🚨 “There’ll Always Be a VA”? Don’t Believe It

An in-depth exposé by The American Prospect lays out how VA Secretary Doug Collins is deliberately weakening the VA system while steering care—and dollars—into private hands .

🔍 The core strategy:

• Cut 30,000–80,000 VA jobs, slow hiring, and quietly delete positions from staffing charts
• Use this manufactured understaffing to justify offloading care to private “community providers”
• Claim community care is “just as good” as VA care—even though the data says otherwise

📉 What’s really happening:

• Since January, VA has lost thousands of direct care staff, including:
  • 688 doctors
  • 1,882 registered nurses
  • 511 social workers
  • 766 medical support assistants
• VA job postings are down 30%, and onboarding has collapsed by 52%
• In June alone, VA health system staffing dropped by over 2,000 positions

🧠 Meanwhile, private care fails to match VA quality:

• Only 2% of community mental health providers meet VA training standards
• Most vets don’t believe community docs understand their needs

This isn’t an accident—it’s the plan. As one House Republican put it:

“The higher the ratio between veterans and [VA] staff, the more veterans will need community providers.”

🛡️ What This Means for Us:

AFGE 2328 has long warned: cutting staff is how they gut care.

This article proves it. Now’s the time to step up, speak out, and organize to protect the VA system veterans trust.

📎 Read the full article

Privatizing Veterans’ Health Care Will Be a Disaster – The American Prospect

Thousands of VA health care workers have been fired. Private-sector replacements will be worse.

prospect.org