On days when the emphysema and the unintended effects of his traumatic mind harm aren’t flaring uncontrolled, David Cochran generally leaves his home in Vista, California.
However easy issues like site visitors can set off his post-traumatic stress, and the U.S. Military veteran shortly returns house, the place he doesn’t really feel so susceptible to the potential of hurting himself — or others.
“I can’t be in crowds,” Cochran stated. “I have trouble driving because of the road rage.”
The U.S. Division of Veterans Affairs is the previous Military main’s sole well being care supplier, overseeing his prescription remedy regime and providing one-on-one remedy to assist him course of his expertise in Iraq so a few years in the past.
The VA has served him pretty properly since he left the navy in 2012, Cochran stated.
However his nervousness has reached a gradual boil in latest months, as President Donald Trump’s administration slices jobs and providers throughout the federal authorities, together with the VA, the place this month the administration introduced it plans to chop greater than 80,000 jobs.
Now, Cochran and different veterans are anxious about how their advantages and providers may very well be impacted by the staffing cut back — and the way far the cuts will go. For some, the company has already focused particular cuts to well being care, saying final week that it’ll now not present gender-affirming care to transgender veterans.
“I didn’t think it would be this bad,” stated Cochran, now 57 and dealing a private-sector pc job from house. “I didn’t think Trump would brutalize the government like he is. His efforts have surpassed my darkest images.”
The Trump administration stated it plans to chop 83,000 jobs from the VA, the company that gives well being care, housing, pensions, schooling stipends and extra to the nation’s 15.8 million navy veterans.
Veterans additionally assist run the company, accounting for about 30% of everybody it employs. Extra nonetheless — about 630,000 — work for the federal authorities at massive, making up about the identical share of the federal workforce, in response to 2023 information from the U.S. Workplace of Personnel Administration.
The VA already reduce greater than 1,400 jobs in February.
“It really seems like all of the things I was promised as a citizen of this fine country are very quickly either evaporating or intentionally being dismantled and taken apart,” stated Ian Mooney, the president of the San Diego, California, chapter of Veterans for Peace.
He served within the U.S. Military from 2007 to 2011 and is now pursuing a doctorate in philosophy from the College of Kentucky.
San Diego’s Veterans for Peace organized a protest on March 14 on the World Beat Middle in Balboa Park, California, in response to the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the VA. Lots of the roughly 200 attendees held handmade indicators with slogans corresponding to “Hire a Veteran, Fire Musk” and “Keep Promises to Veterans.”
One lady whose husband died in Vietnam at 22 — when she was three months pregnant — stated she may have by no means gone to school herself and gotten a job to help her daughter if it hadn’t been for the VA and the GI Invoice.
VA Secretary Doug Collins has stated cuts gained’t affect veterans or their advantages, sustaining that the transfer will truly permit extra funding to stream to them.
However many veterans and their households aren’t shopping for it.
In San Diego, native veterans say cuts to personnel will affect their providers — making for longer wait occasions and hurting communication with the VA staff who’re serving to them course of medical claims and enroll them in packages.
“If the people who were processing the claims are no longer there… What if it takes a year for you to get a determination? What are you supposed to do for that year?” requested Clairemont, California, resident Patricia Hoekman, whose 28-year-old son was discharged from the U.S. Coast Guard final weekend. “If you’re diminishing our access to care, you’re essentially taking it away.”
Her son has been working with a VA worker to course of his service-connected incapacity declare, a course of he began months in the past. As of Wednesday, he hadn’t heard from them in a couple of days.
Carlos Perez Gomez, a 42-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran who lives in El Cajon, California, says he’s scared the federal government will come for veterans’ advantages subsequent.
Carlos Gomez Perez attended Grossmont Excessive Faculty, then enlisted within the U.S. Marines and was deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, the place he earned the Silver Star and Purple Coronary heart whereas serving in fight. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Gomez is a Silver Star recipient who served in Iraq throughout 2003 and 2004, together with in Fallujah, the place he was shot within the face and shoulder throughout a mission.
He remembers the worry he and his firm felt in Iraq. They needed to jerry-rig their very own automobile safety, he says, utilizing sandbags and plywood to create a protection towards enemy hearth. Their uniforms had been inexperienced camouflage, unfit for Iraq’s beige desert panorama.
The conflict additionally shifted the deployment schedule for the Marines, he stated, in order that some had much less coaching earlier than coming into fight zones.
When Gomez left the service in 2006 on the age of 23, he didn’t know something about post-traumatic stress dysfunction. However he sought assist when he grew to become anxious that his aggression may put his younger son in peril.
His experiences with the VA’s psychological well being providers haven’t all the time been nice. In 2023, he needed to wait 18 months for an in-person one-on-one counseling appointment. However he says this can be a signal that the company wants extra sources, not fewer.
