Joel Jacobs, Propublica

As Jason Beaman recounts his long slog searching for mental health therapy last year, he sounds defeated.

The first therapist assigned to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs told him at their initial meeting that she was leaving the agency. A few months later, his second therapist told him she was also leaving. An appointment with a third counselor was canceled with no explanation.

These were huge setbacks for the 54-year-old veteran of the Navy and Army Reserve. Nearly a decade ago, a spiral of depression and anxiety left him homeless and living on the streets of Spokane, Washington. A VA social worker threw him a lifeline, helping him apply for benefits, find housing and get into therapy.

He still needs mental health care, he and his physician say. But bouncing from therapist to therapist has left him exhausted.

“I just quit. I don’t want to mess with the therapist anymore,” Beaman said. He spends much of his time now alone playing video games or walking with his dogs.

After President Donald Trump returned to office last year, his administration announced plans to overhaul the VA, one of the largest health care systems in the country, to deliver “the highest quality care.”

“This administration is finally going to give the veterans what they want,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said last March, as the department announced tens of thousands of job cuts.

But in interview after interview, veterans across the country told ProPublica that one year into the second Trump administration, it’s become more difficult to get treatment, as hundreds of therapists and social workers have left the VA. Many of them have not been replaced.

While front-line mental health care workers were largely exempted from the job cuts, hundreds chose to leave anyway. Some cited disagreements with new administration policies, including several targeting the LGBTQ+ community, while others, facing diminished ranks, said they simply could no longer provide proper care.

In January, the department had around 500 fewer psychologists and psychiatrists than it had at the same time last year, ProPublica found.

Although the losses represent a relatively small number — about 4% of psychologists and 6% of psychiatrists — they are notable for an agency that has long struggled with inadequate mental health staffing. For years, administrators have listed psychologists in particular among their most “severe staffing shortages.”

Mental health is not the only area where the VA has lost medical staff. The agency has eliminated more than 14,000 vacant health care positions across the system, according to data first reported by The New York Times.

Data published by the VA going back to May 2023 shows that the agency was adding psychologists every quarter until Trump’s return to the White House. Then, the trend flipped, with departures outpacing hires in all four quarters of last year.

Compounding the losses, the agency’s cohort of social workers, some of whom are licensed therapists who provide mental health counseling, declined by nearly 700 staffers over the year.

To better understand the departures and their impact on veterans’ care, ProPublica interviewed dozens of former and current VA staffers as well as patients.

ProPublica also examined a previously unreported internal employee exit survey, which included hundreds of responses from mental health care workers.

“Mental Health is understaffed, burned out, and there is not enough mental health care for the Veterans who need the services,” wrote one New York-based former employee, according to the records.

“Support is no longer there to provide ethical and good care for these Veterans,” wrote a second, based in Indiana. “Scheduling issues are incredibly high due to poor staff hiring and retainment.”

Yet another wrote that the number of new patients seeking help at their Kansas facility was far too high, making it “unethical to accept more veterans in our clinics.”

Many of those vacated positions have gone unfilled due to a yearlong hiring freeze, which was only lifted in January.

Echoing the exit survey, many who remain on staff describe crushing workloads as they struggle to fill the gaps. Those reached by ProPublica, who agreed to speak only under the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that as staffing losses mount, they’ve seen their patient loads increase, while administrators shorten their appointments and pack more and more clients into group therapy sessions.

“It was always bad,” said one VA psychologist, referring to staffing at a facility in Arizona. “And now it’s at a breaking point.”

The therapist described being stretched so thin that schedulers replaced some one-on-one sessions with online group sessions that included as many as 35 veterans. The therapist said despite that they were still overloaded with individual sessions and had to limit each one to as little as 16 minutes.

The VA declined ProPublica’s request to interview an official familiar with its mental health programs. In an email, VA spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz accused ProPublica of attempting to mislead the public by “cherry picking issues that are limited to a handful of sites and in many cases were worse under the Biden Administration.”

He argued that the agency’s performance around mental health has improved since Trump took office, citing more than 15.5 million direct mental health care appointments in the most recent fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025), a 4% increase from the previous fiscal year. He did not say whether those additional appointments were for individual therapy. Kasperowicz also noted that the administration has opened 25 new health care clinics.

After ProPublica shared its findings and the names of veterans who would appear in this story, the agency reached out to several to inquire about their care and offer help. The veterans told ProPublica they remained skeptical that the VA would consistently respond to their mental health needs.

