Trump’s VA Budget is A Grave Warning

Midway through the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee’s May 20 hearing on the VA’s advance budget request, Sen. Angus King (I-ME) pressed VA Secretary Doug Collins on his view of the future of veterans’ health care. Every net increase in Collins’s FY2028 advance appropriations request was earmarked for care delivered by private-sector providers. To King, the intention seemed unmistakable: a plan “to gradually privatize VA health care coverage.”

Collins’s response was withering in its contempt—for the question and the questioner alike: “There is no intention to gradually, there is no intention to accelerate, there is no intention to decelerate, there is no intention to privatize at all.” And yet that is precisely what’s been happening—and Collins’s proposed budget would turbocharge it further.

In a new piece for The American Prospect, VHPI Senior Policy Analysts Suzanne Gordon and Russell Lemle dig into the data and the numbers to sketch out the turbocharging of VA outsourcing. 

As they note, measured by workload rather than dollars, private care is close to surpassing VA—and may already have done so. In FY2023, private care accounted for roughly 40 percent of the total workload volume, and congressional testimony last year by VA administrators indicated that share has kept climbing.

Read their full piece here.