“We need to increase the services,” he stated, including that though he’s skilled hiccups on the VA, “they’re actually helping as best they can.”
The VA has already been understaffed for years.
In a 2024 evaluate on staffing shortages from the VA Workplace of Inspector Basic, the Veterans Well being Administration (VHA) reported a complete of two,959 extreme occupational staffing shortages throughout its amenities.
Shortages in psychology had been essentially the most ceaselessly reported, and have been some of the reported since 2018. Greater than 80 p.c of amenities reported shortages of medical officers and nurses — a extreme scarcity that has been reported yearly since 2014, in response to the evaluate.
Andrea Johnson has labored as a registered nurse on the VA in La Jolla, California, for the previous seven years. She stated the problem of treating veterans has by no means been better than within the two months since Trump returned to the White Home.
“Every day when we go to work, our nurses are really struggling with feeling demoralized,” Johnson stated. “Every day is a surprise.”
Thus far, not one of the 900 or so registered nurses, nurse practitioners or different members of the Nationwide Nurses United union on the La Jolla hospital has been laid off, Johnson stated.
However lots of the dietary workers, housekeepers, provide chain managers and lab technicians have been let go or accepted early-retirement presents, she stated, forcing nurses to do additional work that takes them away from their main duties.
“These are all services and people we rely on to assist in the care of veterans,” Johnson stated. “We started to feel the effects as far as impacting patient care over the last three or four weeks.”
In keeping with Johnson, nobody has died because of the staffing cuts imposed so far — however the stage of care already has been affected.
“When there’s a reduction in staff and a reduction in health care providers, that does lead to negative patient outcomes,” she stated. “We’re in the business of caring for veterans and getting them back home to their families. We don’t want to be hindered in our ability.”
The VA Advantages Regional Workplace seen on Friday, March 21, 2025 in San Diego, CA. (Meg McLaughlin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
This month, the VA additionally went a step additional in its reductions, concentrating on look after transgender veterans.
The VA has by no means supplied gender-affirming surgical procedures, nevertheless it introduced it might be chopping different gender-affirming well being look after transgender veterans and veterans with gender dysphoria, together with hormone-replacement remedy and voice coaching remedy.
The transfer rolls again VHA Directive 1341, which was launched in 2018 underneath Trump’s first time period and supplied “a policy for the respectful delivery of health care” for trans veterans. Info on the coverage is now not out there on the VA’s web site.
Democratic Rep. Mike Levin, talking to reporters in Oceanside, Caifornia, on Friday, stated the transfer matches with the Trump administration’s assaults on transgender folks.
“Anybody who puts on the uniform, who serves our nation voluntarily, who puts their lives at stake in order to defend our freedom and our institutions and our country — we should take care of them,” Levin informed The San Diego Union-Tribune after a press convention, throughout which he advocated for VA workers and packages.
Levin stated he wrote to Secretary Collins final month pushing to protect veterans’ providers however hasn’t gotten a response.
Advocates fear a scarcity of entry to look after trans veterans may result in increased charges of melancholy and suicide.
“Gender-affirming care has the ability to effectively save lives, and so any threat to take that away is a direct assault to our rights as human beings,” stated Pamuela Halliwell, the assistant director of behavioral well being providers on the San Diego LGBT Neighborhood Middle.
Halliwell herself was kicked out of the U.S. Navy underneath the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” coverage in 2007 for being transgender — a discharge that stripped her of the appropriate to obtain advantages underneath the VA.
She stated that for the reason that election, extra group members — together with active-duty and retired navy personnel — have contacted The Middle in worry over how they are going to entry providers.
Some trans veterans are contemplating whether or not they need to search non-public well being care, says Lindsay Church, the manager director of Minority Veterans of America. However not everybody has that choice.
And for all of the VA’s shortcomings — Church says they’ve been misgendered and harassed — it’s additionally the one federal company outfitted to know veterans’ complicated wants after they return house from service, one thing non-public care could not have the capability to supply.
Cochran, the U.S. Military veteran, says he sometimes attends remedy and receives different therapy on the VA clinic in Oceanside however visits the La Jolla campus pretty frequently.
His one expertise with Neighborhood Care, the VA program that lets veterans get therapy from non-public suppliers when care isn’t instantly out there, didn’t go properly. The clinic botched his paperwork and left him with $1,000 of debt that ought to have been coated, he stated.
Now he worries downsizing the VA will power extra veterans into private-sector therapy and chip away at the advantages they earned.
Though he has but to be straight affected by cuts, Cochran is consumed with fear over the way in which the Trump administration has slashed providers on which thousands and thousands of individuals rely.
“The government is a complicated organization,” he stated. “You can’t just lop off programs at will. It would be like taking out random body parts and hoping people can just live with it.”
Employees author Jemma Stephenson contributed to this report.
