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Earlier this year, the doctors of the Hospitals of Veterans Affairs in Pennsylvania sounded an alarm. The radical cuts imposed by the Trump administration, told High-Up in an email, were causing “severe and immediate impacts”, even the “cancer trials that save lives.”
The email said that more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to the treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic cancers of head and neck, to kidney disease to traumatic brain lesions.
“Registration in clinical trials stops,” warned the email, “which means that veterans lose access to therapies.”
The administration reversed some of its decisions, allowing some judgments to continue for now. Even so, other research, including tests to treat head and neck cancer, has stagnated.
President Donald Trump promised for a long time prioritizing veterans.
“We love our veterans,” he said in February. “We are going to take care of them.”
After the Department of Veterans Affairs, throwing employees and contracts, Trump’s election to direct the agency, Secretary Doug Collins, promised: “Veterans will observe a change for better.”
But internal email boxes obtained by Propublic reveal a reality of great differentity. Doctors and others in the hospitals and VA clinics throughout the country have been sending messages often desperate to the headquarters that detail how the cuts will damage the attention of the veterans. The VA provides medical attention to approximately 9 million veterans.
In March, VA officials throughout the country warned that a critical resource, databases to trace cancer, will no longer remain updated. As explained by the officials of the Northwest of the Pacific, the government’s efficiency department was moving to kill their contract with the external company that maintained and directed its cancer registration, where information about the treatment of patients is collected and analyzed. Dege had marked it for the “immediate termination.”
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The VA in Detroit raised a similar alarm in an email, warning about the “inability to trace oncological treatment and recurrences.” Electronic emails obtained by Propublic detail a wide variety of interruptions. In Colorado, for example, dismissals to social workers were causing homeless veterans who expected temporary housing to go without help.
The warnings, sent as part of a long -standing system in the VA to alert the superiors of problems, paint a portrait of chaotic retrection in an agency that only three years ago was ordered by Congress through the Law of the Pact to expand attention and benefits for veterans who face cancer and other problems after exposure to exposure to Orange, burn Pits or other toxins.
Doctors and other medical care suppliers throughout the VA have a bone that hastened to the left and personnel personnel in the middle of an increasingly changing cuts, hiring of frying and other edicts of the White House.
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The completely exposed position in the emails is particularly surprising because the cut would be eclipsed by the dramatic reduction of the personnel and the change of priorities that the administration has said that it comes.
The VA has cut only a few thousand employees this year. But the administration has said that it plans to eliminate at least 70,000 through volunteer layoffs and purchases in the coming months. The agency, which is the largest integrated medical care system in the US.
Despite an extended role ordered by Congress through the Law of the Pact, administration officials have said that their objective is to cut the agency to the size before the legislet approved.
“The Biden administration understood what it meant to pay for the cost of war; it seems that the Trump administration,” said representative Mark Takano, a California Democrat and chief author of the PACT law.
The documents obtained by Propublic show Doge officials who work in the VA in March prepared a scheme to “transform” the agency that focused on ways to consolidate operations and introduce artificial intelligence tools to manage benefits claims. A Dogle document proposes to close 17 hospitals, and perhaps one more boxes.
Va press secretary, Pete Kasperoowicz, told Propublic that it would not be hospital closure. “Just because a VA employee wrote something, he does not make him a VA policy,” he said in a written statement. But he said that use or AI will be a large part of what he called the “reform” efforts of VA.
Kasperoowicz dismissed the idea that the emails obeyed by Propublic Show Chaos.
“The only thing these reports show is that it has a robust and very functional system to mark potential problems and solve them quickly so that we can provide the best possible attention to veterans,” he wrote.
Dege did not respond to comments requests.
The White House published a budget proposal last week that requires a 4% increase in the VA budget. That total includes more money for medical care, thought that a part of that would be used to pay veterans to seek attention outside the VA medical system.
Today more responses can reach the largest plans of the VA, when Collins is scheduled to testify to the Senate Veterans Committee, his first hearing in Capitol Hill since he entered the position.
David Shulkin, who directed the VA in Trump’s first mandate, said the administration is too focused on cuts instead of communicating a strategy to improve attention for veterinarians.
“I think it is very, very difficult to succeed with the approach that is in the bar,” Shulkin told Propublic.
A way in which local VA officials have tried to limit the damage that bone has sending warnings formally known as a problem of letters to superiors. And sometimes it works.
After the officials in Los Angeles warned that “all chemotherapy” would stop unless Washington retreated to kill a service contract, he was reversing his decision.
And, in the midst of the growing scrutiny, the administration also did some researchers in Pennsylvania and in other places exempt from the cuts. Exposed social workers who helped the homeless veterinarians in Colorado were also brought after approximately one month from their work. Kasperoowicz said that four social workers were affected, but that “his helmet was temporarily redistributed to other members of the team of homeless.”
The warnings of officials throughout the country underline how the relatively modest cuts are already affecting the work of the VA medical system, with the study and treatment of cancer assigned in multiple warnings to the agency’s leadership.
“We have absolutely felt the impact of the chaos that surrounds us. We are already losing people,” said a principal researcher, who spoke with propublic Anonymous for fear of reprisals.
Referring to studies, he added: “We are going to lose things that cannot restart.”
And although Kasperoowicz told Propublic that the problems in Pennsylvania have been solved, the locals there they said that this is not the case and that the impact is on Ono.
In Pittsburgh, two essays to treat veterans with advanced head and neck cancer, that officials in March had warned that they were at risk because either freezing hiring, they have not yet begun, according to Alanna Caffas, who heals a non -profit of feterans in the investigation.
“It’s crazy,” Caffas said. “These veterans should be able to obtain access to research treatments, but they can’t.”
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A third test there, to help veterans with opioid addiction, did not stop. Instead, he was limited by the layoffs of the key members of the team, according to coffee and another person involved in the investigation.
Regarding problems with cancer records, Kasperoowicz said he didn’t have a leg “had no effect on patients.” He added that the VA is moving to create a national contract to administer those records.
Rosie Torres, founder of Burn Pits 360, the veterans defense group that also strongly pressed the legislation, described the emails that showed cancer treatment prevented as a “crisis in creation” and “agitating”.
He added that decisions are being made without contributions from the communities of the veterinarians that affect.
“If they are killing contracts that can affect the benefit of attention, then we have the right to know,” he said.
Last week, when Trump’s second administration marked his first 100 days in office, Collins celebrated what he described as his achievements.
In a registered speech, he said that under his administration he processed a record number of benefits claims, the “divisive” expense ended in diversity initiatives and redirected millions of dollars of agencies of Towefit varicals.
“We will not stop working to put the veterans first,” he wrote in a companion in the ED.
Others say that Collins has not done such a thing. Instead of focusing on veterans, said a VA oncologist, “we are spending a huge amount of preparation for a staff catastrophe.”
The lives of “veterans” are at stake, “said the doctor.” Let’s go back to work and take care of them. “
Alex Muejeski contributed investigation, and Joel Jacobs contributed reports.
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