Something significant has shifted at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
According to Military Times’ reporting on VA workforce losses and care impacts, the VA shed more than 40,000 employees over the past year — the first net workforce loss in the department’s recent history. Eighty-eight percent of those departures came from the Veterans Health Administration, the branch responsible for actually delivering care. That’s not a footnote. That’s the core of the system.
Ivan Buxton Gay Jr., a Navy veteran who served aboard the USS Forrestal, has been watching this story develop for months. His view is straightforward: the people leaving aren’t the ones shuffling paper in central offices. They’re nurses. Mental health providers. Appointment schedulers. The people a veteran actually sees, calls, and counts on.
VA Secretary Doug Collins has maintained that care has not been meaningfully disrupted. Congressional Democrats and independent analysts are looking at the same numbers and reaching different conclusions.
Who Actually Left
The breakdown of who’s gone tells the real story. Net losses over the past year include roughly 3,000 registered nurses, 1,000 physicians, 700 social workers, 1,550 appointment schedulers, and nearly 2,000 claims processors. In a normal year, the VA would have added around 10,000 employees to its rolls. The swing from that baseline to a net loss of tens of thousands is jarring by any measure.
About 10,000 of the departed employees held frontline positions — the kind that interact directly with patients and claimants — that the department has struggled to backfill. And it’s not stabilizing yet. By the end of 2026, most VA facilities are projected to lose an additional 2 to 5 percent of their psychologists, with some locations, including Seattle and Buffalo, tracking toward double-digit attrition.
Mental Health Wait Times Are Climbing
The VA’s own access standard says new patients should be seen within 20 days for mental health care. That benchmark is being missed across a wide swath of the country right now.
As of early January 2026, the national average wait for new mental health patients exceeded 35 days. In 14 states, waits had climbed past 40 days. Maine hit 61 days. Maryland hit 54. Those aren’t near misses — they’re more than double the VA’s threshold. At one California clinic, seven of twelve mental health providers left following return-to-office mandates, pushing local wait times to 121 days.
Perhaps the most troubling detail: some veterans are now being capped at eight therapy sessions, regardless of what their provider recommends, simply because there aren’t enough staff to carry the caseload.
What the RISE Reorganization Means Going Forward
Layered on top of the staffing losses is a sweeping structural overhaul. The VA’s RISE initiative — Restructure for Impact and Sustainability Effort — will reduce the number of Veterans Integrated Service Networks from 18 down to 5. The reorganization carries an upfront cost of at least $312 million, with projected savings of $1.7 billion over time.
Separately, DOGE-driven contract decisions added another layer of uncertainty. Fourteen thousand contracts were allowed to expire and 2,000 more were canceled outright — many with no public plan for replacing the services they covered. The downstream effects reach beyond appointments: veterans waiting on claims appeals are now looking at average waits of 3,541 days, and 75,000 students saw education benefit checks go unpaid after the department failed to process several programs on time.
What Navy Veterans Should Do Right Now
Navy veterans have a particular reason to watch this. Tinnitus, hearing loss, and PTSD are among the most commonly filed service-connected conditions for sailors — and those are precisely the areas hit hardest by cuts to mental health staffing and claims processing capacity. Veterans who served in environments with burn pit or toxic exposure may also find their PACT Act claims moving slower, with nearly 2,000 fewer claims examiners working the backlog.
Ivan Buxton Gay Jr. encourages Navy veterans to take a few concrete steps now rather than wait for a problem to surface. Check current VA enrollment status. Confirm that upcoming appointments are still on the books. If a claim is pending or appears stalled, connect with a Veterans Service Organization — the DAV, VFW, and American Legion all offer free claims assistance and can help navigate delays.
For a full overview of current care access options and community care eligibility, visit VA.gov.
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