Nurses, veterans, and community members waved signs outside the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Decatur on Tuesday protesting pending layoffs and union busting efforts at the VA that they say will detrimentally impact care that local Black veterans need.
In 2023, around 34% of all veterans in Georgia were Black, according to data from the VA’s National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics.
“In Atlanta, we have plenty of Black veterans — they sacrificed their life, they went on the line, they worked hard, and we made a promise to them, and breaking that promise is not what America should stand for,” Florence Uzuegbunam, a nurse practitioner and associate director of National Nurses United, the nurse’s union representing the Atlanta VA, told Capital B Atlanta.
“We shouldn’t be talking about cutting staff. We should be increasing staffing to make sure our patients are safe.”
In July, the VA announced a plan to eliminate around 30,000 jobs across the department by the end of the fiscal year. As part of these staffing cuts, the Atlanta VA is proposing to eliminate positions within its Mental Health Intensive Case Management program, a team that helps veterans with serious mental illnesses, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing team, which helps homeless veterans with rental assistance, according to NNU.
“These are the nurses that go into the patient’s home, to see patients that are suicidal, they’ve had either multiple suicidal attempts, are a harm to themselves or to society,” Uzuegbunam said. “Their proposal is to cut 50% of those nurses. We cannot be quiet or silent, because those patients are the most vulnerable population.
“They’re patients with PTSD, that are crippled, they cannot even get out of bed. … They have to go in their home to assure their safety, to help them manage other conditions like diabetes, heart disease.”
The rally also comes days after President Donald Trump’s executive order to abolish multiple unions across federal agencies went into effect. Tiffany Nguyen, lead labor representative at NNU, said that will make it easier for the Atlanta VA to enforce the looming layoffs, as NNU is one of the unions directly targeted by the order.
“I’ve been with the organization for 20 years and this is the first time that we’ve seen these kinds of attacks on labor, on nurses, on their right to advocate for veterans and patients — it’s crazy. And so today, nurses are standing up,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen said that the culmination of the looming cuts and federal union busting efforts have created an environment of instability at the VA, which ultimately has made it difficult for the department to hire new medical staff to care for the nation’s veterans.
“The VA’s system was already difficult in hiring people because of the time frame it takes to go through all of their credentials, but now you have the instability of whether you’re going to be fired or not. It’s not an attractive place at this point for a lot of people,” Nguyen said.
According to a report by ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom, records show nearly 4 in 10 of the roughly 2,000 doctors offered jobs at the VA from January through March of this year turned them down — quadruple the rate of doctors rejecting offers during the same period last year.
The number of doctors on staff has declined each month since Trump took office, and the VA also lost twice as many nurses as it hired between January and June, according to ProPublica’s report.
Chris Purdy, a local veteran at the rally, said he visits the Atlanta VA frequently and that he’s seen fewer service providers to assist patients and as a result wait times increase as more people access care.
“There’s a medical test that I need, but it’s taken three plus months for me to get an appointment for it,” Purdy said.
NNU and other unions targeted in the executive order are currently suing the Trump administration on the grounds that they believe it is an unconstitutional retaliation against the unions for engaging in activity protected by the First Amendment.
“Nurses are standing up,” Nguyen said. “They’re the last defense, in a sense, for these veterans and for the community, because what affects veterans, especially mental health, is something that is going to be challenging for the community to take care of.
“I think it’s important that the community knows that it’s not just about veterans and federal workers, but it’s about the community as a whole. These nurses are saying, ‘We need you at this moment in time.’”
