2024 Election
Project 2025: Veterans' Care
Project 2025 Seeks to Gut Veterans’ Healthcare
Trump’s Project 2025 Will Dismantle Veterans’ Healthcare
TOPLINE
The largest integrated healthcare system in the United States is the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Veterans Health Administration (VHA). With over 1,300 healthcare facilities and over 9 million Veterans in the system, it is no exaggeration to say that next to the Affordable Care Act and Medicare/Medicaid, the VA is a pillar of healthcare in the United States.
Project 2025 seeks to gut Veterans’ Health Care. It does so in four ways:
- Project 2025 kicks efforts to privatize Veterans’ healthcare and put it in the for-profit system into overdrive.
- Project 2025 callously seeks cost savings by targeting disability ratings of our disabled Veterans, putting millions of Veterans at risk of losing benefits.
- Project 2025 wages a political war on specialized healthcare for Veterans, ensuring that the needs of millions more aren’t met – and it may not stop there.
- Like the rest of Project 2025, it seeks to replace independent expertise with loyalty and make it harder to remove loyalists from key positions of power within the VA while dismantling systems that hold them accountable.
Combined, Donald Trump and Project 2025 would end the sacred guarantee we have made to our Veterans – that when you serve, you will be taken care of when you get home.
DEEPER ANALYSIS
Privatization of Veterans Care
Project 2025 pushes more Veterans into the for-profit system where they will get worse care and does all it can to increase strain on VHA facilities, resulting in worse care for Veterans there, as well.
- Project 2025 goes out of its way to degenerate the VA for “harbor[ing] a bias toward expanding the unionized federal employee workforce.1” As prescribed by Project 2025, the antidote to that is to expand efforts to move Veterans’ care from VA centers to the private sector2.
- Project 2025 orders the VA to identify VHA centers that aren’t making enough referrals to the private sector and make them push more Veterans to private care3.
- At the same time, Project 2025 orders VHA facilities to see more patients per day – equal to the number seen at Department of Defense facilities. This ignores the fact that VHA patients are likely to have more complex health challenges than their much younger counterparts and that they cannot simply crank up the number of appointments without affecting the care of their current patients, who will have to be rushed through. Increasing the load daily for providers will diminish the personalized care Veterans have long advocated for.
- Project 2025 orders a review of older VHA facilities. Rather than invest in modernization, it veers towards shuttering them in favor of smaller, less capable clinics. This would reduce the VA’s footprint in many areas and its ability to provide specialized care to Veterans in need in those areas. Combined, these moves would necessitate Veterans seeking care in the private, for-profit system, where their care will arguably be worse while impacting the ability of Veterans to receive quality care simply because of where they live. Care from VA centers consistently outranks non-VA care in patient satisfaction surveys4.
Cutting Costs By Cutting Disabled Veterans
Project 2025 nickel and dimes Veterans so severely that it literally seeks to cut spending on the backs of our disabled Veterans. Currently, there are 5.3 million Veterans who have some kind of service-connected disability5. Millions of future disabled Veterans will get screwed out of the benefits they deserve by Project 2025.
- Project 2025 callously views disabled Veterans as a burden on the system, whining that the expansion of benefits has been too generous. It says the VA system “has assigned disability ratings to a growing number of health conditions over time; some are tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service,” and moans that benefits for those Veterans suffering from Toxic Burn Pit and Agent Orange exposure “has led to historic increases” in benefits spending6.
- Project 2025 seeks cost savings by “target[ing] significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants7.”
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- Furthering its love of all things in the for-profit private section, Project 2025 seeks to ensure more miserly disability ratings for disabled Veterans by employing more and/or different private sector companies to determine ratings. Project 2025 lays this out on page 649, writing that the VA should “hire more private companies to perform disability medical examinations.” This is even though nearly all of these examinations are already farmed out to private entities8, raising serious flags about why Project 2025 focuses on it.