As the ranks of mental health care providers at the VA have shrunk, the department has proposed shifting billions of dollars into community care, a program in which veterans obtain health care via private physicians and other providers. But the program has been stretched thin amid the loss of administrative staff and ongoing issues finding private therapists, ProPublica found, with veterans encountering longer delays as they seek help.

In December, patients waited an average of around 25 days just to receive a confirmed appointment date, nearly four times the VA’s stated goal for scheduling community care.

Collins has disputed assertions that there’s a systemwide problem with access to mental health care. “And if you need emergency care, or are in a crisis situation, you have immediate care,” he told a Senate committee in January.

He said the VA’s average wait time for new patients seeking mental health care appointments was less than 20 days, the number it has set as its goal. But other VA officials have acknowledged problems with access.

“There are wait times at some facilities that are beyond what our expectations and standards would be,” Dr. Ilse Wiechers, assistant undersecretary for health for patient care services, told senators at a separate hearing.

ProPublica’s analysis found that wait times fluctuate dramatically, and fast access to care can depend on location. For example, the small clinic near Beaman’s home in rural Nebraska, with its comparatively small staff, saw appointment wait times for new mental health clients climb as high as 60 days in December and drop to 20 days in February, according to the VA figures.

But a closer look at the entire VA system reveals that a large number of facilities are struggling. In early February, more than half of its hospitals and clinics reported one-on-one mental health appointment wait times for new patients that were longer, and in some cases far longer, than the VA’s 20-day goal, according to a ProPublica analysis of data published on the agency’s website.

In late December, Beaman said he received an email from the VA saying he’d been approved for additional therapy. He was able to meet with a therapist in January — after about six months of waiting and going more than a year without a session. In the interim, he said, he relied on prescription medications, video games and his therapy dogs to keep him steady. Still, his anxiety worsened, he said, and now he often feels so uncomfortable around others that he rarely leaves his home except to walk his dogs while wearing headphones so no one speaks to him.

Kasperowicz, the VA spokesperson, wrote in his email to ProPublica that Beaman had “more than a dozen mental health visits at VA between late 2024 to mid-2025 through the Cheyenne VA clinic” in Wyoming, which is about an hour-and-a-half trip for Beaman. Kasperowicz declined, however, to say whether those appointments involved the one-on-one mental health counseling Beaman had requested. Beaman said he only had two sessions for one-on-one therapy in 2025 — meetings that were truncated because of the therapists’ impending departures.

Kasperowicz also said that one of Beaman’s appointments didn’t occur because he had “moved.” Beaman, however, said he has lived at only one address in Nebraska.

Experts warn that the exodus of mental health care providers from the VA has hurt the agency’s ability to meet veterans’ unique needs.

“VA psychologists are best in class,” said Russell Lemle, former chief psychologist for the San Francisco VA Health Care System and a senior policy analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. “They have research and training and decades-long experience” working with veterans.

“When you lose them, the veterans are the ones who pay the price,” he said.

“It Could Mean Life or Death”

Michelle Phillips, 56, a Navy veteran from Ohio, saw her therapist in remote sessions once a week for two years for her PTSD. Then, in December, Phillips’ therapist told her that she was quitting the VA because of Trump’s policies.

The change, Phillips said, “could mean life or death.”

Years of depression have led Phillips to isolate. Inside her small home about an hour outside of Columbus, the city where she enlisted in 1988, the walls are filled with reminders of brighter times — photos of family members and military paraphernalia from her time in the service. Her only real company is an aging dog, and she almost never leaves.

Her virtual therapy sessions were “the only contact that I had coming in my home to talk to me every week,” she said. “And I would sit and just wait for that appointment.”

Phillips said the counselor requested that the VA continue her one-on-one remote counseling with a new therapist — which totaled about four hours per month. The agency initially offered her virtual group therapy, an option that her previous therapist dismissed as inappropriate. In the third week of January, the VA told Phillips she could have an appointment for one-on-one sessions in March. She later declined the appointment because she didn’t want to face starting over with a new therapist.

Phillips, who is disabled and doesn’t work, said she will try to pay for one-on-one therapy out of pocket with the same therapist who left the VA but will likely only be able to afford one, possibly two, sessions a month.

James Jones said his close connection to his VA therapist, who was trained in combat trauma, helped him control his PTSD-fueled episodes of anger and alcohol abuse. Now the 54-year-old Gulf War veteran, who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, has seen his care cut in half after his therapist told him colleagues had quit and he had to pick up the load.

His sessions went from an hour every week to half an hour every two weeks. “I can tell it’s rushed,” said Jones, a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service. “I’m not able to work through something.”

Others have found it difficult to establish care in the first place.

