While controversy swirls around last week’s mass firing of 1,000 Department of Veterans Affairs’ employees, a far greater threat to veterans’ health care is going completely unnoticed. Powerful leaders in Congress have quietly unveiled their plan to gut VA-delivered care, wrapped in the misleadingly titled “Veterans’ ACCESS Act.” If veterans don’t act fast, they will lose the VA health care system they know and depend on.

The bill appears innocuous enough, with aspirations of accountability. But don’t be fooled. Hidden in its depths like a ticking time bomb is a provision intended to dismantle the integrated VA health care system faster than you can say “privatization.”

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Follow the money, which will hemorrhage from the VA to the private sector. The likely outcome is that the VA will close its inpatient services and instead become a sprawling assortment of outpatient clinics. If that sounds familiar, it is the plan laid out in the Project 2025 playbook. Veterans are being hoodwinked that the VA facilities they rely on won’t be impacted. Don’t buy it for a second.

Speak Up Before VA Health Care Is Gutted

Previously:

What’s in Store for VA Disability Benefits with New Office of Management and Budget Chief?

Vought, confirmed Thursday in a 53-47 Senate vote, spearheaded a 2023 report by the Center for Renewing America think tank that called for reducing VA disability compensation for veterans who reach Social Security retirement age and eliminating unemployability benefits for these veterans as well.

The report also proposed cutting disability compensation to veterans with ratings lower than 30% and dropping disability compensation for veterans whose health conditions aren’t directly related to military duty.

Vought also contributed to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a conservative federal government, which recommended the VA revamp its disability ratings schedule to eliminate any conditions that are “tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service.”

Project 2025’s VA section, written by former VA Chief of Staff Brooks Tucker, suggested that the new administration “target significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants while preserving them fully or partially for existing” recipients.