By SUZANNE GORDON / The American Prospect /
In Washington, D.C., scorching heat waves along the East Coast this summer have raised the temperature and humidity in a notoriously hot and muggy city, with the thermometer hitting 100 degrees or higher more than once in July. This was particularly bad news for federal health care workers and their patients in a 35-acre hospital complex in Northwest Washington, just a few miles away from the Capitol.
The Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) in D.C. is the administrative hub of a regional health care network that employs 2,000 people and cares for 125,000 veterans in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The patient population is predominantly African American. But staff reports reviewed by the Prospect indicate that the hospital does not have enough maintenance staff to fix its air-conditioning system, thus creating threats to patient safety and well-being.
Additionally, due to VA Secretary Doug Collins’s initial revocation of remote work arrangements last year, sources have told the Prospect that the VA has lost radiologists who play a central role in patient care in D.C. and elsewhere. Insiders say that medical specialists and other staff members who remain at their posts are increasingly demoralized as DOGE-like conditions persist at the agency.
“The D.C. VA has been neglected for years through various administrations,” one hospital patient, a former VA official, told the Prospect. “Its physical plant has been allowed to deteriorate, and it has been essentially abandoned by Congress and veterans service organizations [VSOs].” Many VSOs have national offices in D.C.
A second source, also a former VA official, compares the medical center to a patient with a debilitating chronic illness. “The patient has been able to hobble along and cope with his deteriorating condition. Then, suddenly, the patient gets a life stress, and that stress brings on a heart attack.”
VA press secretary Quinn Slaven downplayed the problems at the D.C. VAMC, and said that staffing has increased in recent months.
Aging Infrastructure
Insiders attribute some of the current challenges at the D.C. VAMC to aging infrastructure which has not been fully renovated or rebuilt across several administrations. For example, patients and staff say that the facility’s air-conditioning (HVAC) system has been unable to cope with this summer’s soaring temperatures. Sources have told the Prospect that shortages of key workers have meant fewer staff are available to repair infrastructure.
One veteran patient who served in Iraq visited the facility on July 15, when the thermostat jumped to nearly 100 degrees. When he entered the hospital, he immediately felt the heat in the sunbaked atrium. As he passed by the neurology clinic on the third floor and allergy clinic on the fourth, he said the place was “blazing hot. I don’t know how people can survive in these conditions.” The veteran said he was sweating profusely after spending only 20 minutes in the hospital.
Another visitor at the hospital told a friend that, as they were visiting a colleague, they noticed that the physician’s shirt was soaked through with sweat because the facility was so hot.
“We have to bring in pallets of bottled water to make sure veterans in the waiting room don’t keel over from dehydration,” a doctor told the Prospect. “Operations are canceled because of the heat in the operating rooms.” You can imagine, this doctor added, what it’s like to be waiting months for an operation and then find it had to be rescheduled because of the heat.
Another D.C. VAMC staffer said that the MRI machines sometimes go down because of the heat. This is hardly surprising; MRI machines generate an enormous amount of heat and require well-functioning HVAC systems to maintain temperatures between 65 and 75 degrees, as one industry publication advises. The combination of condensation from the heat and high-voltage electronics is a safety hazard and can lead to damaged machinery.
The Iraq veteran who noted high temperatures in the hospital took snapshots of hoses rigged up to the ceiling, snaking down into large buckets scattered along the corridors. One VA staffer told the Prospect that raw sewage had recently been spewing from a drain in the research building.
In the face of concern about staffing cuts and caps, Collins insisted to lawmakers in May that the VA would maintain “mission-essential jobs like doctors, nurses, claims processors, while phasing out nonessential roles, like interior designers and other things—DEI.” Similarly, last December, former VA press secretary Peter Kasperowicz argued that most unfilled positions at the VA “have not been filled for more than a year, underscoring how they are no longer needed,” while adding that the agency was continuing to hire.
In response to questions for this story, Slaven, the VA’s new press secretary, contradicted his predecessor. “VA has not said that ‘positions that have not been filled are not needed.’ We actively recruit for unfilled positions,” he told the Prospect. According to Slaven, “We did eliminate several unfilled positions last year after consulting with local facilities.” He added that “VA still has thousands of unfilled positions it’s working to fill.”
Asked about the HVAC failures, Slaven said, “D.C. VAMC recently had two HVAC repairs and maintenance staff were able to quickly address both issues.”
The Return-to-Office Impact
In January of 2025, President Donald Trump directed all federal employees working remotely to return to their offices. Following this edict, VA Secretary Doug Collins applied this requirement to VA workers. His return-to-office order even applied to mental health professionals who lacked private office space in VA facilities and were thus forced to discuss confidential patient issues in crowded call center–like conditions.
The impact of the order on radiologists, who read imaging studies produced by X-rays, MRI machines, and CT scanners, was less publicized at the time, but similarly disruptive of essential health care work.
The VA’s across-the-board elimination of remote jobs ignored the realities of radiology work. Radiologists do not typically provide services fully on-site in any one place. As one radiologist who left the VAMC in D.C. explained, “Sometimes I would work in the hospital because I had to be there to do a procedure, for example a biopsy or drainage of an abscess or a barium study. The other days I would read studies from my home office.”
