Trump Says 'We Love Our Veterans.' His VA Just Lost 90 Roles at One NJ Hospital

The Layoffs That Weren't (Until They Were)

Here's how the trick works. Days after Trump's inauguration, a memo leaked showing the administration weighing sweeping job cuts at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Vets groups screamed. The administration backed off the mass layoffs.

Then it found a quieter way to get the same result. If you can't fire people, you make the job unbearable and let them walk out on their own.

They canceled union contracts, citing national security concerns. They ordered remote staffers back to the office. Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency demanded workers report what they'd accomplished each week. And the administration dangled early retirement packages and other incentives to quit. Call it a layoff with plausible deniability.

Front-Line Workers Were Supposedly Safe

VA leadership promised that front-line medical workers would be immune from any cuts. Remember that promise, because it did not survive contact with reality.

Six months into Trump's term, the VA had 3,800 fewer doctors, nurses, and other "mission critical" staff than when he started, according to the department's own data. Many of the people who left in those early days were never replaced. Instead, the agency eliminated thousands of open positions, including doctors, nurses, and other providers.

That reversed a hiring spree under Biden that had started chipping away at longstanding shortages. A VA spokesperson told ProPublica the eliminated healthcare jobs were simply "not needed." Tell that to the oncology ward.

Inside East Orange, Where Nobody Is Left

East Orange and its affiliated New Jersey facilities lost nearly a tenth of their staff since Trump took office. A VA watchdog report shows roles with "severe shortages" at the hospital tripled over two years, from around 30 to roughly 90.

The list reads like a hospital's table of contents: oncologists, radiologists, surgeons, cardiologists, anesthesiologists, critical care doctors, nurses, mechanics, cleaners. Nearly every job that makes a hospital run.

"It's scary," one East Orange administrator said in a meeting this year. "We have no one." That's not a whistleblower on a podcast. That's an administrator, inside the building, saying it out loud to colleagues.

Missing Wound Care, Missing Clot Tests, Missing Radiation

The damage cuts across the entire hospital. Wound care got harder to find because the nurses who specialize in it mostly left. Standard tests for blood clots weren't available for most of the year because there were no technicians. Radiation treatment stopped for months after a key specialist departed.

One doctor said veterans coming in with chest pains couldn't get cardiac tests for months. "It felt dangerous practicing in a place like that," said another physician who recently quit. A third put it plainly: "Care has gotten worse for the patients. The services available. The wait times. We're not providing the care that we wish we could."

These are people who raised their right hands and signed up to get shot at for this country. They are now waiting months for a heart test.

Fix It by Breaking It, Then Blame the Patient Waitlist

The bigger plan is not subtle. Conservatives have spent decades trying to shrink government-run VA care and push veterans toward private doctors. Under Trump, the VA increasingly acts like an insurer, paying outside doctors through a program called Community Care.

Here's the neat part. Gut the staff at VA hospitals, and veterans get forced into Community Care because the VA can't see them. Then Community Care gets swamped, and a government report cites "insufficient staffing" there too, so vets face interminable waits anyway.

The VA's own watchdog found that 97% of VA hospitals reported severe shortages of doctors. The agency argues the report measures a shortage of candidates, not actual staffing. Sure. A shortage of candidates caused by the previous round of everyone quitting.

"There's Actually an Excitement"

VA Secretary Doug Collins, a former personal lawyer for Trump, told Congress this spring that "there's actually an excitement about what's going on." The administration denies it is hurting veterans' care.

The studies on this are not ambiguous. Research has found the VA, where doctors coordinate with each other and know veterans' specific needs, produces better outcomes than private care. It has had scandals and chronic short-staffing, sure. The answer to a leaky roof is not to demolish the house and hand the residents a coupon for a hotel.