When Ed Anderson walks into the Atlanta VA Medical Center, he doesn’t just see a hospital. He sees the place that once saved his life.
“I can say with no shame in my voice that the VA mental health care saved my life more than 20, 25 years ago,” said the 71-year-old Air Force veteran.
For years, he said, the Atlanta VA functioned as both a health care provider and a community hub. Veterans gathered in waiting rooms and hallways, talking for hours during what he considers to be informal therapy rooted in shared experience.
“You’d see a ton of vets just hanging out talking,” Anderson said. “While they may not have been receiving medical care, it’s the therapy that came about from talking with other vets.”
But over the past year, Anderson said, that sense of stability has frayed.
As a reduction in workforce swept through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs last year, including a loss of more than 1,000 employees in Georgia alone, staff and veterans said the reductions are straining care in metro Atlanta, with particular consequences for Black veterans who rely heavily on the VA system.
“I’ve seen it in several different ways — delays in my medications being received, appointments being canceled,” Anderson said. “So yes, there is a problem.”
Nationwide, the VA has undergone one of the largest workforce reductions in its history. Between January and December 2025, the agency lost nearly 28,000 employees, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Those departures included thousands of nurses, physicians, psychologists, and social workers.
VA officials have described the reductions as the result of normal attrition, early retirements and a federal hiring freeze, according to a press release from the VA. But employees and veterans say the loss of experienced staff has been deeply felt on the ground.
At the Atlanta VA Medical Center, nurses and community members have held protests warning that staffing reductions could undermine care, particularly for Black veterans, who make up a disproportionately large share of the clinic’s patients.
“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,” Florence Uzuegbunam, a nurse practitioner and chief nurse representative with National Nurses United, told Capital B Atlanta at a rally last summer. “We shouldn’t be talking about cutting staff. We should be increasing staffing to make sure our patients are safe.”
Months later, Uzuegbunam’s concerns about staffing cuts materialized as she said that the remaining providers at the VA are stretched far beyond recommended patient limits.
Under Veterans Health Administration guidelines, she said, physicians are typically capped at 1,200 patients, while nurse practitioners and physician assistants are limited to 900. Those caps were lifted because of the staff shortages, she said.
“They removed the maximum,” she said. “Everybody is at 126% capacity of what they’re supposed to have.”
She said that physicians have been resigning because of the tough working conditions and that the VA is having a hard time recruiting new doctors.
At one point, she said, a departing physician left behind 600 to 700 patients at the Atlanta VA’s women’s clinic. Uzuegbunam said she was assigned those patients in addition to her full-time role as a traveling primary care provider.
Uzuegbunam said, overall, the conditions are impacting the quality of care that veterans receive as wait times have increased and more veterans are being pushed out to receive care elsewhere.
The chief of communications for the Atlanta VA Health Care System, Chanel Cook, said there are 5,153 people employed with the Atlanta VA.
“We are currently hiring for a number of open positions and encourage anyone who may be interested in a VA career to apply here,” Cook said in an email to Capital B Atlanta.
Anderson said he worries most about veterans who depend solely on the VA for care.
“By and large, the care I get from the VA, I don’t really have any complaints with — well, yes, I do, but it’s offset by the fact that I have regular insurance,” he said. “A lot of vets rely primarily only on the VA for their health coverage, and it’s more pronounced amongst Black veterans.”
Quentin Pullen, a Fayette County small business owner and Marine Corps and Navy veteran, said he has experienced the strain firsthand. He described administrative disruptions at his local facility.
“They didn’t have anybody at the local VA hospital to get me an ID. Their hours had been cut, and so they were only there a couple days a week,” Pullen said.
Staff uncertainty compounds the problem, he added. A nurse he knows personally “has just been getting the runaround … with the uncertainty of keeping her job.”
Veterans say the strain hits hardest in core services that many Black veterans depend on, including mental health treatment and housing assistance.
According to Common Defense, a progressive veterans group, based on publicly available data from the VA, wait times for mental health services at VA clinics across the country are as high as 210 days for new patients.
“There needs to be policy that our state house, that our federal government should be working on … to provide better services,” Pullen said.
For Anderson, the system he credits with saving his life now feels uncertain. Veterans, he said, were promised care in exchange for their service. “We held up our end,” he said. The question now, he added, is whether the system will hold up its end, too.
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