This doctor also reports that the volume of studies that they were expected to read per day began to surge due to short-staffing. “We lost people due to retirement who were not replaced, and I felt like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dam. My workload increased and I was reading a very high volume of studies: about 125 studies a day.” One MRI can include over a thousand images, and a CT scan can include hundreds. So 125 studies translates to thousands of images.
The VA does not pay market-rate salaries to many medical professionals. So it faces a competitive disadvantage in the recruitment of specialists. In the past, it was able to attract new physicians, the former D.C. VAMC radiologist explained, because other benefits of working at the VA compensated for the salary gap. “We signed on to work at the VA because it offered job security and stability, an interesting caseload, and we believed in the mission,” the doctor said.
All of that has changed, amid a hostile work environment and perceived disrespect. The former VA radiologist recalls with particular bitterness the insulting DOGE requirement that federal workers provide a weekly update on what they had accomplished the week before. “I did not go to medical school for this,” the physician said.
The radiologist left the VA and now earns about $200,000 a year more while working less. The doctor also pointed out that gaps in pay have also encouraged radiology techs, radiologic technologists who assist radiologists in the diagnostic imaging process, to leave the VA for employment in the private sector.
As with many of its current policies, the VA eventually recognized the problem and exempted radiologists from the return-to-office order within the last year. But this may have come far too late.
“When you reverse a misguided policy after people have already left, the horse is already out of the barn,” one former VA official told the Prospect.
A Broader Exodus
Asked about the lack of radiology capacity at the D.C. VAMC, Slaven claimed that staffing has improved since the beginning of the year. “D.C. VAMC currently has five diagnostic radiologists with two more onboarding in August, which will put the department well above historical levels,” Slaven said. He added that all frontline staff at the D.C. facility has increased, with hiring in fiscal year 2026 surpassing the previous year “by more than 100 employees.”
But the problem is not limited to D.C. One former high-level regional official told the Prospect that the VA has lost almost 50 percent of its radiologists across the system. A primary care physician in a different region of the country said it now takes days, not hours, to get the results of an imaging study. “When a patient asks us what the results are, we can’t tell them.” The physician said that primary care doctors are not used to reading complicated X-rays and images for diagnostic purposes and cannot fill in the gaps.
A neurologist at a major California medical center told the Prospect, “Over the past three months, the neurology department has been unable to order amyloid PET scans and DaTscans in-house.” The neurologist said that tests done in-house used to come back within two or three weeks. Because this work is now outsourced to the private sector, getting the results can now take two or three months. “We are now forced to practice medicine the way it was practiced 20 years ago before we had the scans, which can make diagnosing difficult,” the neurologist said.
According to the VA’s Slaven, the agency is trying to recruit more staff. But one former VA official worries, nevertheless, that recent personnel policy changes will be a continuing obstacle to hiring new clinicians. “It will likely take years to reverse the damage and restore the reputation of the VA as a good place to work.”
When ProPublica examined internal VA documents, it found that 40 percent of physicians offered jobs at the VA between January and March of 2025 rejected them because they felt positions were not “stable” and they were “uneasy” about the direction of the agency. This quadrupled the rate of the previous year.
The former VA radiologist, who now works at another academic institution and deals with residents, is reluctant to recommend the VA as a place to work. “I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as a place to work for someone of high caliber, someone just coming out of their training, or someone in mid-career who wants to have a longer trajectory. No way.”
Filling a Representational Void
Secretary Collins has been notable for his dismissal of complaints or concerns from blue-state Democrats in Congress—even those serving on the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committees. But he and prior VA leaders have had an easier time in the District of Columbia, because it has a congressional delegate who doesn’t have a vote.
Since 1991, D.C.’s nonvoting delegate has been 89-year-old Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has had highly publicized problems with dementia in recent years. VA patients and staff say her office has long been missing in action as an advocate for VA patients.
One veteran and D.C. resident, who sought help with a complaint about VA education benefits, got none of the assistance routinely provided by congressional staffers specializing in veterans affairs. “They just told me to go and talk to the VA and provided zero constituent services,” he complained.
Early this year, Norton said she will not seek re-election. But until her successor is chosen, “we have no hope and no representation,” said one local VA staffer. (The Prospect called the office of D.C. Councilmember Robert White, the Democrat who is running to replace Norton, to ask about his position on the D.C. VAMC. His office did not respond.)
Pro-VA Democrats in Congress, veterans service organizations, the national AFL-CIO Veterans Council, and VA unions headquartered in D.C. are all that’s left to fill that void. As one D.C. VAMC physician notes, quality care for veterans should not be a partisan issue. “We work in health care facilities,” the doctor said. “The problems we are facing are patient safety hazards. If they are not addressed and soon, someone is going to get hurt.”
Suzanne Gordon is a senior policy analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, as well as a journalist and co-editor of a Cornell University Press series on health care work and policy issues. Her latest book, co-authored with Steve Early and Jasper Craven, is Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs (Duke University Press). She has won a Special Recognition Award from Disabled American Veterans for her writing on veterans’ health issues, much of which has appeared in The American Prospect. Her website is www.suzannegordon.com. More by Suzanne Gordon
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