The Department of Veterans Affairs doesn’t factor much in budget conversations. Yet its budget was over $400 billion last year, which was nearly half the baseline Pentagon budget. With greater spending must come greater accountability — America’s veterans deserve no less.
Those who served in uniform sacrificed for this country, and the government owes them support and care. Historically, Washington has sometimes neglected to provide for veterans as well as it should have. This makes it imperative to ensure that every dollar allocated is spent wisely.
Measured by spending, the federal government is providing more than ever. Between fiscal years 2004 and 2024, the most recent year for which data are available, Veterans Affairs spending grew by 446 percent — 229 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. That was faster than any other department in America’s rapidly growing federal government.
Over those 20 years, Veterans Affairs leapfrogged Education and Agriculture in annual spending and now ranks fourth, behind only Health and Human Services, Treasury and Defense. In 2004, Veterans Affairs spent around the same amount of money as the Labor Department. In 2024, it spent about five times more.
Health care inflation is a general problem in America, and Congress expanded veterans’ health care in the Pact Act of 2022, so higher spending is to be expected. But the majority of VA spending is not on health care, and the department’s spending surge was already underway on health care and on everything else before the new bill was signed.
The VA workforce more than doubled from 2004 to 2024, from 212,000 employees to 483,000. In 2025, the department targeted a reduction of 30,000 positions. Senate Democrats said it was more like 40,000. Either way, that still leaves it with more workers than it had in 2022 or any year prior. Roughly one in five civilian federal employees works for Veterans Affairs.
All of this extra spending and all of these additional workers are serving a declining population. Despite the post-9/11 wars, the overall number of veterans fell from about 24 million in 2004 to about 18 million in 2024. (Only about 9 million are enrolled in VA health care.) Veterans Affairs projects that the total veteran population will continue falling each year, to about 11 million in 2053.
For the current fiscal year, Veterans Affairs has been budgeted over $25,000 per veteran. In a decade, that is projected to increase to over $45,000 per veteran.
Such a significant increase in spending ought to be accompanied by better outcomes for veterans, but the record is mixed. Veterans have a higher median income, are less likely to be unemployed and are less likely to be in poverty than nonveterans. All of these facts also heldwhen the department was spending much less money. The gap between the overall poverty rate and the veteran poverty rate closed by 2 percentage points between 2010 and 2023.
The veteran suicide rate has been gradually rising, from 23 per 100,000 in 2001 to 35 per 100,000 in 2023. Younger veterans have higher rates of alcohol and drug use disorders than older veterans, and most of those affected are not receiving treatment. Part of the problem, the Government Accountability Office found, is a nationwide shortage of mental health care providers, which is not the VA’s fault. But pouring more money into an area of constrained supply causes further inflation in health care costs.
The best news is that the population of homeless veterans has declined significantly since 2010. That trend might have been helped by VA spending. But homeless veterans only made up a tiny fraction of the veteran population to begin with, and homelessness programs account for less than 1 percent of the department’s budget.
Veterans Affairs has reported declines in average wait times in recent years (although, as the department’s inspector general has found, VA facilities are inconsistent in how they measure and report wait times for appointments).
VA spending suffers from a lack of accountability to Congress. That was a key theme from recent testimony to the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee by Brittany Madni of the Economic Policy Innovation Center. First, 69 cents of every dollar that Veterans Affairs spends is classified as mandatory spending. That means it happens automatically, outside the budget process that Congress debates each year.
Second, Congress has found it difficult to get budget information from Veterans Affairs. Madni said that the department failed to provide the information necessary to estimate the budget effects of legislative proposals before the committee hearing. “There is no reason that the Congressional Budget Office shouldn’t be able to get data from the VA just like it is able to secure that data from every other department,” she said.
Opacity and reluctance to reform aren’t new for Veterans Affairs. GAO reports have found that the department spends billions of dollars on IT but doesn’t know how many software licenses it has and is basing disability ratings partly on data from 1945. The Post reported last year on fraud in the veterans disability program, which is so easy that there are YouTube channels teaching people how to do it.
The department tasked with caring for the men and women who served our country isn’t performing at the level it should be. Simply throwing money at the problem is politically convenient but ultimately fails to help those who deserve it most.
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