Tomorrow, the nation honors Veterans Day. But truly recognizing veterans’ service requires asking whether the Department of Veterans Affairs, the agency charged with the nation’s sacred obligation to care for them, is able to fulfill its mission.
Under President Donald Trump, the department has more political appointees than federal statutes allow while losing the experienced career employees who deliver veterans’ care and benefits. The result is a department with more political control, fewer experienced leaders and front-line providers, and a diminished capacity to serve veterans.
Our analysis of federal workforce data and inspectors general reports reveals a clear pattern:
- The Trump administration is violating statutory caps on political appointments at the VA: Non-Senate confirmed appointees at the VA have more than quadrupled during the past two years. The department has 29 Schedule C political appointees who serve in confidential or policy-determining roles, nearly double the 15 the statute allows, and 37 non-career members of the Senior Executive Service, well above the statutory maximum of 22. It also has placed 22 appointees under Schedule G, a new category of political appointees in “policy-making or policy-advocating” roles that appears designed to get around the limits.
- The career workforce has been hollowed out: The VA has nearly 30,000 fewer employees than in December 2024, including nearly 2,000 fewer physicians and over 3,000 fewer nurses.
- Veterans are waiting longer for care: Ninety-seven percent of VA health care facilities report severe physician shortages, and VA’s inspector general has documented clinics turning away new patients, hospitals cutting beds and delays in diagnostic care.
The VA is losing the experienced professionals who know how to run the department and serve veterans’ specific needs while adding unprecedented levels of political appointees selected primarily for their loyalty to the president, not on the basis of qualifications. At the same time, four of its 10 Senate-confirmed leadership positions, including the heads of health care and benefits, sit vacant, leaving the department’s largest operations without leaders the Senate has vetted.
The VA directly shapes veterans’ health and financial security and plays a critical role in training medical professionals and boosting local economies. While veterans suffer the immediate consequences, the country will pay the price of mismanagement at the VA over the long term.
If federal leaders want to honor veterans, they must take a deep look at these trends, demand answers and course correct based on what they finds. In the meantime, the VA is falling short of the legislative mandates Congress has given it, and veterans are bearing the cost.
Political staffing beyond the statutory limits
Political appointments at the VA have surged past both the department’s historical norms and the limits Congress set in statute, even as many of the leadership positions that require Senate confirmation sit empty. The administration has also created a new category of appointments that appears designed to get around the statutory limits.
At least 88 non-Senate-confirmed appointees are serving at the VA across the non-career Senior Executive Service, Schedule C and Schedule G, according to the most recent Office of Personnel Management data. This is nearly four times the average number of non-Senate-confirmed appointees in the department between 2009-2024 (23.3).
The VA is unique among federal departments because Congress has written statutory restrictions on the number of non-Senate-confirmed political appointments that may serve at any given time. By law, the department is only allowed to have 15 positions “excepted from the competitive service, on a temporary or permanent basis, because of their confidential or policy-determining character,” meaning no more than 15 Schedule C appointees may serve at any given time. Additionally, there are statutory restrictions on the number of non-career members of the Senior Executive Service that can serve in the department. The law states that the number of non-career members cannot exceed 5% of “the average number of senior executives employed in Senior Executive Service positions in the Department during the preceding fiscal year.”
The Trump administration is in violation of the statute on both provisions. As of Sep. 30, there were 29 Schedule C appointees serving in the department, nearly double the cap of 15. Additionally, there were 37 non-career members of the SES serving in the department. In fiscal year 2025, there were an average of 445 career and non-career members of the SES serving in the department at the end of each quarter. According to the formula set out in statute, this means that the number of non-career SES in the agency should not exceed 22.
The department also is home to 22 Schedule G appointees, a new category of political appointees created by executive order in July 2025 and disclosed only recently in an unannounced update to OPM’s Plum Book, the publication that lists political and career leadership and support positions across the federal government. The order cited “improving the operations of the Department of Veterans Affairs” as a reason for the new category, and it is the only agency the order names. Schedule G covers positions of a “policy-making or policy-advocating” character, language that sits just outside the “confidential or policy-determining” positions the VA’s statutory cap covers. The effect, and the apparent intent, is a way around the limit the department already exceeds.
Political staffing has also reached parts of the department historically led by career officials. The Veterans Health Administration now has 12 non-Senate-confirmed appointees, nearly nine times its 2009-2024 average of 1.4. What these appointees are doing, and why the nation’s largest integrated health care system needs so many of them, is unclear. Data from the Plum Book includes only four of the 12, and three of those carry the generic title of “senior advisor.”
