Veterans on Labor Day: Pray, but Move Your Feet

Coaches routinely tell players: “Move your feet.” The VA and Politicians are fond of sending “Thoughts and Prayers” to wounded Veterans. It’s a good time for Veterans to pray, but don’t just stand there. Take charge. Don’t take useless advice. You can heal, but you have to Move Your Feet.

“EARTH to the VA and Congress!! Come In, C-Suite?”

Labor Day, 2025. Thousands of Veterans at the VA are in peril for their jobs. Whatever the final numbers of firings, 25% of those let go will be Veterans. More drastically, approximately 29% to 31% of the federal workforce are Veterans, representing over 600,000 to 700,000 individuals across federal agencies.

Add to that Veterans who are contractors. A report by the Brookings Institution notes that the number of contractors often outnumbers federal employees by a factor of more than two to one. Since the number of federal employees in 2024 was around 2.9 to 3 million, this would suggest a contractor workforce of 6 to 8 million people. And as of March 2024, the protected Veteran hiring benchmark for federal contractors is 5.2%. Thus, the total number of federal contractors who are Veterans is approximately 360,000 Veterans, making the total number of Veterans in peril of losing their jobs at close to a million.

We have written continually about the presence of undiagnosed TBI and PTSD in the Veteran population. Add the stress of potential or real job loss to brain wound symptoms like frustration, anger, sleeplessness, memory loss, physical pain, depression, and diminished capacity due to prescribed drug toxicities and you have a recipe for compounding the number of Veterans under internal and external pressure.

What is really going on at the VA that makes it so difficult for health care providers to get Veterans the help they need? Here’s a short cultural lesson and parallels provided by the Roman Catholic Church.

Religious and medical doctrine share common traits: priesthoods, rigid hierarchies, frequent sketchy science, near-absolute power to condemn heretics, and the power of the purse. Pre-Christian Greeks and a few centuries later Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE proposed the earth-centric model of reality. The Roman Catholic church made it Doctrine. Copernicus in 1543 countered with heliocentrism, the sun at the center. But not until 1992 did Pope John II formally apologize for the Church’s handling of the Copernicus/Galileo cases, acknowledging the error made by the Church tribunal in condemning Galileo. The burning of Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 for similar views received no mention. One smiles, aware of the irony of the Church over two millennia hanging on to demonstrably untrue Doctrine.  

The VA hasn’t been in business that long, but they show all the signs of unrelenting adherence to Doctrine. They enshrine “mental health” as the target of efforts to avoid suicides and shunt Veterans into ineffective and costly programs to deal with symptoms, not with healing.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Collins is a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He is a chaplain now, as he was in the Navy going back to 2002. One can hope that he is conflicted wearing his two hats. He is stripping union rights from 400,000 VA workers, 120,000 of whom are Veterans. His latest speeches are replete with Thoughts and Prayers: “The VA will always fulfill its duty to provide Veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors the health care and benefits they have earned. That’s a promise.”

In 2008, SEC Collins, in his Air Force Reserve capacity, was deployed to Joint Base Balad, in Iraq with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing Chapel. During his five-month deployment, he served as the nighttime flight line chaplain, ministering to service members at the airbase’s chapel and hospital. As a Protestant chaplain, he provided spiritual and emotional support to Airmen, visitors at the flight line, medical staff, and wounded personnel. Certainly he carries within himself memories of the wounded that could give him insight about the battles that Veterans face at home.

Simultaneously, he is tasked with overseeing and changing one of the largest bureaucracies in the world: 6th largest by budget, 2nd largest by employees. Among many tasks, he is charged with overseeing the costly Electronic Health Record transition. A case can be made that it is now the most costly upgrade in the history of the world that has delivered almost no benefit to Veterans for decades. In fact, the VA’s Office of Inspector General declared it created patient harm and safety risks.

The VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) was the VA’s long-standing EHR system, developed in-house starting in the 1980s. It was supposed to modernize and standardize VistA across all VA facilities, making it interoperable with the Department of Defense’s systems.

Despite years of development and investment, VistA Evolution was deemed too fragmented and outdated to meet future needs. The VA faced pressure to align with the DoD’s EHR modernization, which had selected Cerner as its vendor. By 2017, VA Secretary David Shulkin announced the VA would abandon VistA Evolution and adopt Cerner Millennium, the same platform used by the DoD, to ensure interoperability.

