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ProPublica: How Trump’s VA Cuts Are Leaving Veterans Without Care
A ProPublica investigation documents how VA staff losses — driven by union contract cancellations, return-to-office mandates, and policy upheaval — are leaving veterans without timely care at hospitals nationwide.
ProPublica: How Trump’s VA Cuts Are Leaving Veterans Without Care
Published November 11, 2026 — Veterans Day
A new ProPublica investigation published this week documents what many Hampton VA Healthcare System employees have been seeing from the inside: a Department of Veterans Affairs that is losing doctors, nurses, and critical staff faster than it can replace them — and veterans who are paying the price.
The investigation focuses on the East Orange, New Jersey VA Medical Center, but the picture it paints is national. According to the VA’s own watchdog, 97% of VA hospitals now report severe shortages of doctors. The VA has 3,800 fewer doctors, nurses, and other mission-critical employees than it had when the Trump administration took office. Among those gone: oncologists, radiologists, surgeons, cardiologists, anesthesiologists, critical care physicians, and the nurses and support staff who make a hospital function.
At East Orange, the consequences have been stark. A Vietnam veteran — the sole survivor of a rocket attack on his river gunboat — arrived at the hospital in February with a burst, gangrenous appendix. Doctors wrote that he needed surgery immediately. But the operating room was closed: the ventilation system had broken down and the repair crew was too short-staffed to fix it. He waited seven hours.
“Care has gotten worse for the patients,” one East Orange doctor told ProPublica. “The services available. The wait times. We’re not providing the care that we wish we could.”
A longtime oncologist who works with VA hospitals across the country put it plainly: “Care is collapsing from the inside.”
What drove the collapse
ProPublica traces the losses to a deliberate strategy. Unable to conduct mass layoffs after pushback from veterans groups, the administration used other means to push employees out: rigid return-to-office orders that caused what the VA’s own watchdog called a “system shock,” weekly productivity reporting demands, early retirement incentives, and — critically — the cancellation of union contracts across the agency, citing national security concerns.
The contracts covered more than 320,000 VA employees. With collective bargaining eliminated, workers lost negotiated protections, official time for representation, and workplace dispute mechanisms. Many left.
The administration has denied any harm to veteran care, citing a record number of appointments and improvements on certain quality metrics. ProPublica found that those claims do not reflect what is happening at the facility level.
What this means for Hampton
Our members at Hampton VA Healthcare System have been living a version of this story. The union was stripped of official time and forced to vacate our office in Building 135. Our collective bargaining agreement has been declared expired by VA management, even as litigation continues. Stewards who once had protected time to represent employees are now working those cases on their own hours, away from the facility.
The conditions ProPublica describes — short-staffing, departing specialists, overwhelmed Community Care caseloads, demoralized staff — are not unique to New Jersey. We hear from our members every week.
What members can do
If you are experiencing unsafe working conditions, unreasonable workload demands, or retaliation for raising patient safety concerns, contact AFGE Local 2328.
You have statutory rights regardless of the status of the collective bargaining agreement. Weingarten rights — the right to union representation in an investigatory interview — are protected by federal law, not the contract. Reasonable accommodation requests, EEO complaints, and OWCP claims follow the same path they always have.
This Veterans Day, we stand with the veterans our members serve, and with every employee doing their best under conditions that should not exist.
Source
ProPublica: *”We Have No One”: How Trump’s Dismantling of the VA Left a Veterans Hospital in Crisis*
https://www.propublica.org/article/east-orange-va-hospital-veterans-decline-new-jersey
In solidarity, AFGE Local 2328 — Representing the employees of Hampton VA Healthcare System