While the administration has filled the department with appointees who never faced Senate review, many of the positions that require confirmation sit empty. Four of the VA’s 10 Senate-confirmed positions are vacant, including the heads of the Veterans Health Administration and the Veterans Benefits Administration, the two components that deliver nearly all of the department’s care and benefits. VHA is currently led by John Figueroa, a non-Senate-confirmed appointee from the Office of the Secretary serving as acting undersecretary for health. Figueroa already has one foot out the door as he awaits confirmation as the State Department’s global HIV/AIDS coordinator. Three of the vacant positions have not had a confirmed official at any point in the administration: the undersecretary for benefits, the assistant secretary for information and technology and the assistant secretary for accountability and whistleblower protection. Only one has a pending nominee. That leaves a department led largely by officials whose qualifications have never been examined in public and confirmed by the Senate.
The result is a department increasingly run by appointees the administration has selected primarily for loyalty to the president. Appointees can bring real value, but a VA with more political staff, fewer Senate-vetted leaders and thinning career ranks is less equipped to manage one of the government’s largest and most complex operations. Congress capped political appointments at the VA for a reason: to preserve a small political team to steer a capable career workforce. Every recent administration has operated within that balance. The Trump administration has not, and veterans are bearing the consequences.
A hollowed-out career workforce
While political appointments have surged, the agency’s career workforce has been hollowed out.
Between December 2024 and August 2026, the VA lost nearly 33,000 employees, including thousands of experienced doctors, nurses, psychologists, claims processors and career leaders. The department also eliminated tens of thousands of vacant positions in the health system while capping staffing levels at VA medical centers. According to federal workforce data, by August 2026, the VA employed 1,829 fewer physicians, 3,136 fewer nurses and 289 fewer psychologists than it did before the Trump administration took office.
In September 2026, the VA’s Inspector General reported that 97% of the agency’s health care facilities identified severe physician shortages, 86% reported severe nursing shortages and more than half reported severe shortages of psychologists and psychiatrists. The shortages have grown substantially in recent years. The previous year’s inspector general report documented a 50% increase in reported severe staffing shortages between fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
These losses come at a time when the department was already struggling to recruit and retain enough medical professionals to meet veterans’ needs. In early 2025, 40% of physicians offered jobs at the VA turned them down, four times the rejection rate a year earlier. An analysis of federal hiring data found that the VA hired only 77% as many employees in 2026 as it typically hired annually between 2015 and 2024. The combination of departures, hiring restrictions and recruitment challenges has left the agency with fewer experienced employees and a diminished ability to fill critical vacancies.
The losses extend well beyond VA hospitals. More than 5,000 employees have departed the Veterans Benefits Administration since January 2025, including more than 2,600 claims processors responsible for deciding veterans’ disability claims. As experienced employees left, the VA largely stopped replacing them. An analysis of federal personnel data found that the VA hired just six claims examiners in 2026 compared with roughly 1,000 in a typical year. Now, after pushing thousands of experienced employees out of VBA, the department has reversed course and announced plans to hire more than 2,000 claims processors to keep pace with rising claims. But replacing this lost capacity will take time because claims processing requires specialized knowledge of veterans’ benefits law and complex medical evidence, and it generally takes two years for new employees to reach journeyman level proficiency.
The VA also has experienced substantial turnover in its career leadership. Nearly half of the VBA’s 56 regional offices are led by acting directors as are approximately one-third of its central office leadership positions. Employees who left the VA in 2025 had served an average of nearly 11 years. Their departures represent a loss of institutional knowledge and management experience that cannot be quickly replaced even if hiring resumes.
Morale among the employees who remain has also fallen sharply, undoing a decade of progress. The VA’s Best Places to Work engagement and satisfaction score, which measures how satisfied employees are with their jobs and the agency and whether they would recommend it as a place to work, rose from 54.6 out of 100 in 2014 to 72.1 in 2024. But in the Partnership’s 2025 Public Service Viewpoint Survey, just 24.3% of VA respondents said they were satisfied with the department and 31.1% would recommend it as a good place to work.
Taken together, these changes have left the VA with fewer employees to deliver services, fewer experienced leaders to manage operations, declining morale among those who remain and a weakened ability to recruit replacements.
The toll on veterans’ care
Staffing losses, hiring restrictions and disruptive personnel policies are making it harder for VA hospitals and clinics to deliver the care veterans need. The VA’s inspector general has documented facilities turning away new patients, reducing available hospital beds, delaying diagnostic procedures and struggling to schedule appointments.
