The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is notorious for its complex and bureaucratic processes that make accessibility for veterans nearly impossible. This has been a major problem for years, and it is an added burden to veterans and their families in the midst of an increasing suicide risk among veterans, a veterans homelessness crisis, and the continual prioritization of illegal immigrants over veterans.
The VA, for more than a decade, has been plagued with a myriad of failures that have put our veterans last - everything from backlogs and delays, failures in leadership and work efficacy, the propagation of gender radicalism and DEI, and unnecessary bloat and bureaucracy. In the past 10 years, the Government Accountability Office reported that VA healthcare has been at a “high risk.” This means it is fraught with waste, fraud, and abuse, and patient care for our veterans has suffered as a result.
The Biden administration only exacerbated these failures. As one example, at Biden’s direction, bureaucrats at the VA received bonuses despite persistent and prevalent leadership failures. Some of these failures include a severe backlog of disability claims. By 2022, the VA had 635,026 pending disability claims, with 152,560 backlogged for more than 125 days. This means that veterans with disabilities have not received the urgent care they need. In some cases, this has even led to fatalities. This must be remedied immediately.
The Heritage Foundation recently released a report, based on a VA watchdog report, stating that under the Biden administration, 68% of claims at the VA were mishandled due to VA representative errors and 38% of cases lacked proper documentation, directly affecting claim approvals. These are some of many facts pointing to how inefficient and mismanaged the VA has been for years, and these issues worsened in the last four years.
It is unacceptable that while the Biden administration added thousands of positions at the VA and put in additional billions of dollars (in 2024, the VA’s budget totaled $307.75 billion and the VA requested a $32.9 billion increase for 2025), veteran physical and mental health care accessibility worsened, and our veterans are suffering now more than ever. All those dollars did not improve veteran care.
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Care and treatment for “gender dysphoria” at the VA alone has cost hardworking American taxpayers millions of dollars, and has hurt veterans, especially considering that fewer than one tenth of one percent of the 9.1 million veterans enrolled in VA health care are “trans-identified.” Despite this fact, the VA has prioritized “gender-affirming care,” making it nearly impossible for veterans to access basic and urgent healthcare services. This is true because resources are finite, and there is an opportunity cost. When millions of dollars, in addition to time and energy, are devoted to gender-affirming care, non-transgender veterans (an overwhelming majority) are left to fend for themselves.
In one egregious example of gender radicalism at the VA, officials gave a presentation to parking attendants, maintenance staff, and housekeepers, “forcing them to “Articulate the key elements of VHA’s Directive on Providing Health Care for Transgender and Intersex Veterans and training them to ask the Veteran what name, gender, and pronoun, the Veteran prefers” so they could place them in shared hospital rooms with a member of the gender with which they identified.” This presentation, aimed at pushing through a radical political agenda, is just one example of how our veterans have been abused by the system.
As soon as Biden took office, veterans’ trust in the VA plummeted to never-before-seen lows. Over the past four years, veterans have turned to nonprofits to find opportunities for private care in order to avoid the VA’s bureaucratic disaster that is adding additional stress to their already-existing struggles of dealing with transitioning back to civilian life.
This is exactly why the Trump administration and Secretary Collins streamlining the VA system and delivering services directly to veterans is so critical. We must cut the bureaucracy that has hurt veterans for far too long and provide them with choice and flexibility. This requires strong leadership. Preserving the status quo helps no one, and especially not our veterans, who have sacrificed to defend our country.
Nicole Kiprilov is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for American Safety and Security at the Independent Women’s Forum.
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