VA Sec. Collins visits Lebanon VAMC, touts streamlined veteran services

U.S. Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs Doug Collins visited the Lebanon VA Medical Center in South Lebanon Township on Tuesday, Feb. 17, promoting the Trump administration’s efforts to streamline and expedite the delivery of medical services to the nation’s veterans.

Collins was nominated by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in February, 2025. Since then, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs has cited a series of accomplishments that it says has resulted in more, better, and quicker service to veterans.

The changes are part of a nationwide effort to reorganize the department’s “management structure, a long overdue step that will empower local hospital directors, eliminate duplicative layers of bureaucracy and ensure consistent application of VA policies across all department medical facilities,” according to Lebanon spokesman Doug Etter.

Nationwide, the department says it has, among other achievements, reduced the backlog of veterans waiting for VA benefits by 62% since the start of 2025, processed record numbers of disability claims, opened 25 new healthcare clinics around the country, announced plans to spend close to $6 billion to modernize, repair, and improve facilities and infrastructure, and taken steps to privatize some services.

The department says it has accomplished this despite eliminating 30,000 employees nationwide through hiring freezes, attrition, retirements, and deferred resignations.

It has also terminated employee unions. In response to questions in an earlier LebTown email, Etter said that the unions “have repeatedly opposed significant, bipartisan VA reforms and rewarded bad employees for misconduct.”

According to Etter, “as a result of this move, nearly 1,900 union representatives, who had been collecting government salaries to do union work, have returned to full-time VA work on behalf of veterans.” Etter’s response closely tracked statements on the VA’s website.

Unions representing VA employees denied the charges, claiming the move was instead retaliation for opposing cost cutting and privatization measures such as the elimination of rural VA hospitals.

After meeting privately with patients and some of the facility’s 2,200 employees, Collins conducted a “coining ceremony” to honor employees Theresa Haley, Neil Smartschan, Jennifer Distrola, Nora Bairagdar, and Elicia Frank, each of whom had performed services to veterans above and beyond their official job duties.

“This is the attitude that I want to see pervasive through the VA,” Collins said. “For anybody listening here, there’s nobody ever going to get in trouble for trying something new and helping veterans. You’ll never get in trouble. These are the values that are exemplified in these actions now, and that I want all across the VA.”

As state Rep. John Schlegel (R-101) and U.S. congressmen Dan Meuser (R-PA9) and Lloyd Smucker (R-PA11) looked on, Collins praised his department’s efforts to serve veterans more efficiently and economically, and made it clear that the effort will continue.

“Over a year ago, when I came to this job, I said there was going to be one thing, and one thing only, which the VA will focus on, and that is putting veterans first,” he said.

In an apparent reference to the bureaucratic aspects of VA management and administration, Collins observed that “the problem was we got so invested in ourselves that sometimes we were looking internal when we should have been looking at the patient walking through the door. The VA does not exist unless a veteran contacts us and comes to us.”

“Our hospitals and clinics and those folks out there are tip of the spear. We’re just simply here to support them.”

Collins also discussed what is being done to reach veterans at risk for suicide. On Feb. 13, the VA released a new report showing that for 2023, the latest year for which data is available, 6,398 veterans ended their lives, about the same number as 2022. On average, 17.5 vets per day committed suicide in 2023.

Collins said that 60% of veterans who died by suicide in 2023 had not had any sort of contact with the VA, and he is focused on veteran outreach.

“We’re focusing our attention on areas that reach veterans who are not affiliated with VA,” he said. “We’ve been all over podcasts, social media, NASCAR, Major League Baseball, UFC. We’re working in partnerships with National Football League, hunting shows, anything where veterans are that we can reach them.

“Homelessness falls under that as well. We’re making progress right now to be able to house upwards of 6,000 veterans over the next three to five years. Those are the things that we’re doing. But also places like Lebanon and others also do stand downs, some of them call it differently, where they actually go out in the community, they take their workers and go out in the community to actually reach veterans who are homeless.”

The number of homeless veterans is hard to accurately count due to their transient nature, and appears to have been falling significantly in recent years. Nevertheless, the National Coalition for Homeless Vets reported that a January 2024 “point-in-time” count estimated that 32,882 veterans were experiencing homelessness on a single night.

Collins is a lawyer, Baptist minister, and U.S. Air Force Reserve chaplain. The Republican previously served in the Georgia state house and as a U.S. congressman from Georgia’s 9th congressional district. He was tapped by the Trump campaign in 2020 to lead an effort to recount ballots after Joe Biden was projected as presidential winner there by roughly 10,000 votes.