I come from a generation that volunteered to go into harm’s way — not knowing that when we returned, the systems created for us would reflect neither our oath nor our commitment to this country and to each other.
Nobody made us swear that oath. We took it freely, knowing what was waiting, and it bound us to something larger than ourselves: to the Constitution, to the mission, and above all to the men and women beside us. That commitment did not expire when the deployments ended. Many of us came home carrying trauma, grief, moral injury, and unanswered questions that followed us into civilian life — and the bond that brought us home is the same bond that obligates us to the veterans still struggling to make it all the way back.
Yet when we finally reach the point of asking for help, we walk into systems where almost nobody has carried what we carried, sworn what we swore, or lived inside the culture that formed us. Earlier this month, I published an open letter on VA mental health intake — how the front door of the system loses veterans through distrust before they arrive and intake design after they do. This piece is about who is waiting on the other side of that door. Because who delivers the care matters as much as how the care is designed.
Editor’s note: This is an opinion and advocacy piece written from a combat veteran’s perspective. Every statistic cited here is drawn from public, mainstream sources — including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Office of Personnel Management, the Government Accountability Office, the Council on Social Work Education, the National Association of Social Workers, peer-reviewed research, HUD, and reporting by Pew Research Center and ProPublica — and is linked throughout and listed in the References section at the end. Where we describe incentives, motives, or institutional culture, we offer a reasoned argument and interpretation, not an assertion of hidden facts. We invite anyone — including the VA — to engage these numbers on the merits.
The Number That Should End the Debate
The Department of Veterans Affairs employs more than 480,000 people. According to VA’s own workforce reporting, about 25 percent of them are veterans.
Hold that number against the rest of the federal government. Pew Research Center’s analysis of federal workforce data found that just over half of the Air Force’s 171,657 civilian workers are veterans, as are nearly half of the Army’s 221,222 civilian employees. Even the Department of Transportation — an agency with no veteran-specific mission whatsoever — sits at 34.6 percent. The agency built exclusively to serve veterans has a lower veteran-employee share than the agency that manages highways.
No licensing requirement explains this. The Air Force and Army civilian workforces are full of administrative, management, and program roles — the same kinds of positions that make up much of the VA — and they still run at double the VA’s rate. This is not a supply problem. It is a priority problem. And nowhere does it cost more than in mental health care, where the person across the desk holds the power to label, diagnose, and shape the future of the veteran sitting in front of them.
Who Actually Makes Up the Veteran Population?
As of 2023, about 15.8 million Americans identified as veterans, roughly 6.1 percent of the adult population. Around 1.7 million of those veterans are women, meaning nearly 89 percent of the veteran population is male. Federal statistics show the veteran population is still majority White and non-Hispanic — roughly three-quarters of veterans fall into that category.
Let me be clear about why these numbers matter. They are not a template for who clinicians should be. They describe who the patient population is — the cultural context any workforce serving veterans must actually understand. Most potential clients for veteran-focused mental health services are people who volunteered for service, often in combat or high-risk roles, and who were formed by a culture built on service, sacrifice, and moral responsibility — a culture often very different from the one that produces the helping professions. And the 1.7 million women who served carry the same oath, the same wounds, and walk into the same civilian-staffed system. They are not an aside to this argument. They are in the formation.
A Profession That Doesn’t Reflect the Warriors It Serves
The licensed social work workforce is large and powerful. A 2024 national workforce study estimated it at about 463,000 people, with nearly 59 percent in clinical roles — the clinicians providing therapy, writing diagnoses, and guiding treatment plans. The Department of Veterans Affairs is the single largest employer of social workers in the country, with more than 18,000 on staff across its medical centers and clinics.