Last summer, George Retes, 26, who left the Army in 2022 after serving for four years, was driving to work in Camarillo, California, when he was suddenly caught between immigration agents and protesters. Retes said the agents broke his car window, pepper-sprayed him and detained him for days. The incident, which ProPublica detailed last fall, left him shaken and exacerbated the PTSD that was first sparked after he faced missile attacks in Iraq, Retes said. (The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to ProPublica’s questions about Retes.)

Following his release, Retes found himself withdrawing from the world. “I wasn’t texting anyone or talking to anyone,” he said. “Not even my kids.”

A few weeks after being arrested, Retes sought help from the VA clinic in Ventura, California, where staffers told him they’d be in touch for an appointment. But Retes said he never heard back, even after he called to follow up. His incident with Immigration and Customs Enforcement was in July. Retes is still waiting.

According to data on the VA’s website, new patients seeking individual therapy at the Ventura clinic had to wait an average of two and a half months in early February.

The VA said it could not discuss Jones’ or Retes’ accounts because the veterans declined to waive their privacy rights.

Strains on the System

The VA overhaul has also taken a toll on mental health providers, many of whom quit after spending years at the agency.

Natalie McCarthy worked as a social worker and mental health therapist for a decade before quitting the VA in May. Like many others working in mental health, she did all of her work remotely; from her Ohio home she saw vets mostly from the Washington, D.C., area.

But McCarthy and her colleagues faced pressure to return to agency offices after the VA issued new restrictions on telehealth workers. She was uneasy about the prospect of having to conduct sessions in makeshift spaces like conference rooms filled with other counselors — a situation that raised widespread ethical concerns over the legally mandated privacy for medical conversations.

Complicating matters, McCarthy said, were Trump’s orders eliminating diversity and equity initiatives within the federal government. She said she began to worry that therapists would no longer be able to discuss the subject of race with their patients or document patients’ thoughts on the topic in their session notes. So she quit.

“I was angry that veterans were in that position,” said McCarthy, who started her own practice. “I was angry that I was in that position. It just felt like an unnecessary thing to have to navigate.”

Psychologist Mary Brinkmeyer found herself in a similar situation. She started at a VA facility in metropolitan Norfolk, Virginia, in 2022 after seeing a posting for an LGBTQ+ care coordinator, which oversees support programs for LGBTQ+ veterans and helps navigate their care. She quit last February after her superiors began enforcing Trump’s anti-diversity orders.

Brinkmeyer said she was told to stop conducting training for physicians and other staff on best practices for caring for LGBTQ+ patients. Then, she said, staff members were ordered to remove all LGBTQ+ paraphernalia from the facility such as rainbow flags, identity-affirming literature and program brochures. Also, an edict was issued directing people to use the bathroom of their gender assigned at birth, Brinkmeyer said.

That’s when the VA stopped feeling like a welcoming place. “There was a failure of empathy,” she said.

The VA did not respond directly to either Brinkmeyer’s or McCarthy’s accounts of how the administration’s policies had impacted the quality of mental health care.

Much like those seeking mental health care directly from the VA, veterans referred to community care are also struggling to secure appointments.

Gwyn Bourlakov, 58, enlisted in the Army National Guard in 1998 and over the following 21 years she was awarded a Bronze Star for her service in the invasion of Iraq, climbed the ranks to become a major and won a Fulbright scholarship to study Russian history.

Today, after a series of professional setbacks, Bourlakov works as a museum security guard. Lingering PTSD from her time in the service, coupled with deep bouts of depression over her current circumstances, have kept her seeking the VA’s help despite long-standing frustrations with its services.

After she began looking for a new therapist last year following a move to Colorado, officials at her local VA clinic in Golden said at her intake appointment that its in-house providers were swamped and could not see new patients for at least six months.

She asked if she could get help through community care, but staffers told her that the system was so overwhelmed that it would be a “nightmare,” she recalled. Veterans living in eastern Colorado waited 57 days on average to get a community care appointment scheduled in December, VA figures show.

Bourlakov said she tried to get help through a separate VA clinic, but when her phone calls went unanswered, she finally gave up.

“I don’t have time for all of that,” she explained. “It’s just like shouting into the wind.”

Following inquiries from ProPublica, VA officials reached out to Bourlakov and other veterans interviewed for this story to offer additional assistance with their mental health care. The calls left several frustrated, saying it shouldn’t take questions from the media for them to get help from the VA.

Though skeptical, Bourlakov decided to move forward. She was contacted by three separate VA representatives in February asking about her health and if she needed help scheduling a therapy appointment.