Estimated lifetime cost of the outdated VistA system alone from the 1980s to 2025 is ~$12–14 billion over 40+ years.

The VA originally signed a $10 billion contract with Cerner in 2018 to modernize its EHR system. That figure was later revised to $16.1 billion, but independent analyses have estimated the total cost could reach nearly $50 billion. For FY 2026 alone, the VA requested $3.495 billion for the EHR program—an increase of 164% over the previous year. The project is now 7 years into a 10-year contract, yet only six facilities have adopted the new system. Deployment was paused in April 2023 due to technical failures and patient safety concerns. VA plans to restart deployments in mid-2026, beginning with four Michigan-based facilities. Total number of facilities to integrate: ~1,400+.

Despite this timeline, Congress has not received an updated schedule or cost estimate to evaluate the program’s current state. And the suicide rate continues its upward trend, proving, once again, that when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. Or, in this case, Veterans.

Two anecdotes among hundreds this year are illustrative of the damage.

A recent call from a care giver inside a large VA facility is one of several of late. The voice asked to come for a visit to a clinic successfully treating brain-wounded Veterans with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy. The visit had to be quiet, off-book. The person admitted that they were overwhelmed with “mental health” patients and were “desperately” seeking alternatives to their drug-and-talk-therapy protocols.

Second: An active duty, combat wounded doctor in a special command is degraded by TBI. Though the command has HBOT chambers available, it is against policy to use those chambers to treat TBI. The doctor is going to get our help getting care. Despite the enormous cost of potentially losing this doctor to a medical Board, the DoD cannot get out of its own way to even TRY a treatment that has already healed over 12,500 Veterans, among them over 700 Special Operators, active duty and retired.

These are not isolated instances. Go to https://www.youtube.com/ @treatnowdotorg to view hundreds of similar stories.

Consider the economics of the VA alongside the job peril. Keep in mind the priesthood inside the VA that is wedded to a “mental health” model of brain wound treatments. A small percentage of the budget will be spent on alternatives to the standard of care that has existed in both the DoD and the VA since 9/11. Continuing investments are going into classic Psychedelics, Dissociatives, Entactogens/Empathogens, and Tryptamines. In a phrase: more drugs and profits for the “Veteran support universe.”

The VA budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY 2026) requests a total of $441.3 billion, representing a 10% increase over the 2025 budget. Embedded in that budget is a 20% increase of funding for Suicide Prevention: $698 Million, or $118 Million more than the year before.

Remember the numbers Congress needs to keep in mind as they decide how to fund “suicide prevention” going forward:

• VA’s budget has increased 125% over the past decade.
• ~157,000 Veterans have committed suicide since 9/11 — more than 22 times the number of combat deaths in the War on Terror, and over half the number of US service members killed in WWII.
• Male Veteran suicides are 60% higher than that of non-veteran males
• Female Veteran suicide rate is 92% higher than for non-veteran females.
• The VA has budgeted billions of dollars and added nearly a decade for completion for an Electronic Health Record that currently does nothing to reverse the suicide trend in the VA, and was found to risk patient safety.
• HBOT has contributed to the healing of TBI/PTSD/Concussion in over 31,000 civilians in the US over the last 15 years, among them over 12,500 Veterans. The TreatNOW Coalition continues to heal brain wounds and eliminate suicide ideation every day. Only 865,000 TBI/PTSD casualties to go, whether they’re employed by the federal government or on active duty. Every day is Labor day for suicide prevention.

Heal Brains. Stop Suicides. Restore Lives. TreatNOW.

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The TreatNOW Mission is ending service member suicides. Along the way, we have learned that we can end suicidal ideation, help end symptoms of PTSD, get patients off most of their drugs, and heal brain wounds to end the effects of Concussion, BLAST injury, mild TBI, Persistent Post Concussive Syndrome, and polytrauma from AHI, Burn Pits, and COVID. No Veteran or civilian has ever been killed while undergoing HBOT treatment for TBI/PTSD. For a video Summary, see: https://www.youtube.com/@treatnowdotorg/videos  

Information provided by TreatNOW.org does not constitute a medical recommendation. It is intended for informational purposes only, and no claims, either real or implied, are being made.