Here is what matters in that workforce data — and what does not. The mismatch between this profession and the veterans it serves has nothing to do with gender, race, or background in the demographic sense. A woman who deployed, a medic who held a dying friend, a nurse who served in a combat hospital — all carry the credential that counts. The gap is this: the clinical pipeline shows almost no trace of military service at all, in anyone, of any description. The distance between clinician and veteran is measured in experience — the oath taken, the culture lived, the weight carried — and by that measure, the profession is nearly empty of us. The people with the authority to diagnose and treat veterans overwhelmingly arrive through academic and professional pathways that never intersect with military life.
This mismatch is not an abstraction. It shows up in outcomes. A 2019 study published in Psychiatry Research — funded by the VA and the Department of Defense — followed 265,566 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with PTSD across 130 VA facilities over 15 years. The findings should stop every policymaker cold: 77.2 percent never received a full evidence-based treatment protocol. Only 9.1 percent completed one. And the veterans who did finish took an average of three years from their first mental health visit to get there.
Three years. That is how long it takes, on average, for a veteran to build enough trust in the system to do the hardest work of their life. The study’s own authors observed that veterans “may need to gain trust in providers or in the overall system prior to engaging” in evidence-based treatment. Prior therapy — an established relationship — was one of the strongest predictors of completion. Trust is not a soft precondition. It is a measurable clinical variable. And a system staffed 75 percent by people who never served is structurally positioned to spend those three years earning what a veteran-to-veteran relationship could establish in the first conversation.
And before anyone reaches for the oldest excuse in the building — that veterans are simply a difficult population, avoidant and hard to retain — the Department of Defense’s own researchers have already closed that door. A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, conducted by the DoD Psychological Health Center of Excellence, examined 26 randomized controlled trials with nearly 3,000 active duty and veteran participants. Its finding: military and veteran dropout rates in those trials were only slightly higher than civilian rates. When the conditions are right — structured support, engaged providers, careful follow-up — veterans stay in treatment at essentially normal rates. The population is not the problem.
Yet in routine VA outpatient care, published dropout rates run as high as 38.5 percent — roughly one and a half times what those same treatments produce in controlled settings. Same veterans. Same therapies. The only variable that changed is the delivery environment. That gap belongs to the system, not the patient. And the same review found that trauma-focused protocols — the VA’s designated first-line treatments, which require a veteran to narrate their worst experiences — carry a 60 percent higher dropout risk than approaches that do not demand immediate disclosure. The system’s own preferred tools are the ones most dependent on the trust its workforce is least equipped to build.
Read those numbers again in that light. The catastrophe was never primarily dropout. Of 265,566 veterans with PTSD in VA care, 77.2 percent never received a full evidence-based protocol at all. The loss happens before treatment even begins — at initiation, at intake, at the front door. Even if veterans dropped out at rates identical to civilians, the VA’s outcomes would still collapse, because the system fails to get veterans started in the first place. Every link in that chain — initiation, trust, disclosure, retention — points at delivery and workforce. None of it points at the veteran.
The Warrior Was Built, Not Broken
Warriors are trained to carry our own rucksacks. In Special Operations, you do not ask for help — you solve the problem, absorb the strain, and keep moving. You are trained to compartmentalize, to contain, to function under conditions that would break an unprepared mind. That is not a character flaw. That is the hardwiring that kept us and the people beside us alive.
In 2016, I published a criminology master’s thesis examining PTSD stigma and de-escalation — work that documented a pattern that has only grown more visible since: the clinical system’s tendency to pathologize the traits that made effective warfighters, rather than understand them. When a clinical model built on vulnerability language and emotional disclosure meets a veteran trained for years to contain rather than express, the failure that follows gets coded as the veteran’s resistance. It is not resistance. It is a clinical blind spot — and veterans pay for it.
The double standard extends across trauma survivors broadly. We do not tell survivors of other traumas that the coping mechanisms that got them through were disorders. But the warrior’s discipline, vigilance, and self-reliance — the very adaptations that kept us alive — are routinely written up as symptoms to be corrected. And here is the question that should haunt every treatment program in the country: how do you heal someone you have labeled a threat — and why would we trust you to try?
