When beloved Colorado Springs mental health counselor Michael Sunich died in March 2024, dozens of his patients — veterans who knew their “doc” had continued to treat them, even when the Department of Veterans Affairs failed to pay — faced the return to a complex system with a history of falling short of promises.
Army veteran Stacey DeMoss was among them.
“We were all grieving, and there was a lot of anxiety and fear about taking that next step,” said DeMoss, adding that they’d “all heard the stories”: veterans waiting weeks, even months, for appointments, or having to fight to get referrals to an approved provider in the private sector.
To her surprise, it took just two days for the VA to get DeMoss in with a Community Care Network psychologist whose services were 100% covered. Six months later, she’d established a good rapport with a Northglenn therapist she continues to meet with weekly, via telemedicine.
“He’s not Mike — nobody is. But I like him and he’s helping me,” said DeMoss, 53, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. “Part of me can’t believe I’m saying this, but I have no complaints about the VA. Things are good.”
She just hopes she can say the same next time you ask.
Since its founding between the two world wars, the VA has been a work in progress, expanding and adapting in response to the growing, changing needs of America’s former service members.
Army veteran Stacey DeMoss stands outside her Fountain apartment Friday. DeMoss, 53, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and is worried that the layoffs to the VA staff will hurt the quality of care for her and other veterans.
One hundred days into President Donald Trump’s second term, and a downsizing campaign that’s poised to overhaul, streamline and — in some cases — eradicate bedrock federal agencies, the nation’s largest integrated health care system is again on the brink of a fundamental remake.
In March, VA Secretary Doug Collins announced plans to slash the agency's workforce by 15%, bringing the number of employees down from 470,000 to 398,000, according to an opinion piece he penned in The Hill. Other published accounts put the number of firings under the Trump administration plan at around 80,000 nationwide.
"Our goal is to increase productivity, eliminate waste and bureaucracy, increase efficiency, and improve health care and benefits to veterans. We will accomplish this without making cuts to health care or benefits to veterans or VA beneficiaries," said Gary Kunich, a spokesman for the VA.
Notorious VA backlogs in processing claims have become more streamlined
More than a decade ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs faced national furor because thousands of claims for monthly disability benefits were waiting years for adjudication. Now the VA reports a claim can be processed in 135 days.
The cuts are part of Trump's overarching promise to "restore competence and effectiveness" to the federal government by establishing a Department of Government Efficiency. The White House office was given wide authority to root out waste, fraud and abuse.
Kunich said the cuts could be data-driven and achieved while maintaining mission-essential jobs, such as doctors, nurses and claims processors.
However, Tiffany Roman, the national Hispanic coalition chairwoman for the American Federation of Government Employees, said internal discussions presage far bigger cuts to the staff at the health care system providing for more than 9 million people across the 50 states and U.S. territories. She also doesn't expect the cuts will be data-driven.
“They’ll be picking and choosing which staff they want to keep or fire based on personal preferences,” she said.
The sprawling VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System, for context, operates 12 health care facilities in Colorado and western Kansas, including the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center in Aurora and the Pfc. Floyd K. Lindstrom Clinic in Colorado Springs, employing thousands.
Army veteran Stacey DeMoss sits in her Fountain apartment last week.
Army vet DeMoss said she isn’t the only veteran worried the looming layoffs could trigger chaos for millions of former service members who rely on the range of support the VA currently provides.
“It feels like they finally got things to a place where it’s working — for me, for most veterans I know,” DeMoss said. “And now they want to go and maybe break it all over again.”
Bookkeeping skullduggery
After more than a decade of reform at the VA, advocates and veterans fear the Trump administration’s goal to cut the workforce by tens of thousands will hurt critical health care.
Sea changes were sparked by a national scandal in Phoenix in 2014 when an investigation discovered that veterans were placed on secret waitlists to hide sometimes monthslong waits for appointments. An investigation by the VA’s Office of Inspector General found similar bookkeeping skullduggery was being used to hide long wait times, especially for mental health appointments, at the then-newly opened Lindstrom Clinic, where at least one veteran who shared his story with The Gazette in 2018 said he was told it would be six months before he could be seen.
These days, after a decade of convolutions, under a series of administrations, a majority of veterans, like Mark, a retired Army officer living in Monument, say they believe the VA is doing what it promised it would.