The earliest telehealth appointment they offered was not until June, she said. The next available in-person slot was not until July. Bourlakov opted for June.

A New York business frozen out of its checking account. A Georgia chemotherapy patient denied a credit card refund after a product dispute. A New Jersey service member defrauded out of their savings.

These consumers — along with hundreds of others — reached out to their congressional representatives for help in the past 12 months.

“I have been unable to pay my rent, utilities, personal bills, student loans, or my credit card. I have been unable to buy groceries or put gas in my car,” wrote the New Yorker, who contacted Rep. Nicole Malliotakis’ office.

Records show their representatives — all Republicans — referred them to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency formed in the wake of the Great Recession to shield Americans from unfair or abusive business practices. All three consumers got relief, according to agency data.

Then the lawmakers — along with nearly every other Republican in Congress — voted to slash the agency’s funding by nearly half as part of President Donald Trump’s signature legislative package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a step toward the administration’s goal of gutting the agency.

Republicans have long been critical of the CFPB, accusing it of imposing unreasonable burdens on businesses. Already, the CFPB under Trump has dropped a number of cases and frozen investigations into dozens of companies.

Yet the agency has historically benefited consumers across the political spectrum, securing around $20 billion in relief through its enforcement actions.

Data obtained by ProPublica through a public records request shows that many of the same Republican members of Congress who have targeted the CFPB for cuts have collectively routed thousands of constituent complaints to the agency.

Rep. Darrell Issa of California and Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia, for example, voted to reduce the CFPB’s budget. Yet each of their offices has referred more than 100 constituents to the CFPB for help, among the most of any House members. The office of Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who also voted for the CFPB cuts, has routed more than 800 constituent complaints to the agency, the most of any current lawmaker from either party, ProPublica found.

A spokesperson for Issa said in an email that most of his office’s referrals to the agency “occurred several years ago” and reflected “a conventional way” to handle constituents’ consumer issues.

Wittman and Cornyn didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the disconnect between their offices’ use of the CFPB’s services and their votes to cut it. Neither did New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, whose office fielded the defrauded service member’s complaint, or Malliotakis, who was approached by the New York business owner, or Rep. Rick Allen, whose office directed the Georgia chemotherapy patient to the agency.

Overall, members of Congress have steered nearly 24,000 complaints to the CFPB since it opened its doors in 2011. Roughly 10,000 of those were referred by the offices of current and former Republican lawmakers, ProPublica found.

“This is how members of Congress from both parties get help for the people who live in their districts,” said Erie Meyer, the CFPB’s former chief technologist, who left the agency in February. The agency has a particular mandate to help service members and seniors, she noted. “This is how, if a service member is getting screwed on an auto loan, this is the only place they can go.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has referred more than 200 constituents to CFPB since its creation. In a statement to ProPublica, he accused Republicans in Congress of “pursuing senseless cuts that will undermine their own ability to protect their constituents, who will be left in the lurch when they fall victim to scams or deceptive and unfair business practices.”

“Republicans have made clear that they stand on the side of big businesses — not consumers,” he added. “Their irresponsible pursuit of dismantling the CFPB will have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.”

An Irreplaceable System

In recent years, the CFPB’s public database shows the number of complaints has exploded, from around 280,000 in 2019 to more than 2.7 million last year.

Complaints have grown across many categories, including credit cards and debt collection. Last year, most of the complaints filed, over 2.3 million, were about mistakes or other problems involving credit reporting agencies, and more than half of them resulted in relief, CFPB data shows.

“These credit score formulas govern so many factors of your life. It’s not just your ability to get a loan, it’s your ability to secure housing or qualify for a job,” said Adam Rust, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America. “It’s important that you can resolve something, but it’s difficult to do it on your own.”

Once a complaint is submitted, it is routed to the company, which has 15 days to respond. Companies can request an additional 45 days to reach a final resolution.

Many consumers end up getting nonmonetary relief, such as fixes to erroneous credit reports or an end to harassment by debt collectors, but some get financial help as well. More than $300 million has been returned to Americans through the complaint system, including $90 million just last year.

Normally, staff at the CFPB monitor the complaints to identify systemic issues and escalate complaints involving consumers who are at immediate risk of foreclosure, although that didn’t happen for a few weeks this year when the agency’s acting director halted its work.

The CFPB also shares complaint information with other federal agencies, states and localities to help them protect consumers. No other government or private entity has the capacity to effectively handle the volume of complaints that the CFPB does, experts and current and former employees say.

States often have limited resources for consumer protection efforts. Many states — including some conservative ones that supported a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the CFPB’s structure — steer consumers to the agency on their websites, providing links to it.