I want to be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying civilian clinicians are incapable or uncommitted. Many are dedicated professionals, and veterans owe genuine gratitude to every civilian who shows up for us. But gratitude is not the same as representation. A clinical workforce is incomplete without practitioners who understand why a specific population was trained to respond the way it does. The distinction between a broken veteran and a veteran formed by a specific culture is not a nuance. It is the diagnosis.
And this is where a veteran clinician changes the equation. A veteran clinician does not need the rucksack explained. They can take the same evidence-based tools and work with the training instead of against it — meeting discipline with discipline, rather than asking a warrior to unlearn what kept them alive before the healing can start.
The Field Already Set the Standard — and Never Met It for Us
Here is the part that should end any argument that this is merely my opinion. The profession has already declared, in its own official standards, that military and veteran culture is a distinct competency domain requiring specialized training. This is not my framing. It is theirs.
In 2012, the National Association of Social Workers published its Standards for Social Work Practice with Service Members, Veterans, and Their Families — an entire standards document naming veteran cultural competence as a specific professional obligation, covering the skills, knowledge, values, and sensitivities a social worker needs to serve this population effectively. The Council on Social Work Education, the sole accrediting body for social work programs in the country, publishes a Specialized Practice Curricular Guide for Military and Veteran Social Work for exactly this reason. And CSWE’s 2022 accreditation standards require every graduate to demonstrate cultural competence in practice — not to absorb it in a lecture, but to demonstrate it. The field does not treat cultural competence as optional. It treats it as a condition of accreditation.
So the standard exists. The obligation is named. The curriculum is written. And here is the field’s own verdict on whether it is being met: the research underlying those very standards found that few civilian providers are prepared to serve military members, veterans, and their families. The profession set the bar, wrote the guide, and then documented that most of its practitioners do not clear it — for the one population an entire federal health system exists to treat.
There is a deeper point buried in the field’s own doctrine. When NASW updated its cultural-competence framework, it moved toward the concept of cultural humility — the recognized stance that a practitioner approaches a culture they do not belong to with humility, precisely because full mastery from the outside is not something a curriculum can confer. That is the field itself conceding the limit. Classroom study can teach a clinician about a culture. It cannot manufacture the lived membership that competence, at its highest level, requires. And for a culture forged in experiences that have no civilian equivalent — the oath, the deployments, the weight carried and the friends lost — the distance between having studied us and having stood where we stood is a distance no syllabus was ever built to close.
This reframes the entire problem, and it does so without impugning a single clinician. The gap is not that civilian providers are unwilling or unfit. Many pursued the military competency training on their own initiative and serve veterans with real skill. The gap is structural: the pipeline never required this competency of everyone it placed in front of veterans, and then it seated under-prepared clinicians at the highest-stakes moment in the whole process — first contact, when trust is won or lost and disclosure either happens or does not — and coded the resulting disconnect as the veteran’s noncompliance. The clinician was not given what the standard demands. The veteran was blamed for the shortfall. And the training to fix it has been sitting on the shelf, funded and written, the entire time.
A veteran does not need every clinician to be a veteran — that is precisely why peer support and veteran-to-veteran rapport are part of the fix rather than a demand that the whole workforce enlist. But a veteran is owed a system that meets its own published standard. And a clinician is owed the training that standard requires and the pipeline never guaranteed. Both are being failed by the same omission.
What the DEI Years Cost — and What We Still Don’t Know
There is a harder conversation inside this one, and I intend to have it honestly rather than loudly.
Start with what we lived. Our teams were made up of every race and creed in this country. The military takes Americans from every background, drops them into chaotic environments where they must function as one organism, and forges unity the only way it can actually be forged — through a shared oath and shared risk. It never mattered who stood beside you until it mattered what they would do when things went bad. Brothers and sisters in arms judge each other by character and conduct — nothing else. We saw teammates. We saw fellow Americans who also volunteered for their country. That is a commitment only a few make — fewer than one percent of Americans — and it was the only membership criterion that ever counted.
