We're Making Veterans Faster Than We Can Care For Them
War creates disabled veterans. Congress keeps cutting their care.
The Gist
Trump launched a war with Iran five days ago without a congressional vote. Six service members are already dead. The Senate just voted to let him keep going. Meanwhile, the VA eliminated 14,400 medical positions — 73% of which were recently filled — and veterans in 15 states are waiting more than 40 days for a mental health appointment. We’ve seen this movie. We know how it ends.
Five days ago, we went to war with Iran. Forty-one days ago, a Senate Democrats report found the VA had lost 40,000 workers — though VA disputes this, claiming a net loss of 30,000 through attrition — and veterans in 15 states are waiting more than 40 days for a mental health appointment.
Nobody in Washington is connecting those two facts.
Six Army Reserve soldiers, deployed to Kuwait on a logistics mission, died when an Iranian drone struck their port. They weren’t combat troops. They were doing supply and support work — and the blast radius of this war found them anyway. Defense Secretary Hegseth said Wednesday the operation is “just getting started” and could last weeks. “We are accelerating, not decelerating,” he told reporters.
We are manufacturing veterans faster than we can care for the ones we already have.
Yesterday, the Senate voted 47-53 to let Trump keep the war going — no congressional authorization required. The same body that couldn’t be bothered to vote on a war also couldn’t be bothered to ask what happens to these service members when they come home.
I’ll tell you what happens. I’ve watched it for 29 years.
The system waiting for them is already broken.
Two days ago, the New York Times published an analysis of internal VA records. The VA has been telling the public it eliminated “COVID-era ghost positions” — bureaucratic vacancies that had sat empty for years. Cleanup work. Nothing to see here.
The records say otherwise.
Of the 14,400 medical positions the VA eliminated, 73 percent had people working in them during 2025 or 2026. Only 5 percent had been vacant since 2023 or earlier.
Those weren’t ghost jobs. Those were doctors. Nurses. Social workers. Real people, recently doing real work, now gone — and the VA called a New York Times analysis of their own internal records a “shoddy hit piece.”
At a February congressional hearing, VA Secretary Doug Collins told lawmakers: “Do we need more doctors? Yes. We’re not fully staffed, and we haven’t been for 50 years.”
He said that while his department was actively eliminating 14,400 medical positions.
Internal agency records aren’t liberal or conservative. Numbers don’t have a party affiliation.
Here’s what the numbers actually say.
Then they eliminated 1,500 more physician slots and 4,900 more nursing positions. Beyond that, another 11,700 positions were cut — including social workers and psychologists. The Times called them the cornerstones of VA’s suicide prevention and homeless veteran programs.
Part of that collapse is a direct result of a policy decision that had nothing to do with care quality. The VA built rural mental health access on telehealth — psychiatrists who could reach veterans in places with no VA facility nearby. When the return-to-office mandate ended remote work, those psychiatrists were required to drive into a VA building to conduct their remote appointments. Two hundred of them left. That’s a 6 percent drop in VA psychiatrists — not from budget cuts, not from a hiring freeze, but from a policy that forced clinicians to commute in order to do the same work they’d been doing from home. Rural veterans lost providers because of an office attendance dispute they had no part in.
And while they’re cutting direct care, the FY2026 budget increases community care — private contractors — by more than 50 percent.
The VA’s own expert panel warned in 2024 that this was an “existential threat.” They called it a downward spiral: cut staff, capacity drops, wait times rise, more veterans get sent to private contractors, costs surge, less money for direct care, more cuts. Round and round.
Nobody listened. The spiral is now the operating model.
We have done this before.
Vietnam veterans fought for decades to get care for Agent Orange exposure. Gulf War veterans are still fighting for recognition of Gulf War illness. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans fought — and many are still fighting — for burn pit coverage under the PACT Act.
Every generation: we send them, we break them, we make them prove it, we delay, we deny.
Now we’re going back to the Middle East. New veterans, new exposures, new wounds — physical and psychological. And we’re doing it with a VA that just eliminated thousands of recently-filled medical positions and called the evidence a hit piece.
The Senate that voted yesterday to keep this war going without authorization has said nothing about any of it.
One more thing.
The contractors getting that 50 percent budget increase? They will be waiting. Community care networks — Optum, TriWest, the whole apparatus — are about to get a new generation of customers, courtesy of Operation Epic Fury and a gutted VA that can’t absorb them.
The mechanism that makes this possible was already in motion before the first missile flew.
That’s a separate investigation. It’s documented.
For now: six service members are dead. More are coming home. The system meant to catch them is already in collapse.
Congress voted to look away.
— Tbird
What you can do right now:
Call your senator: 202-224-3121 — tell them a war authorization vote is not optional, and neither is funding VA care for the veterans coming home from it.
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I use AI as a research and editing assistant—the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.