More jobs at Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers faced "severe" shortages this year compared with last year, and more facilities reported shortages in doctors, a government watchdog found in a report released Tuesday.
This year, Veterans Health Administration facilities reported 4,434 severe occupational staffing shortages in jobs ranging from physicians to nurses to security guards to electricians, the VA's inspector general said in the report. That's compared to 2,959 total jobs with shortages last year -- or about a 50% increase.
Meanwhile, the inspector general estimated that 94% of facilities have severe shortages for medical officer jobs, compared with 86% last year.
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A severe shortage is defined by the inspector general as a job that is particularly hard to fill and does not necessarily reflect a vacancy.
The inspector general reports annually on staff shortages at the VA, but this year's edition comes after months of warnings from veterans, department workers and Democratic lawmakers that VA Secretary Doug Collins and President Donald Trump's efforts to slash the VA workforce were bound to diminish care for veterans and are driving away top tier talent.
Democrats quickly seized on the inspector general report as evidence they were right.
"This report makes clear the Trump VA's self-manufactured attrition crisis is neither strategic [n]or 'natural,'" Senate Veterans Affairs Committee ranking member Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said in a statement. "Secretary Collins and President Trump would have you believe there's 'nothing to see here.' Yet this report by an independent body with expertise in VA health care suggests otherwise about this administration's unforgivable efforts to privatize and cut VA health care."
Last month, the VA said it expects to cut about 30,000 jobs this year by relying on resignations, retirements and other forms of what a statement described as "normal" attrition. The announcement walked back a previous plan to fire about 80,000 employees that alarmed veterans.
The inspector general's report is based on questionnaires that were sent to VA facilities in March and April. Because of that, the report stressed, "the reported impact on staffing from [the Office of Personnel Management's] Deferred Resignation Program and VA's workforce reshaping efforts are not fully reflected in this report."
Psychology was the top clinical job with a severe shortage this year, with 57% of facilities reporting it as a shortage, according to the report.
Psychology has been a persistently hard field to fill, landing in the top five of shortages every year since 2019. Amid the shortages, veterans have detailed struggles to get mental health appointments.
On the nonclinical side, VA police officer was the hardest job to fill, with 58% of facilities reporting it as a shortage, according to the report.
The report made no recommendations, but said the inspector general "encourages VA leaders to use these review results to inform staffing initiatives and organizational changes."
Asked about the report Tuesday afternoon, the VA dismissed its utility.
"This statutorily required report is not based on actual VA health care facility vacancies and therefore is not a reliable indicator of staffing shortages," VA spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz said in a statement. "The report simply lists occupations facilities feel are difficult for which to recruit and retain, so the results are completely subjective, not standardized, and unreliable."
Vacancy rates, he added, are 14% for doctors and 10% for nurses.
The inspector general report also estimated that 79% of facilities face severe shortages for nursing jobs. That's a slight improvement from last year, when 82% of facilities faced nurse shortages.
But VA nurses have been sounding the alarm about more cuts to come. On Tuesday, nurses at the Joseph Maxwell Cleland Atlanta VA Medical Center in Decatur, Georgia, held a rally to protest what they say are planned cuts to mental health staffing at the facility and shifts of personnel from its Housing and Urban Development-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing, or HUD-VASH, team, which assists homeless veterans with rent and services.
The nurses said hospital leadership planned to reduce 55% of the staff from a case management team that helps veterans with serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder with psychosis.
"We provide vital lifesaving services to some of our most vulnerable vets who are without housing and facing serious mental health issues," said Dana Horton, a registered nurse and director of National Nurses United at the facility. "For many of these veterans, we are their closest allies as we address their serious mental health issues and provide regular care. We fear that cutting nurses from this program will result in increased severity of symptoms, hospitalizations, and the risk of suicide among our veterans."
Questions to the Atlanta VA facility about the concerns were referred to Kasperowicz, who denied that the medical center planned to reduce staff. He added that personnel were being reassigned from "low-demand specialties to those with higher demand."
"Imagine how much better off veterans would be if government union bosses cared as much about fixing the department as they do about protecting its broken bureaucracy," Kasperowicz said in an email to Military.com. "These moves will improve care for veteran patients and have no negative impact on the Mental Health Intensive Case Management Program, which is seeing much lower caseloads than it previously has."
He also said that just one staff member on the HUD-VASH team was being reassigned.