So understand how it landed when veterans watched institutions — including the one built to serve us — adopt frameworks that sort people back into categories. For several years, the VA, like much of the federal government, operated formal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. That is documented fact, not interpretation: when the current administration ended those programs in January 2025, the VA itself announced it was stopping more than $14 million in DEI spending — nearly 60 employees whose sole function was DEI activity, plus over $6 million in consulting contracts. Whatever one believes about the intent of those programs, this much is measurable: they existed, they shaped hiring and workplace culture during their operation, and the department that ran them has now repudiated them.
Here is the veteran’s perspective, offered plainly as perspective. We did not learn integration from a training module. We lived it — and it worked because commitment was the axis, not category. You do not teach the most genuinely integrated institution in American life about inclusion by re-dividing its people into boxes.
And here is what makes it a uniquely bitter irony at the VA: the agency already possessed the most inclusive category in America. “Veteran” contains every race, creed, gender, and background in this country — a status earned by oath, not assigned by birth. An agency built for veterans had, sitting in its own name, the one unifying identity that already accomplishes what those frameworks claimed to want. It chose demographic sorting instead. For many of us, that raised an unavoidable question: has the institution charged with my care already judged me by my category before I said a word?
I am glad the VA ended those programs. It was the right call, and credit belongs where it is due. But ending a policy does not automatically repair the trust it cost — and here is what troubles me more than the policy itself: no one outside the VA has ever independently examined what those years actually did. The Government Accountability Office reviewed VA’s equal-opportunity outcomes covering fiscal years through 2021 — before the DEI-era window — and no independent body has isolated the 2021 to 2024 period, and none has ever cross-tabulated VA hiring, promotion, and workforce outcomes by veteran status at all. The single question that matters most to the population this agency exists to serve has never been asked by anyone the agency doesn’t control.
I am not asserting what such a review would find. I am asserting that veterans are owed the review. The VA’s satisfaction data deserves its own examination, and that is a conversation I intend to have in full very soon.
When PTSD Becomes a Silencing Tool
There is a quieter injury that does not show up in workforce studies, but many veterans who have tried to speak up inside broken systems describe it the same way. Once an institution knows a veteran carries PTSD, that diagnosis can become a tool. Disagreement gets relabeled as “symptoms.” Legitimate concern gets reframed as “dysregulation.” A veteran who raises a hard, factual objection — about waste, about misconduct, about failure — can be quietly recast as “reactive,” “rigid,” or “unwell,” so the conversation shifts from what they reported to whether they are stable enough to be taken seriously.
This is not a clinical assessment. It is a power move. Institutions that loudly call themselves “trauma-informed” can, in practice, mean: we decide what is safe to say, and if you push back, we call it a trauma response. Words like “difficulty with authority” or “limited insight” can be written into a file and follow a veteran for years, quietly discrediting their warnings before anyone has to engage them on the merits.
There is a second, related tactic: dismissing a veteran’s concerns because they lack the formal credential. Tell the truth without the right letters after your name, and the response is not “are they right?” but “what would they know?” That is precisely why representation matters — and why the answer to both tactics is the same. When the veteran holds the license, sits on the board, and supervises the interns, the same voice can no longer be diminished. We are not claiming these tactics operate in every case. We are saying they happen often enough that veterans recognize the pattern — and it deserves to be named.
A Justification, Not a Priority
Here is the part that should make every veteran angry. We are not just underserved by these systems — we are useful to them. Our wounds, our suicides, our homelessness, and our trauma have become the moral currency that funds an entire apparatus of agencies, programs, academic departments, and contracts. The veteran is the reason the budget exists. The veteran is rarely the one who sees the return on it.
