Brown’s Embrace of Project 2025 VA Not Shared by His Fellow Vets

Former Army captain Sam Brown’s bid for the US Senate should have had natural appeal to his fellow veterans, particularly the 112,00 in Nevada who use the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for their health care. A combat veteran in Afghanistan, Brown needed extensive government-provided medical care himself after he suffered grievous and disfiguring wounds of war. When he recovered from his injuries, with the help of a world class burn victim treatment program at an Army hospital in Arizona, he started a vet-owned business that received $2.7 million in federal contracts to expedite prescription deliveries to some VA patients. However, on the campaign trail, Brown is not a defender of the VA and its high-quality care for 9 million veterans, which has long enjoyed the support of even conservative veterans’ organizations like the VFW and American Legion. Instead, he claims that “too many of us have been left behind” by an overly-“centralized” and “socialized system” of healthcare delivery. According to Brown, the work of 300,000 VA care-givers—a third of whom are veterans– should be supplemented, if not replaced, by federally-funded private sector treatment. Brown’s embrace of VA privatization—and he is careful not to use that “P” word—echoes the controversial VA-related recommendations of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which he, like President Trump, downplays as a guide to his likely post-election thinking about federal government “reform.” In a new story for the Nevada Current, VHPI Senior Policy Analyst Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early dig into the record and positions of Brown, now running in one of America's most closely watched Senate races.