Caregiver John Bright helps Mark (didn’t want to give his last name), 89, from his wheelchair to his standing chair at his Monument home Friday. The Vietnam War veteran broke his neck cycling in Garden of the Gods Park about five years ago and is happy with the care the VA has provided him.
The now 89-year-old Vietnam veteran broke his neck on his bike while cycling on a trail about five years ago. After the accident, he was lucky enough to be found by an Army officer who led a medical detachment at Fort Carson, and did all the right things.
Mark spent three months as a resident of the VA hospital in Aurora, learning to do everything again, including swallowing.
“The professionalism, technical support that I got was unbelievable,” said Mark, who declined to give his last name pending the VA cuts.
Mark said he sees many other veterans in his regular visits to the VA, some who have lost limbs, many who regularly rely on the agency for care.
“I don’t know what would happen to them if the VA got cut,” he said.
Caregiver John Bright feeds Mark (didn’t want to give his last name), 89, lunch at his Monument home Friday. The Vietnam War veteran broke his neck cycling in Garden of the Gods Park about five years ago and is happy with the care the VA has provided him.
Personal impacts feared
So far, reports indicate fewer than 3,000 VA staffers have been fired, but hiring across the VA is currently frozen as Collins evaluates the agency that provides health care, mental health care and monthly disability benefits for vets, and runs cemeteries across the country.
Collins, a former Air Force Reserve chaplain and congressman nominated by Trump and sworn in on Feb. 5, said in The Hill that the cuts envisioned would bring the VA back to 2019 staffing levels, a time before major recent expansions to benefits that added 740,000 people to the VA system over two years.
Many lawmakers, advocates, employees and patients question how such large cuts can happen without an impact on services, and without sending significantly more patients into the private sector.
U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, D- Aurora, a former Army Ranger and combat veteran, said the reductions to VA are personal to him.
“I’m deeply concerned by the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the VA that would fire specialists devoted to veteran-specific care and cause irreparable damage to life-saving research. President Trump is turning his back on our veterans,” Crow said.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank, Colorado Springs, who represents the El Paso County-based 5th Congressional District, home of 40,000 active-duty military and 80,000 retired vets, earlier told The Gazette he has “faith” that Trump's executive mandates are clearing the way for a “more efficient and effective government.”
“President Trump is following through on his commitment to root out waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government. While the President’s process is in its early stages, I am closely monitoring the impacts to Coloradans,” he said in an emailed statement to The Gazette.
Hit to rural areas
The cuts could be especially destructive for rural communities, such as La Junta, Lamar, Alamosa, Salida and Burlington, said Roman, who also serves as the Rocky Mountain Chapter president for the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement.
She fears small and rural clinics and facilities might close because the first Trump administration was interested in similar action shortly before Trump left office in January 2021.
A small 25-bed VA nursing home in Pueblo offers an important alternative for veterans because, unlike Medicaid, the VA allows their residents to keep their assets, such as their homes, so their spouses have somewhere to live.
“The vets and the families love it,” said Roman.
The VA said it has no plans to close the nursing home or any other nursing homes across the country and such fears are “disinformation.”
Under a formal reduction in force directive, the VA employees would only receive 30 days notice or essentially two paycheck cycles, which is not a lot of time for some people without savings, Roman said. So some employees have sought other part-time work.
“Everybody is on edge,” Roman said.
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Destabilizing cuts
Planned cuts come on the heels of an expansion of benefits, under the PACT Act.
In 2022, bipartisan legislation known as the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act expanded eligibility for veterans exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War era and burn pits in the Middle East to receive care. It also allowed veterans and their families who had previously been denied access to benefits.
Steve Kjonaas, legislative director for the Colorado VFW, fears that the proposed cuts could hurt the quality of care available to those recently approved for benefits under the expansion.
“We need the people who were hired since the PACT Act to treat the new patients,” said Kjonaas, a former Air Force fire chief.
For example, under the act, veterans exposed to toxic burn pits who experienced brain, kidney, pancreatic and respiratory cancers among others now qualify for benefits.
One of the most concerning areas for potential cuts is mental health care, said Kjonaas, calling it a “significant hazard” that could lead to veterans considering suicide.
Those potential cuts, he said, posted the “greatest risk to life.”
Research appointments
The cuts to VA could fall hard on its vital research arms.
The National Association of Veterans Research and Education Foundations expected to celebrate 100 years of veterans specific breakthroughs this year, such as the development of cardiac pacemakers, nicotine patches and the first CAT scan.
But instead, the association, known as NAVREF, is scrambling to save federal VA funding as the department looks for savings.