Consider the structure. When the numbers improve, leadership takes the credit. When the numbers stay bad, that is used to argue for larger budgets. Either way, the institution wins. The question is whether the veteran does. In January 2024, federal data counted 32,882 veterans homeless on a single night — nearly 14,000 of them unsheltered. Meanwhile, reporting by ProPublica found the VA losing roughly 700 social workers and 500 psychologists and psychiatrists in a single recent stretch, even as demand climbs. The institution measures itself by activity — programs funded, veterans enrolled, appointments scheduled. The veteran measures it by whether anyone in the building understands them. Those are not the same metric, and the gap between them is where trust goes to die.
This is opinion grounded in public data, and it is a fair question to ask out loud: when an institution’s funding depends on a population staying in crisis, what is its real incentive to end the crisis? We are not saying clinicians act in bad faith — many are dedicated people. We are saying the structure itself rewards managing veterans, not finishing the job for them. That is a design problem. And design problems do not fix themselves from the inside when the people inside all came through the same pipeline.
The Fix Already Exists — Pointed at the Wrong Target
Now for the part critics will not expect: the solution requires no new bureaucracy, no displacement of anyone currently serving, and no invention the VA has not already tested on itself. It comes in three tiers — one for today, one that builds a ladder, and one that never ends.
Today: expand the peer support corps. The VA already employs veteran peer support specialists — by definition, veterans — and the credential takes months, not years. The job series exists. The hiring authority exists. Every peer support specialist hired raises veteran representation inside the building immediately, and puts a veteran at the exact point where the system loses the most people: the front door, where trust is either established or forfeited. No new law is required to do more of this. It is the single fastest lever the VA holds, and the fact that it remains under-pulled while veterans disengage at the front door is a choice.
The ladder: a veteran scholarship with a built-in scouting pipeline. The VA already operates the Health Professions Scholarship Program. HPSP awards scholarships to students in health care disciplines in exchange for a service obligation at VA facilities after graduation — with a liquidated-damages clawback for anyone who takes the money and fails to deliver. The model works. The infrastructure exists. The precedent is internal.
What does not exist is a version with veteran preference built in at scale. Federal regulation already contains the seed: under 38 CFR § 17.605, when HPSP has more equally qualified applicants than awards, VA must select veterans first. The preference principle is already law — but only as a tie-breaker. And the VA already operates an entirely veteran-specific scholarship, the Veterans Healing Veterans Medical Access and Scholarship Program, though it is small and limited to medical school. The precedent is not theoretical. It is codified. What remains is to scale it.
That is the bill: a standalone act — deliberately standalone, not buried in a reconciliation package where it can be traded away — establishing a VA scholarship for veterans entering mental health and nursing pathways, at both the bachelor’s and master’s level, with qualification screening on the front end and the same clawback on the back end. Two design requirements are non-negotiable. First, no eligibility window tied to separation date. Programs that quietly restrict eligibility to the first few years after service exclude the exact veterans this scholarship exists to reach — because most veterans do not discover this representation gap until years after they take off the uniform, often after the GI Bill is already spent. A veteran who separated fifteen years ago and answers this call has lost none of the oath. Second, it does not touch existing programs like VR&E and does not take a seat from anyone. It builds a second door — and leaves that door open for as long as the veteran lives.
Here is where the two tiers connect into something stronger than either alone. The peer support corps is the scholarship’s natural feeder — and its proving ground. A veteran hired as a peer support specialist today is inside the building, doing the trust-building work, learning where the clinical system fails veterans firsthand. Two years later, that specialist is not a stranger submitting an application. They are a known quantity — a proven performer the VA has watched work with veterans in crisis, with a documented track record inside the exact environment they would return to as a clinician. That is how the military has always built its best people: assess, select, and invest in demonstrated performers. The VA would simply be adopting the talent model of the institution its patients came from. It also makes these the lowest-risk scholarship dollars in government — the VA funds people it has already evaluated on the job, scholarship attrition drops, and service-obligation completion rises. Peer support remains a full career in its own right for those who choose to stay; the ladder is there for those who choose to climb. Either way, veterans are in the building — and the veteran chooses.