In legal filings opposing the Trump administration’s steps to effectively shut down the CFPB, 23 Democratic attorneys general noted that their states collectively have referred thousands of complaints to the agency and that its services can’t be replaced by state-level operations.

“In the CFPB’s absence, consumers will be left without critical resources,” they wrote.

The complaint system has also lessened the burden on congressional offices, which can route constituent problems to an agency dedicated to, and expert in, addressing consumer issues. Yet that hasn’t stopped Republicans from pursuing dramatic cuts to the agency.

The CFPB receives its funding from the Federal Reserve instead of annual appropriations bills. The structure is meant to safeguard the agency’s independence, though critics say this makes the agency less accountable, giving elected officials less power over its operations.

Initially, Republicans pressed for extreme cuts to the CFPB as part of Trump’s legislative package. House members approved a 70% cut. The Senate Banking Committee attempted to go even further, zeroing out the agency’s funding entirely.

Ultimately, the final version of the bill signed into law by Trump on July 4 cut the CFPB’s budget by around 46%, reducing the agency’s funding cap — the maximum amount it can request from the Federal Reserve — from $823 million to $446 million for this fiscal year. The agency requested $729 million last fiscal year.

The offices of lawmakers who voted for the bill have referred about 3,400 complaints to the agency, running the gamut of consumer problems — from crushing debt to mortgage issues to financial scams, ProPublica’s data analysis shows. (In some of these cases, consumers also took complaints to the CFPB themselves in addition to reaching out to their representatives. Consumers’ names aren’t disclosed in the data.)

Their constituents are sometimes desperate: “I’m about to be homeless because of this,” wrote a Florida resident whose bank account was frozen.

Others have expressed frustration at getting the runaround from a company. “I’ve spent countless hours on hold trying to speak with a representative, only to be met with silence or outdated instructions to send letters,” wrote one Virginian in a complaint about their bank.

In a statement after the CFPB funding cut passed, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Tim Scott, R-S.C., applauded the measure for saving taxpayer money but insisted it would not affect the agency’s mandatory functions, which include handling complaints.

Consumer experts as well as current and former CFPB employees, however, said the cuts will likely hinder the agency’s effectiveness.

“I think the whole process is at risk,” said Ruth Susswein, director of consumer protection at the nonprofit advocacy group Consumer Action. “If you starve the system, it cannot provide the benefits that it now offers.”

Signs of Strain

The Trump administration’s initial efforts to unilaterally hobble the CFPB give a hint of what may lie ahead for the complaint system.

In February, acting Director Russell Vought issued a stop-work order to all CFPB employees and canceled a slew of contracts, including for antivirus software that scanned files attached to consumer complaints.

The actions largely froze the complaint system for about a week. More than 70,000 complaints were submitted, but most were not sent to companies for their response during that period, data shows.

Although some issues were later fixed, the work stoppage spawned a backlog of more than 16,000 complaints that required manual review, according to court records from a lawsuit filed by the union that represents CFPB employees. About 75 complaints from consumers at risk of imminent foreclosure, which would normally be escalated to CFPB staff, weren’t acted upon.

In late March, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the CFPB to end the work stoppage, reverse contract terminations and reinstate probationary employees who were fired. However, an appeals court allowed layoffs to proceed, triggering a frenzied effort by the administration to cut about 90% of the CFPB’s staff.

The layoffs included the vast majority of the roughly 130-member team that manages the complaint system as well as nearly every staffer in legally mandated offices focused on service members and seniors.

The CFPB has fielded over 440,000 complaints from current and former service members and their families since 2011, according to CFPB data, more than 100,000 of which have resulted in relief.

The CFPB did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a court declaration, Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s chief legal officer, said that the agency’s leadership had “been assessing how the agency can fulfill its statutory duties as a smaller, more efficient operation. In making this assessment, leadership discovered vast waste in the agency’s size.”

Paoletta also said the agency would have a “much more limited vision for enforcement and supervision activities, focused on protecting service members and veterans, and addressing actual tangible consumer harm and intentional discrimination.”

In April, Jackson issued an order blocking the firings made at the CFPB after the appeals court decision. The administration has appealed Jackson’s ruling.

Lawsuits won’t protect the CFPB or its complaint apparatus from the cuts included in the recently passed spending bill, current and former agency employees pointed out.

These changes are likely to hit home with consumers no matter which party they favor, said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center, which is a plaintiff in the union’s lawsuit.

“Republicans don’t want to be abused by big corporations that ignore them any more than Democrats do,” she said.

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