Without swift action, the VA will continue ‘eliminating choice for millions of veterans’

In mid-April, U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, and Sen. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, sent a letter to Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough demanding to know why the agency was wounding itself.

Specifically, they worried about a series of seemingly contradictory eligibility and staffing policies. In March, the VA handed down a directive that expanded healthcare eligibility to millions of veterans who were exposed to toxins and other hazards while serving in the military. And yet not long after, the department paused hiring for most positions, with plans to cut as many as 10,000 full-time staff in 2025 and then another 10,000 in 2026.“They’re cutting front-line people who see patients in the clinic,” an anonymous VA official vented to CNN, which broke the news of the Congressional letter. “We have no idea why they are making this move.”Moran and Tester expressed similar surprise, deriding the VA’s staffing reductions as both “drastic” and “shortsighted.” Their condemnation was at once politically advantageous and deeply disingenuous. Moran and Tester, after all, are Washington’s two most powerful veterans’ policymakers. Not only are they both acutely aware of the forces squeezing VA staffing levels, but they also played leading roles in creating this crisis. As they dashed off their pointed questions to McDonough, both Moran and Tester had on their desks a VA Red Team report, written by independent experts on veterans’ care, that provided precise details of what’s gone wrong with VA budgets and staff — and how to fix it.In a new analysis for Task & Purpose, VHPI Fellow Jasper Craven examines the willful political blindness far too common on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.

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