The supply side is already proven. Bridge programs at Florida International University, Cal State San Marcos, Texas Tech, and others across the country already convert military medics and corpsmen into licensed nurses — some in as little as a year — precisely because those veterans arrive with clinical experience most students spend years accumulating. Those programs prove the pathway works. What they do not do is coordinate at scale, fund the veteran whose benefits are exhausted, or route a single graduate back into a VA facility. They develop the supply without directing it toward the mission. The scholarship closes that loop.
And let me answer the predictable objections now, so no one has to raise them later.
“Veterans already get hiring preference.” Preference is downstream. It helps the veteran who already holds the credential reach the front of the line. It does nothing for the veteran who never entered the pipeline because nobody funded the pathway — and it has produced a VA that is 25 percent veteran while its sister agencies sit at 50. If preference alone worked, the numbers would say so. They say the opposite.
“Quality and competency come first.” Agreed — which is why the scholarship screens applicants, scouts them from a workforce the VA has already observed, and claws back funds from anyone who fails to perform. But understand what lived experience is in this context: it is a clinical competency. The research says trust predicts treatment completion, and shared experience builds trust faster than any technique taught in a classroom. And representation does not stop at the clinic door — veteran program directors, administrators, and peer support leaders do not require clinical licenses at all. Every corner of the VA should be filled with veterans who want to serve their own.
“The real problem is funding.” The VA’s budget is congressionally approved annually, and Congress has historically funded what the VA asks for. The question is not whether the money exists. The question is who at the VA is making the ask — and why veteran representation in its own workforce has never been among its stated priorities. The tools, the precedent, and the personnel are in place. The will to request it is the only variable.
“This is self-promotion.” Then let me put every card on the table. I am 41 years old, and this fall I begin a Master of Social Work program. I am also completing my certification as a peer support specialist. The VA is the largest employer of clinical social workers in the United States — the single biggest hiring agency in the exact profession I am entering — and peer support expansion is one of the very fixes I am proposing. My company is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business, and the VA is one of the largest contracting customers a business like mine could ever have. So understand what this article costs. I am publicly challenging the hiring practices, the culture, and the accountability of my new profession’s largest employer and my company’s most natural customer — at the same time, in writing, under my own name. And still: as the VA operates today, I will not apply. Not for a clinical role, not for a peer support role, not for any role. I am not writing this to open doors for myself. I am writing it because the oath did not come with an exit clause — and the veterans this system is losing are the ones I swore it with.
Money Funds the Pipeline. It Does Not Buy Trust.
Here is what the scholarship and the hiring surge alone will not fix: the culture waiting on the other side of them.
If the VA’s clinical culture continues to frame warrior identity as pathology, veteran practitioners who enter the system will face a choice — adapt to that culture or leave it. A pipeline that feeds veterans into an environment that repels them is a treadmill, not a solution. The qualified veteran clinicians who exist today and refuse to enter are not confused about their options. They are reading the culture correctly and declining it. That is the self-reinforcing loop: civilian-dominated culture repels veteran practitioners, whose absence keeps the culture civilian-dominated.
So the fix is three-tiered, and every tier is necessary. Hire veterans into the building today. Fund the ladder that turns proven peer specialists into tomorrow’s clinicians. And reform the culture — how the institution trains its providers, evaluates its understanding of veteran identity, and measures whether it is building the trust it claims to pursue. And the ladder accelerates the culture work in a way nothing else can: every peer specialist who climbs to a clinical license becomes a supervisor who understands both floors of the building — lived experience and clinical authority in the same person. That is who changes an institution from the inside.
And to the VA, this must be said plainly: effort itself builds trust. Veterans do not demand perfection — we have led people in environments where perfection does not exist. What we recognize, and what we respect, is genuine effort. An institution that visibly fights for veteran representation earns trust even before the numbers move. An institution that studies the problem, funds another survey of itself, and changes nothing loses trust it may never recover. There is no downside to trying. There is only a downside to the inaction the VA keeps choosing.