Putting Politics Above Care
In the name of politics, Project 2025 would gut specialized care that Veterans depend on, potentially expanding it to exclude care for any non-service-connected issue, which would impact millions of Veterans, especially the elderly.
- Project 2025 once again levies false and unfounded claims that yet another government agency is “woke” because it cares for everyone. It hilariously charges the VA of being a part of “the left’s pernicious trend of abusing the role of government to further its own agenda9.”
- Project 2025’s Veteran section contains a series of policy recommendations designed to overhaul the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the Veterans Benefit Administration (VBA), and the VA’s Human Resources and Administration (HRA) office10, all in a concerted effort to prioritize political and ideological agendas over the medical and psychological needs of veterans, compromising the integrity and effectiveness of VA’s healthcare system.
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- The proposed total bans on abortion care for women11 will harm or kill those who seek life-saving abortions due to non-viable or at-risk pregnancies; further evidence conservatives plan the continued subjugation of women.
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- Gender-affirming care is medically necessary. Denial of critical care will harm those who honorably served their country through years of conflict. It will compound mental health struggles and increase the tragically high veteran suicide rate.
- Project 2025 curiously takes aim at the above as being “non-service-connected” and therefore unworthy of coverage by the VA and VHA. ‘
- Project 2025 sets a slippery slope that puts all non-service-connected care at risk – including millions of elderly Veterans who use the VA as their sole healthcare provider. It would leave millions more with fragmented and inadequate access to healthcare.
- Rescinding policies connected to reproductive health would eliminate services like cervical cancer screenings, birth control, fertility treatments, maternity support, mammograms, and menopausal care. Eliminating this type of care is a slap in the face to every woman who served the nation.
Mandating Loyalty Over Care
As in other sections, Project 2025 seeks to radically remake the VA workforce, leaning on political loyalty over expertise and independence and undermining accountability programs that help ensure our Veterans get the best care possible.
- Project 2025’s remake of the VA begins on Day One, where it says there must be an effort to immediately “ensure political control of the VA12.” Project 2025 undertakes several efforts to ensure that the VA is ruled by politics and loyalty to Donald Trump – not what’s best for our Veterans.
- It immediately rescinds all delegation of authority at the VA and snaps it back under more central control under Donald Trump13.
- Echoing other efforts to recruit a loyal “government in waiting” of Trump loyalists, Project 2025 lays out the plan “in identifying a fully vetted roster of candidates to assume all key positions at VA well ahead of formal nominations14.”
- Anticipating resistance from labor unions to this and other attempts to fire all civil service workers and replace them with loyalists, Project 2025 encourages swift action to fire VA employees with decades of experience in caring for our Veterans so MAGA loyalists can take their jobs15.
- It extends the term for Donald Trump’s choice for the Under Secretary of Health to protect them from administration changes, making them harder to replace16.
CONCLUSION
Like so much of Project 2025, the section on Veterans’ Care would put extremist politics above care for our Veterans and nickel and dime our nation’s heroes to death – literally.
By pushing Veterans into a private care system while overburdening our highly-rated VHA, Veterans are less likely to get the care they need and deserve. Further, by focusing on the reduction of benefits for our disabled Veterans, pushing down their disability rating, and seeking to lower the determination of their rating, Donald Trump and Project 2025 continue to demean those who serve and who they believe are “suckers and losers.”
Project 2025 and Donald Trump impose their extremist social agenda on our VA, not just threatening abortion and gender-affirming care but potentially all reproductive care and any care not related to service-connected injuries.
Finally, Project 2025 recruits a MAGA workforce in waiting, ready to supplant workers on Day One, loyal to Donald Trump above all else. It also discourages VA employees from speaking out, ensuring no one crosses Donald Trump in favor of our Veterans.
In short, if you’re a Veteran who receives VA services or benefits, or the family member of a Veteran who does, Donald Trump’s Project 2025 screws you badly.
Protect Veterans
Stand Against Project 2025
It’s up to Veterans and Military Families to spread the word about how Trump’s Project 2025 will decimate those who depend on Veterans’ care and benefits.
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