Vets deserve better than confusion on defense funding and VA staffing 

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was one of Congress’s last vestiges of bipartisan unity. As our nation’s elected officials dig in their heels on just about everything these days, differences were often put aside to support America’s military. 

Until now.

Today, the bill has become a multi-billion-dollar game of flinch, and those who have given everything to defend America are caught in the middle. 

Once a bipartisan process, the NDAA barely passed the U.S. House this month. The reason: Republican members of Congress attached agenda-driven amendments to it, ranging from restrictions on military access to abortion services to banning the display of pride flags and books that address gender identity.      

Party-line votes on defense spending measures send the wrong message to our troops. And it couldn’t come at a worse time, as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs struggles to address the needs of those who put their lives on the line to defend our country.  

The VA has announced 10,000 staffing reductions for the next fiscal year — cutbacks that will burden an already stressed healthcare system and adversely impact those who wear or have worn the uniform. 

This starkly contrasts with a VA statement from just a year ago that proclaimed the agency was employing people “at record rates to help better deliver world-class care and benefits to Veterans, their families, caregivers and survivors.”  

It’s also at odds with the VA’s plan next year to implement “new hiring and retention authorities to strengthen and maintain a diverse, talented workforce with a shared mission to provide more care and more benefits to more veterans.”   

The VA is in no position to pull back staff. Veteran enrollment in the VA healthcare system is at its highest in the last five years, spiking 30 percent over the last 12 months. The increase is due, in part, to the PACT Act, which enables the VA to expand access to health care and benefits to millions of active duty and retired veterans. 

That’s a good thing, of course, assuming the VA can keep pace with the uptick in demand. But that hasn’t happened, as veterans continue to complain of long wait times at VA facilities, experience failures in receiving proper mental health support and encounter frustrating online technical issues that prevented 120,000 veterans from filing for benefits last year.  

Especially worrisome are claims of mismanagement of the Veterans Crisis Line — a system that can il-afford delays or disruption of service — which has seen a significant increase in traffic. Those failures prompted a Government Accountability Office investigation.  

Making matters worse, 2,000 VA employees have walked off the job since 2020 due to untenable working conditions.   

These issues bring bad optics for the agency. When combined with reports that senior VA executives received $10 million in improper bonuses last year, serious questions arise concerning VA leadership.  

Similar questions have been raised before. A decade ago, Eric Shinseki, who led the VA under President Obama, resigned following news reports that delays in VA care may have resulted in the deaths of dozens of U.S. veterans.

So it stands to reason, given the agency’s troubled past, the increase in demand for VA services and ineffectual policies that have driven thousands of VA employees out the door, that now is the wrong time to cut thousands more full-time jobs at the VA.   

Yet that’s precisely what the VA intends to do. VA executives claim staff rollbacks at the agency will come from “attrition,” rather than layoffs, and be limited to positions that “are not directly veteran-facing.” 

But with so much dysfunction occurring from within the VA itself, it seems any reduction in staff would further harm, not help, the delivery of quality care to current and former veterans. Several U.S. senators have expressed the same concern, and are demanding answers from the agency detailing where the cuts will occur, and how services may be affected.  

The NDAA is now headed to the Senate, and assuming the legislative process plays out the same way it did last year, those “poison pill” amendments in the U.S. House version will likely be removed. But in some ways the damage has already been done; the use of the NDAA as a political weapon sends a distasteful signal by creating confusion and uncertainty for our veterans.  

Hindering access to quality care for our American heroes by eliminating thousands of jobs at the VA only adds insult to injury. 

Lyndon Haviland is a distinguished scholar at the CUNY School of Public Health and Health Policy.