At the New Mexico VA Healthcare System, facility leaders described the administration’s deferred resignation program and hiring freeze as “system shocks” that placed significant strain on operations. Staff losses contributed to a reduction of 75 available beds and left the hospital unable to perform certain cardiac procedures. Average wait times for new patients increased from 24 to 31 days over the course of a year.
At the Washington, D.C., VA Medical Center, four of five full-time radiologists, including the department chief, resigned over a six-month period following the VA’s return-to-office mandate. An August 2026 inspector general report found that uncertainty surrounding exemptions from the policy also hampered recruitment. The resulting shortage curtailed MRI services and created a backlog of CT scans, delaying diagnostic care for veterans.
In Utah, an October 2026 VA inspector general report found that staffing vacancies prevented three VA outpatient clinics from accepting new primary care patients. The problem extended beyond the VA’s own facilities. Shortages of staff responsible for coordinating community care left veterans waiting an average of 66 days in July 2025 just to have an outside appointment scheduled, compared with the VA’s seven-day standard. Although that average improved to 38 days by April 2026, it remained far above the standard. These are veterans who have already been referred for care but are still waiting for someone to arrange it.
These problems are not limited to a handful of hospitals. An analysis by Government Executive of VA appointment data covering 134 hospitals and 10 specialties found that wait times increased for approximately 42% of the medical services examined, while improving for 37%. Nearly half of VA facilities offering oncology appointments experienced longer waits. At the Omaha VA, average wait times for neurology appointments jumped from 27 days to 127 days.
Even newly opened VA clinics are struggling to find enough staff. An October 2026 CNN investigation found that roughly half of 41 new VA clinics had double-digit staffing vacancy rates. At the new Fredericksburg VA Health Center, nearly 40% of positions remained vacant more than a year after it opened. The VA can build new facilities, but without the workforce to staff them, veterans cannot fully benefit from that investment.
Conclusion
The VA is being reshaped from the top down. Decisions about veterans’ care and benefits are increasingly in the hands of political appointees whose primary qualification is loyalty to the president, not expertise in their domain, while the experienced professionals are leaving faster than the department can replace them. Veterans are already feeling the effects, but the longer-term damage may be more severe.
Unfortunately, it has been difficult for policymakers and the public to have a complete understanding of how deep these problems run, because the VA’s own internal watchdog is operating with diminished capacity and conducting less oversight. The VA Office of Inspector General is issuing far fewer audit reports than it has historically and has a staff almost 20% smaller than the end of 2024. The office’s independence has also come into question. Inspector General Cheryl Mason previously served as a senior adviser to VA Secretary Doug Collins, and OIG employees have alleged that she has pushed staff to downplay staffing shortages in their reports.
The public can and should call on their federal leaders to ensure the VA is delivering for veterans and running effectively. In order to ensure that our nation’s veterans receive the benefits they’ve earned and the care they deserve, policymakers must:
- Comply with statutory caps on political appointments. The VA must explain how it will bring its Schedule C and non-career SES numbers within the limits set by the law.
- Explain and examine Schedule G political appointments. The administration needs to explain their use of 22 Schedule G appointments at the VA, including why a new category of employees is needed and what roles the current Schedule G officials fill.
- Fill critical capacity gaps: The VA should immediately develop a plan and timeline for closing critical gaps in health care delivery and benefits processing. The plan should identify staffing needs based on demand for services, particularly for physicians, nurses, mental health professionals, medical support personnel, claims processors and police officers. It should lay out how the VA will meet those needs by retaining experienced employees, recruiting new talent, redeploying existing staff, and improving processes and technology. And it should also address barriers to recruitment and retention and address concerns about politicization and declining trust in the VA as an employer. Measurable milestones tied to improvements in veterans’ access to care, benefits processing and service quality will be imperative.
- Restore transparency into health care access, quality, capacity, safety and quality across its system. The VA should regularly publish standardized, historical data on access to care, clinical capacity, patient safety and quality of care across its health system and in community care. Data should include patient wait times, clinics closed to new patients, reductions in hospital beds and delays in scheduling community care. The VA should make the data available in downloadable formats that allow the public to assess system-wide trends over time, compare performance across facilities and specialties and identify emerging problems without having to examine facilities individually or just rely on the VA’s own summaries.
Authors:
- Josh Jacobs, Democracy Forward Civil Service Strong fellow and former Under Secretary for Benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs
- Chris Piper, Senior Manager of Policy, Partnership for Public Service
