Overview:
As the second Trump administration plans to cut to the VA, veterans are concerned about the consequences for an already overburdened system.
Tonya Wilson was shocked when she showed up for her routine medical appointment at her local Veterans Affairs facility and discovered her doctor was gone, transferred out of state.
“You’ve got another doctor who’s picking up previous physician patients,” she said. “It could take three, four, eight weeks before community care could even get to me to decide what I need or even if those services are available to me.”
Wilson, a U.S. Air Force veteran who served during the Gulf War, is one of many former service members feeling the strain of recent changes to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. President Donald Trump’s new administration has launched an aggressive campaign to streamline federal agencies, slashing staff and accelerating privatization within the VA.
In March, VA Secretary Doug Collins announced plans to cut 15% of the VA workforce—a reduction of roughly 80,000 employees—and implement hiring freezes. While the administration insists that services won’t be impacted, many veterans, providers and advocates fear otherwise.
Maurice Wade, a 77-year-old Vietnam veteran, has seen firsthand the long-term consequences of delayed or insufficient care. He spent decades trying to get benefits for what was initially labeled “combat fatigue”—a diagnosis that overlooked what is now recognized as PTSD. He was also exposed to Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant used widely during the war.
“Like any foliage-killing chemical, it wreaked havoc on you in later years, and in Vietnam, we didn’t understand how dangerous it was,” Wade said. “All we wanted to know was they cleared out the jungle so they could find Charlie.”
During the Vietnam War, ‘Charlie’ was slang for ‘Viet Cong’ or ‘VC.’ Agent Orange was one of several chemicals used to deforest heavily wooded jungles in order to improve visibility during battle. However, it exposed nearly three million American soldiers and civilians in Vietnam to ‘herbicide’ from 1962 to 1971.
Following the events, veterans were unaware that they were returning home and spreading these chemicals to their families, putting them at risk of cancer or even becoming ill if not cured. Wade didn’t discover he had cancer until decades later.
“I had radiation for my cancer, and we constantly had to monitor it on an annual basis and make sure it doesn’t flare up again,” he said. “You really couldn’t get any benefits from Vietnam unless you were mangled or dismembered.”
Dominic Frederico, a retired Air Force major based in Denver, echoed similar concerns. “It’s not a benefit—it’s a right you deserve,” said Frederico, who enlisted at 17 and later served as a medical officer in the Balkans and Iraq. He described the veteran community as a tight-knit “tribe” built on survival and mutual care, something he fears is being eroded.
“You don’t care what the person looks like ‘cause you’re gonna come out of this alive — that’s the tribe I was talking about,” Frederico said. He’s not just worried about his own situation. Frederico sees the VA’s shift toward private contractors and the politicization of care as part of a broader national trend.
“This forming of ‘tribes’ is to the ‘New America,’ and not fully to its benefit,” he said, describing the increasingly stark divide between political factions and its toll on shared institutions like the VA.
For decades, accessing veterans’ benefits has been a complicated, often discouraging process. Some veterans have died before receiving the care or compensation they qualified for, tripped up by burdensome paperwork, slow claim approvals and a system that sometimes requires exact phrasing just to trigger recognition. Veterans and their families are often left in the dark, unaware of the assistance available, or hampered by outdated records, denied diagnoses, or the classified nature of their exposure to toxic environments.
Now, under the Trump administration, those long-standing challenges threaten to worsen. The proposed 15% cut to the VA workforce reverses recent progress by the Biden administration to reform the department and puts additional strain on an already overburdened system.
While the VA declined to comment on the situation, Wilson has taken matters into her own hands, assisting other veterans in navigating a benefits system that she claims has become increasingly complex and underfunded.
“One of the veterans that I helped file his claim went from 60% to 90%,” she said. “His wife called and said he was in the backyard doing backflips because he was so excited.”
Wilson observes that even programs designed to assist veterans are frequently too confusing or burdensome for veterans, causing many to give up seeking assistance. For example, the bipartisan 2022 PACT Act expanded eligibility and care options for veterans exposed to burn pits and toxic chemicals. However, Wilson stated that the rollout revealed deeper capacity issues within the VA.
“The Pact Act was very helpful,” Wilson said. “But once that benefit was accessed, it became overloaded and then the budget did not support those services they were making available.”
Veterans’ concerns are growing as the VA workforce faces sweeping reductions. The proposed cuts would bring staffing back to pre-2019 levels — a time before major expansions in benefits added more than 700,000 veterans to the system. Rural areas are expected to bear the brunt of the downsizing.
In smaller communities across Colorado and other western states, local clinics and nursing homes provide vital services that are often unavailable elsewhere.If those clinics close or reduce services, veterans may be forced to travel hours to receive care, assuming they can even find providers that accept VA referrals.
While community-based care is expanding, critics warn that relying more heavily on private health networks risks losing the specialized expertise and consistency that VA facilities offer, especially for mental health and trauma care. And as more care is outsourced, some fear the VA’s role could shrink to that of an insurance payer, rather than a provider of veteran-focused services.
Despite assurances from top VA officials that no benefits will be eliminated, many veterans remain skeptical, especially as layoffs begin and programs are quietly scaled back.
Frederico summed up the stakes plainly: “When they die, it will be better for these guys to do what they do,” he said, referring to delays and denials that leave veterans without care or compensation in their lifetimes.
For now, Wilson continues her advocacy, one claim at a time.
“I’m able to stay encouraged and try to encourage others,” she said. “Because it’s a whole lot that people can be discouraged about when you’re just looking around, seeing and witnessing things that happen.”