Take the Chair
If you are a veteran reading this and you have thought — even briefly — about going into mental health, social work, nursing, or counseling, hear this clearly:
The system was not designed for you. Go through it anyway.
Take the classes. Get the degree. Grind through the supervised hours. Pass the exams on their terms — then practice on your terms, guided by your oath and your conscience. Every veteran who makes it through licensure is one more voice that cannot be dismissed as uninformed. One more clinician who can sit across from another veteran and understand the wound without a word of explanation. One more guardian at the door.
We fought for this country once in uniform. Earning the license and taking the chair is another way to keep fighting — this time for the minds, families, and futures of those who stood beside us.
Because we have learned it the hard way: if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.
A Conditional Offer
I have been harder on this institution than some readers may be comfortable with. I want to be equally clear about what I am extending.
The VA has not earned our trust. But we are not asking it to surrender — we are asking it to move. The peer support corps can grow tomorrow morning. The scholarship model already exists inside its own walls. The bridge programs already prove the pathway. Nothing in this article requires the VA to invent anything. It requires the VA to want it — and to ask Congress for what Congress has historically been willing to give.
Wipe the slate clean going forward: that is the offer. Hire us. Fund the ladder. Reform the culture. Put veterans in every room where decisions about veterans are made. Do that, and I will be the first to say so, publicly and by name.
I come from a generation that volunteered. Nobody made us swear that oath — and nobody released us from it. We took it knowing it had no expiration date, and it binds us still: to this country, and to each other. That is why we will not walk away from the veterans this system is losing, and it is why we will not stop until the people serving veterans understand what that oath weighs.
The VA can meet us at the door, or it can watch us build the door ourselves.
Either way — we are coming, and we are bringing our own.
This article is part of an ongoing series on veteran care — following pieces on veteran life insurance, peer support, and an open letter on VA mental health intake. The next installment asks a harder question: whether an institution can be trusted to measure its own performance — and what veterans are owed when it cannot. That piece publishes August 14.
References
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- Pew Research Center. “What we know about veterans who work for the federal government.” April 10, 2025 (veteran share of Air Force, Army, and VA civilian workforces, from OPM FedScope data). pewresearch.org
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- Edwards-Stewart, A., Smolenski, D.J., Bush, N.E., Cyr, B.-A., Beech, E.H., Skopp, N.A., & Belsher, B.E. (2021). “Posttraumatic stress disorder treatment dropout among military and veteran populations: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” Journal of Traumatic Stress, 34(4), 808–818. doi.org/10.1002/jts.22653
- Kehle-Forbes, S.M., Meis, L.A., Spoont, M.R., & Polusny, M.A. (2016). “Treatment initiation and dropout from prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy in a VA outpatient clinic.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 8(1), 107–114. doi.org/10.1037/tra0000065
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “VA ends DEI, stops millions in spending on DEI.” January 27, 2025. news.va.gov
- U.S. Government Accountability Office. “VA Equal Employment Opportunity: Increased Attention Needed to Improve Program Effectiveness.” GAO-23-105429 (workforce representation and career-outcome analysis, FY2000–2021). gao.gov
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. VA Health Professional Scholarship Program (HPSP) — program structure, service obligation, and eligibility. vacareers.va.gov
- Florida International University. Veterans Medic to BSN Program. catalog.fiu.edu
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- Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. Veteran to BSN Track. ttuhsc.edu
- RegisteredNursing.org. “Corpsman/Medic to Nurse Programs” (national overview of military-to-RN bridge programs). registerednursing.org
- VA Homeless Programs. Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, January 2024 (veteran homelessness totals). va.gov/homeless
- ProPublica. Reporting on VA mental health staffing losses (social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists). propublica.org
- RAND Corporation. Invisible Wounds of War (MG-720). rand.org