Recognizing a growing need to recruit more staff and keep pace with its hiring efforts, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) recently released its “Recruitment, Relocation, and Retention Incentives for VHA Positions Need Improved Oversight” report. The document provides information about the numerous challenges the VA has faced in maintaining adequate staffing levels to support its service programs.
Initially, when it wanted to boost its staffing, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) began offering incentives to new staff members, paying approximately $828 million to 130,000 employees in fiscal 2022–2023, according to the report. Nearly 90% of the funds allocated in 2022 and 88% in 2023 were directed to employees on shortage lists; however, Veterans Affairs failed to establish proper oversight of its incentive offerings and frequently neglected to document where its funding was being spent.
Other efforts to increase Veterans Affairs staffing have been hindered by external forces.
Since President Trump signed Executive Order 14251 on March 27, which listed more than 40 federal agencies as primarily focused on national security and removed their collective bargaining rights, agencies such as the Veterans Affairs have reported a decrease in their ability to hire new employees. Labor unions such as the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) quickly filed a lawsuit challenging EO 14251.
The lawsuit claimed the president’s sweeping Executive Order was retaliatory. It states that: “The White House Fact Sheet accompanying the Exclusion Order decried actions by ‘hostile Federal unions’ who had ‘declared war on President Trump’s agenda,’ including by ‘filing grievances to block Trump policies.’” The Fact Sheet specifically referenced a statement by the “largest Federal union” — i.e., Plaintiff AFGE — that it was “fighting back” against Trump’s policies.
To further drive home the retaliatory intent of the Exclusion Order, the White House Fact Sheet concluded with the message that “President Trump supports constructive partnerships with unions who work with him …”
According to the Fact Sheet, “The avowedly retaliatory nature of the Exclusion Order and its attempt to punish federal unions who engage in politically disfavored speech and petitioning activities and decline to ‘work with’ the president renders it unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Each of the Plaintiff Unions in this case has engaged in extensive speech and petitioning activity that has been broadly critical of ‘Trump’s agenda’ — both his agenda to decimate the federal workforce and his broader agenda to fundamentally restructure the federal government through expansive and unprecedented exercises of executive authority.”
On June 24, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction stopping agencies from enforcing Trump’s executive order, but during a recent congressional hearing, American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 2328 President Emerita Dr. Sheila Elliott pointed out that even the potential loss of these fundamental labor rights has affected recruitment negatively: “Continuing to deny large swaths of the VA workforce collective bargaining rights will continue to harm recruitment and retention,” she told the committee. “As there is a critical shortage of health professionals in this country, why would high-quality candidates want to serve in the VA, when they would retain not only union protections, but better salaries in the private sector?”
Elliott urged members of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs to support H.R. 2550, the “Protect America’s Workforce Act,” which would nullify Trump’s executive order.
Veterans Affairs, Elliott said, has also been rescinding employee telework privileges, and personnel are being forced to “report to a VA facility, and have been required to interact with patients remotely, often in crowded bullpens, to discuss private matters. This has harmed morale and retention of mission-critical and hard-to-recruit clinicians at the VA,” she said.
The online news site Federal News Network (FNN), which covers the federal government and federal employees, reported on July 22 that the VA is largely reducing its use of pay incentives for new hires since they haven’t worked as expected.
Staffing issues remain a concern for the agency: “[A]bout 7,500 employees in veteran-facing roles have left the department so far this fiscal year,” FNN reported. “That includes a net loss of 1,720 registered nurses, nearly 1,150 medical support assistants, more than 600 physicians, nearly 200 police officers, nearly 80 psychologists, and almost 1,100 veteran claim examiners.”