The VA set aside $943 million for medical and prosthetic research in 2024 with priorities such as traumatic brain injury, precision oncology and mental health.
Some of the major hubs of VA research are in Boston and Southern California, but some VA researchers are based in Aurora at CU Anschutz.
Major areas of biomedical laboratory and clinical sciences research at VA Eastern Colorado, for example, include acute and chronic kidney disease, burn trauma, cardiology, mental health and suicide prevention, and oncology and hematology.
Many of the researchers, over 85%, working on projects are not paid through the VA, but rather another major medical institution, and work on VA research appointments for a set period of time, such as three years, explained Elizabeth Stout, communications and public policy administrator for NAVREF. The partnerships allow the VA to bring in world-class experts to work on cutting-edge research.
When the VA’s hiring freeze took effect, it cast into question the future of those with research appointments expiring, she said. Initially they were cut off from their data and told trials would be shut down.
In early March, the VA announced a 90-day extension for those with expiring research terms.
Without the extension, an estimated 370 studies and clinical trials could have been canceled or suspended, impacting up to 10,000 veterans currently participating in research studies, according to a letter signed by U.S. Sens. Patty Murray, D- Wash., and Richard Blumenthal, D- Conn.
The extension ends in June, but no additional plans have been released, and it’s created a huge amount of uncertainty, Stout said.
“It’s just kind of working in an abyss where there are no answers or guidance,” she said.
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Pushing vets outside the VA
While the potential to lose 15% of the workforce has created panic, it is also likely to accelerate a shift to veterans receiving community-based care and VA functioning essentially as an insurance provider.
The debate over the slow creep into a privatization of VA is, of course, nothing new.
Signed into law in 2014 by President Barack Obama, and extended by Trump early in his first term in office, the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014 allowed veterans facing long wait times or lengthy drives to see a provider in the community. But two years later, veterans at Lindstrom and a number of other clinics were still facing long — sometimes staggering — wait times for appointments.
Investigators pointed to a seeming reluctance by the VA to “farm out” patients to the private sector. That soon changed.
Later iterations of the VetChoice Act doubled down, further leveraging community health care under a series of federal acts and updates that spanned both Republican and Democratic presidencies, ultimately adding hundreds of thousands of veterans to the health care rolls, with a growing number of them receiving care outside the VA system proper.
Veterans qualify for community-based care when they live far away from their provider, or the wait times to get into care are too long. Under the 2018 Mission Act, VA standards changed to allow those who had to drive more than 30 minutes to a VA facility or wait more than 20 days for a primary care clinic provider to seek care in the community.
From 2014 to 2020, the number of people eligible for community based care has grown from 1.3 veterans to 2.3 veterans, according to the VA.
The amount the Veterans Health Administration is spending on community care has also grown, up to 20% of its budget in 2021.
The VA pays for that community health care. And as more and more veterans are routed to community-based care, some fear it will erode the core agency, said Russell Lemle, a senior policy analyst for the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. He noted the VA’s care is typically cheaper, more specialized and more uniform across the country than relying on other health care systems. VA health care also benefits from veteran-specific research.
Lemle worked for the VA as a clinical psychologist for 38 years and said the threat of losing about 80,000 jobs has created a sense of panic across VA employees, amid what was already a looming existential threat for the agency. If the cuts further degrade the number of people the VA can care for, the trend will accelerate.
“You have a vicious cycle in which the VA begins to implode,” he said.
At the same time, the proposed Access ACT is introducing a pilot program to allow veterans in certain parts of the country to seek mental health and substance abuse care without approval from the VA.
“That is Congress’ way of taking a sledgehammer to the VA,” said Lemle.
Project 2025, a conservative policy plan released before Trump took office, also proposes letting the aging VA medical campuses die.
It’s likely that the changes could lead the VA to transition to providing primarily outpatient care, Lemle said, with inpatient and emergency care happening in the private sector.
But if the erosion to VA health care continues, it could also lead to a loss of quality and expertise among the health care providers who learn over time the right questions to ask and what to look for.
The VA requires evidenced based psychotherapy in all of its clinics and requires its clinicians get regular training on suicide prevention. The treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder has also been honed and heavily researched in the VA, Lemle said. The mental health care available through the VA has been different from civilian care for about 20 years, he said.
But if the trends continue, he expects the VA as it currently exists could be decimated.
“It is under dire threat,” Lemle said.
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