A new outpatient clinic for veterans in Chesapeake is set to open next month with about a fourth of the staff needed to fully operate the facility, which the clinic’s proponents say is a direct result of President Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze and spending cuts.
The North Battlefield VA Outpatient Clinic would have about 550 employees when fully staffed but will only have about 150 when it starts accepting patients April 17, according to U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat who cosponsored a bill in 2017 to authorize the clinic along with Sen. Mark Warner. It’s unclear how many staff members were slated to be hired by the time of opening prior to the hiring freeze.
Trump enacted the freeze on his first day in office, and the Associated Press reported earlier this month that the administration plans to cut 80,000 employees from Veterans Affairs.
Kaine toured the clinic along with U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Newport News, on Wednesday. The facility’s day one operations will be “scaled down” and will only offer basic primary care and mental health care, and it’s unclear how long it will take to reach full staff, according to Kaine. He said they will start with 10 primary care teams despite initially planning to have “multiples” of that amount, and the same on the mental health side.
The building has 16 dental offices that will go unused for the foreseeable future due to the restrictions on hiring, according to Kaine.
The senator said the layoffs and hiring freeze at the VA amount to a “war on veterans.”
“Having a hiring freeze, having the mass layoff of probationary employees at the VA and elsewhere, and having the VA administrator say the goal is to take another 80,000 employees out of the VA, makes it extremely difficult to recruit, and makes it extremely difficult to retain (employees),” Kaine said.
Twelve probationary staff at the Hampton VA Medical Center were abruptly laid off last month as part of the Trump administration’s cuts. Those losses included recreation therapists who remaining staff said are critical to the recovery of veterans in inpatient care.
When the hiring freeze went into effect, it interrupted the hiring process for many new staff members who, when they were contacted again after a federal judge reversed the hiring freeze, refused to resume the process, according to Scott. The congressman said that with the VA adding about 1,000 veteran patients per month, they need to be increasing their staff while they’re being told to lay people off.
“The layoffs from on high have been random, across the board, without any indication of what’s needed,” Scott said. “They talk about ‘mission critical’ – if you’re on the payroll at the VA hospital, you’re mission critical. Food service is mission critical, supply chain is mission critical, you can’t run a hospital without everybody doing their share.”
Failure to provide the highest level of care to veterans could hurt the military’s ability to recruit new service members, Scott said, citing George Washington who is reported to have said, “The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive how the veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation.”
Gavin Stone, 757-712-4806, gavin.stone@virginiamedia.com