurses.
That comes despite President Donald Trump saying in a statement in November 2024, as he nominated former Georgia congressman Doug Collins to lead the department: “We must take care of our brave men and women in uniform, and Doug will be a great advocate for our active duty servicemembers, veterans, and military families to ensure they have the support they need.”
Collins himself told the Senate during his confirmation hearing in January 2025: “At the end of the day, the veteran is getting taken care of. VA care is going to happen.”
Responding to the analysis, departmental spokesman Peter Kasperowicz attacked the NYT as as “an extreme liberal publication that is incapable of covering the Trump administration fairly,” calling its report a “shoddy hit piece.”
Kasperowicz told The Independent the positions being eliminated were “not needed,” that the VA was “working much better under President Trump than it did under President [Joe] Biden,” and that its success should be measured by performance, not staffing numbers.
“Every position we removed was an unfilled position,” he said. “No employees lost their job, VA personnel levels will not change, and VA care and benefits won’t be affected at all.”
Kasperowicz also pointed out that the department’s backlog of veterans awaiting benefits was down 63 percent over the last year, that it completed more than 82 million direct care appointments last year, opened 33 new clinics, and spent nearly $5 billion on modernizing existing facilities.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said that “personnel levels will not change, and VA healthcare facilities will continue to hire for any jobs they need to fill.”
The newspaper’s analysis indicates that roughly 10,500 of the eliminated medical roles, or 73 percent of the total, had been filled at some point in 2025 or 2026, contradicting a claim by Collins that most of the vacancies had lingered unfilled for “a year or more.”
In addition to medical provider jobs, the VA’s healthcare division also removed about 11,700 other vacant positions, according to the NYT, including roles for all-important social workers and psychologists and support staff like secretaries, police officers, and custodial workers.
Geddes Scott, a recently retired nurse with the department based in New York City, said that his former place of work was understaffed, with exhausted nurses regularly asked to pull double shifts, risking mistakes on the job.
Psychiatrist Dr. Katie Phelps, who also left the VA last year when the Trump administration began to crack down on remote working, called the loss of medical staff “very worrisome” and said: “There was quite a lot of unintended collateral damage. That is the saddest part of all of this.”
Last year, the department was among many targeted by Elon Musk’s DOGE as it sought to slim down the federal bureaucracy, though in July, a decision to cut 83,000 jobs at the VA was scrapped, fearing it could spark public outcry.
The department declared the cull was no longer necessary because it turned out to be on track to lose approximately 30,000 staff members by the end of the fiscal year anyway due to “the federal hiring freeze, deferred resignations, retirements, and normal attrition.”
That nevertheless trimmed the VA’s total size to around 451,000 employees, down from 484,000 when Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.
“We are going to maintain mission-essential jobs like doctors, nurses, and claims processors,” Collins said at the time of the U-turn.
Prior to that, the atmosphere among staff within the department was described as “fearful, paranoid, and demoralized” in a report by The Washington Post.
Particularly damningly, one social worker at a hospital in the Great Lakes region told the Post: “The veterans now check in and ask us how we are doing. They see the news and are very aware of the circumstances and fearful of losing VA support that they depend on.”
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