John Falchetto survived Vietnam. His river gunboat came under rocket fire, and he was the only one who made it out alive.

This February, at 80, he went to the VA hospital in East Orange, New Jersey, with terrible stomach pain. A CT scan showed his appendix had burst and was gangrenous. Doctors wrote that he needed surgery right away. But the hospital's operating room was closed that night. Its ventilation system had broken months earlier, and the repair team was short-staffed.

So he lay there for seven hours. Around midnight, the hospital arranged to move him to the VA in Manhattan, less than an hour away. But instead of an emergency transfer, he was scheduled to go when the transport unit started its morning shift, around 7. By the time he got there, he was in septic shock. He never recovered, and was moved to hospice.

ProPublica, which reported his story, is careful about this: it's impossible to say for sure that short-staffing caused his death, because he was very sick when he arrived. "But he didn't get that," ProPublica wrote, meaning proper, timely treatment.

"VA is headed in the right direction"

When Trump took office again, his administration set out to shrink the Department of Veterans Affairs and shift veterans toward private doctors. ProPublica describes how it went about it. It canceled the contracts of the VA's unions. It ordered remote staff back into the office — at East Orange, into rooms that couldn't handle them. Elon Musk's DOGE demanded weekly lists of what employees had done. And it offered early retirement and other incentives to quit.

In May 2025, VA Secretary Doug Collins promised Congress that the cuts wouldn't touch care: "We're going to maintain VA's mission-essential jobs, like doctors, nurses, claims processors."

Two months later, the agency bragged about losing nearly 30,000 staff. "VA is headed in the right direction," Collins said.

Here's what the VA's own numbers show:

• 3,800 fewer doctors, nurses and other "mission critical" staff six months after Trump took office, according to the department's own data. Many of them have never been replaced. The VA has instead eliminated thousands of open jobs, including for doctors and nurses.
• 97% of VA hospitals reported severe shortages of doctors, according to the VA's watchdog.
• East Orange and its related New Jersey facilities lost nearly a tenth of their staff since Trump took office.

The administration says it isn't hurting veterans' care. A spokesperson said the eliminated jobs for healthcare providers were "not needed." When ProPublica asked to interview Collins and East Orange's leaders about the evidence, the VA didn't make them available.

What it looks like inside one hospital

At East Orange, staff were told by email that because of "urgent nurse staffing levels," eight of the hospital's roughly 60 general admission beds were being taken out of service. The mechanics who kept the 70-year-old building running were quitting too, so repairs took longer. In December, part of the operating room's air system broke down and contaminated the surgical instruments.

As VA doctors left, more veterans were pushed into the private-care program the administration favors. A government report describes that program as having "insufficient staffing," and many veterans face long waits there too.

It isn't just New Jersey. In Albuquerque, short staffing forced the VA hospital to take many beds offline and stop operating on severe heart attacks. Lung and spine surgeries were suspended for months at the VA hospital near St. Petersburg, Florida. In Minneapolis, radiation treatment stopped because one of the machine's operators quit, so a veteran with cancer in his bones had to ride in an ambulance for treatment every day instead of being wheeled down the hall.

"We are going to take good care of them"

"We love our veterans," Trump said in the Oval Office shortly after his inauguration. "We are going to take good care of them."

One East Orange veteran wrote to Trump to complain about the short staffing. He got back a one-page letter signed by the president: "under my leadership, they will always have the loyalty, respect, and support they have earned and so dearly deserve."

In March 2025, Greg Murphy, a North Carolina Republican on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, defended the VA cuts on CNN. Asked if he could guarantee that veterans' benefits and care wouldn't be affected, he said: "No, I can't guarantee anything."

The bottom line

The Trump administration celebrated losing nearly 30,000 VA staff, including 3,800 doctors, nurses and other critical workers in its first six months, after promising Congress it would protect those jobs. At the East Orange VA in New Jersey, which lost nearly a tenth of its staff, an 80-year-old Vietnam veteran with a burst appendix waited hours for surgery the hospital couldn't perform, and later died. Nearly every VA hospital in the country now reports severe shortages of doctors.

Source

• "We Have No One": How Trump's Dismantling of the VA Left a Veterans Hospital in Crisis — ProPublica, November 2026