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Veterans Hospitals are struggling to replace the hundreds of doctors and nurses who left the health system this year as the Trump administration pursues a pledge to simultaneously cut down on veteran affairs staff and improve care.
According to an internal document investigated by Propublica, many job seekers have rejected offers and are worried that their positions are not stable in the agency’s overall orientation. Records show that nearly four in 10 of the approximately 2,000 doctors offered jobs from January to March of this year. This means four times the rate at which doctors reject offers over the same period last year.
The VA in March said it intends to cut its workforce of at least 70,000 people. The news sparked warnings that cuts would hurt patients’ care, prompting public security from VA secretary Doug Collins that frontline medical staff are immune from the proposed layoffs.
Last month, department officials updated their plans and said they would cut their workforce by 30,000 by the end of the fiscal year on September 30th. Many staff members had left voluntarily, the agency said in a press release that a massive layoff would not be necessary.
“The VA is heading in the right direction,” Collins said in a statement.
However, reviews of hundreds of insider staffing records and interviews with veterans and employees revealed that there was a much lower rosy picture of how personnel influences veteran care.
After adding six years of medical staff, Virginia has reduced more than 600 doctors and roughly 1,900 nurses this year. Since President Donald Trump took office, the number of staff doctors has declined each month. The agency also lost twice the number of nurses it hired between January and June, records seen by the Propublica Show.
In response to questions, a VA spokesman did not dispute the numbers regarding losses in staff at centers across the country, but Propublica denounced bias and “mostly everyday cherry picking issues.”
Agent spokesman Peter Casperowitz said the department can “address” the number of doctors who reduce employment offers by speeding up the hiring process, and “there are several strategies to navigate the shortage,” including referring veterans to civilian providers. A nationwide shortage of healthcare workers has made employment and retention difficult, he said.
Kasperowicz said recent changes in government agencies have not compromised care and wait times have improved after it worsened under President Joe Biden.
While primary wait times, existing patient mental health and specialized care increased during Biden’s presidency, VA statistics show only a small decline since Trump took office in January.
However, according to a report obtained by Propublica, appointment waiting times for new patients seeking primary and specialized care have increased slightly.
As of early July, the national average waiting time to schedule an outpatient procedure appointment for new patients was 41 days, 13 days higher than the goal set by the VA, nearly two days longer than a year ago.
In some locations, reservation waiting times are even longer.
At Togas VA Medical Center in Augusta, Maine, internal records show that they are waiting for a primary care appointment for two months. This is a triple of the VA’s target, 38 days longer than last year. The wife of a disabled Marine who received care at the facility told Propoblica that it has made it even more difficult to schedule appointments and get timely care.
Her husband serves in Somalia and is completely disabled. He had no primary care doctor assigned to him for months after the previous doctor left the winter, she said.
“He doesn’t have anyone in charge of health care,” said a woman who doesn’t want to be named because she fears that her comments would affect her husband’s interests. “It’s not like this before. There’s a lack of staff, empty rooms, locked doors. It feels like something that’s not healthy.”
Kasperowicz expects the VA to “aggressively act” to recruit primary care physicians in Maine and will hire two new physicians by the end of the year.
Nationally, records reviewed by the Propublica Show show that VA physician vacancy rates were 13.7% in May, up from 12% in May 2024. Kasperowicz said these rates are in line with the institution’s historic averages. However, vacancy rates fell in the first five months of 2024, but have risen in 2025.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who was critical of Collins’ stewardship, argues that the VA is heading in a dangerous new direction. He said the Propublica findings reinforce the concerns about the “damage and dangerous effects” of cuts and staffing reductions.
“Dedicated experts are fleeing, recruiting is fleeing — for toxic working conditions and harsh funding cuts and fire,” he told Propoblica. “We repeatedly warned about these outcomes. It’s shocking, but not surprising.”
In the VA’s Texas area, which covers most of the state, in an internal presentation in June, around 90 people reported rejecting job offers “due to uncertainty about the reorganization,” saying low morale prevented existing employees from recommending that they work in medical centers.
Anthony Martinez, a retired Army captain who toured his duties in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he witnessed a downgrade of Care at a temple in a Texas, Virginia temple. He said the hospital lost his recent allergy shot record.
“The problems have always been there, but not to this extent,” Martinez said.
Martinez, who runs a local nonprofit for veterans, said he heard similar frustration from many of them. “It’s not just me. Many vets have had bad experiences,” he said.
Kasperowicz said the agency could not discuss the Martinez case without a patient privacy waiver, but Martinez refused to sign it. He said the waiting time for Temple’s existing patients’ primary care appointments will not change in previous fiscal years. However, internal records show increased latency for new patients in specialist areas such as cardiology, gastroenterology, and oncology.
Managers there have been expressing concern about the impact of staff losses and warned in an internal presentation in June about “institutional knowledge to leave the institution due to increased supervisors.”
It’s not just that doctors and nurses have an impact on care. A shortage of support staff that is not protected from cuts has also been added to the delay.
In Dayton, Ohio, an internal VA report in May shows that the vacant position of purchasing agents fell behind in acquiring hundreds of prosthetics. Kasperowicz said the hospital recently cut the processing time for such orders by more than half.
Some facilities have faced issues hiring and retaining mental health staff.
In February, HR officials in the VA area, which covers much of Florida, reported that they were struggling to hire mental health professionals to treat rural patients with an internal warning system. Work used to be completely distant, but now the provider requires that they be in the clinic.
When the community provided jobs to three mental health providers, all declined. The expected impact was long delays in bookings, according to the warning documents. Kasperowicz said the VA is working to address the shortage.
But despite the agencies facing these challenges, the Trump administration has dramatically expanded the use of critical tools designed to help VAs attract applicants and plug in key frontline care gaps.
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VAs in recent years have used incentive payments to help recruit and retain physicians and other healthcare professionals. In 2024, the agency paid a retention bonus for nearly 20,000 staff, with over 6,000 new hires signing the bonus. In the first nine months of the fiscal year, which began on October 1, only about 8,000 VA employees received retention bonuses and over 1,000 recruiting incentives. The VA told lawmakers they were able to fill jobs without using an incentive program.
D-Ill Rep. Delia Ramirez said at a July Congressional oversight hearing that the Trump administration is withheld the bonus because they “want them to leave” as part of their plans to privatize services.
“It’s not that VA employees are less than they did under Biden,” she said. “They want all employees to be pushed out so that they can destroy the VA workforce.”
Is there any information about VAs we should know? Contact reporters by Signal, David Armstrong.55 or email. [email protected]; Signal, Eric Umansky.04, or via email; [email protected]vernal Coleman via Signal, Vcoleman91.99, or email [email protected].
Joel Jacobs contributed to the report.
