Saturday, August 8, 2026
1973 Vice President Spiro Agnew said reports he took kickbacks from government contracts in Maryland are "damned lies" and vowed not to resign.
1974 Richard Nixon announced that he was resigning the presidency the next day.
2022 FBI conducted a search of Donald Trump's Florida home over his handling of classified government documents
2025 Germany announced it will halt weapon shipments to Israel that could be used in Gaza "until further notice" in light of Israel's plan to fully militarily occupy Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces began massing troops and tanks on the border with Gaza ahead of an expected major ground offensive.
In bed at 9:15, up at 5:45; 0555 202.2 118/69/62 123; 66/79/66, sunny
Morning meds at 7:30 a.m. Eliquis at 6:30 a.m. and p.m.
Comment on JJA's elegant Facebook commentary on Door County:
I truly enjoy your writing, certainly your political commentary, but especially your travelogues, and most especially your writings about the Upper Midwest, including my adopted home state of Wisconsin. Ezra Klein interviewed the journalist Jasmine Sun,f or his column in the New York Times a few days ago. She has been investigating local opposition to new data centers being constructed, including the huge one outside Port Washington, Wisconsin. She started his comments with this: "I think one of the most important things about rural Wisconsin and rural Michigan is how beautiful it is. I felt like I was in Eden. I felt like I was in Paradise. It's incredibly lush and incredibly green." Yesterday, I took one of my regular drives through northern Ozaukee County, near the Sheboygan County line, just to look, to see, to take in and feel how beautiful it is - the farms, the woods, the fields of corn, and beans, and alfalfa, and the softly rolling hills. I had the same feeling that Jasmine Sun described, like being in Eden, in Paradise, literally awesome. I hope you keep visiting and keep writing and posting your beautiful photos.
Todd Blanche was confirmed as Attonrey General. A national disgrace. Blanche, a disgrace to the legal profession.
Trump, Musk, DOGE, the VA and veterans. Our current, and hopefully temporary, Commander-in-Chief proclaims his profound love for the nation's military men and women and its veterans, even though he made sure to see to it, through a certification of a physician who was a tenant of his father, that he had bone spurs on his feet, that he wouldn't wear a uniform and serve in his nation's controversial war in Vietnam. Thus he is not a veteran himself, nor one enrolled in the VA's Health program for veterans. Nonetheless, as Commander-in-Chief, he is entitled to a government-provided, government-paid personal physician, indeed a team of them. And he receives services and treatments at the government-owned and operated Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
Nonetheless, one of the C-in-C's first actions in his second term was to appoint the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, as head of a pulled-out-of-his-ass organization dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, whose purpose was to slash government employment, including at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). His handpicked Secretary of Veterans Affairs is Doug Collins, a former George congressman famous for his right-wing politics while in Congress. From ChatGPT:
The VA lost more than 40,000 employees in FY2025, its first annual net workforce loss in its history. About 88% of those departures were in the Veterans Health Administration. The losses included approximately:
1,000 physicians
3,000 registered nurses
1,500 schedulers
hundreds of mental-health professionals
thousands of other clinical and support personnel.
Importantly, this wasn't simply DOGE firing 40,000 people. The reduction came through a mixture of hiring restrictions, deferred resignations, retirements, attrition, dismissals, and decisions not to refill vacant positions. That distinction matters.
The VA itself initially argued that it could reduce its workforce by roughly 30,000 without impairing care because many of the positions were administrative or non-mission-critical. It also said that more than 350,000 positions were exempt from the hiring freeze.
But what happened subsequently is more troubling.
The problem became vacancies, not just layoffs
One of the most consequential developments has been the VA's decision to eliminate large numbers of unfilled medical positions rather than recruit replacements.
An analysis of VA internal records found that the VA eliminated roughly 14,400 vacant medical positions, including more than 1,500 physician positions and 4,900 nursing positions. That's roughly 5% of the VA's medical staffing capacity.
That is potentially more consequential than the original headline number of employees dismissed. A vacant position doesn't immediately deprive a patient of a doctor—but eliminating the position means the VA has decided that it won't necessarily replace that doctor when one leaves.
And there are measurable consequences
The most disturbing evidence concerns mental health care.
By January 2026, the national average wait for a new individual mental-health appointment was reported at more than 35 days, compared with the 20-day threshold at which a veteran becomes eligible for community care. Some states were reporting waits of 40–60 days. One California VA clinic reportedly had a 134-day wait after seven of its twelve mental-health providers departed.
ProPublica has also documented veterans losing established therapists and, in some cases, waiting as long as six months for therapy.
There are reports of similar problems in other specialties. In Wisconsin, for example, the VA secretary recently acknowledged that some medical centers had become understaffed after the workforce reductions and said they would be allowed to hire where necessary.
But there is another side to the story
I wouldn't conclude that "DOGE wrecked the VA." That's too simple.
The administration argues that the VA had accumulated excessive bureaucracy and that reducing administrative positions and consolidating operations can actually put more resources into direct patient care. It points to improvements in disability-claim processing and says that mission-critical positions were protected.
And there is at least one striking piece of evidence supporting the administration's contention that the VA hasn't simply collapsed: VA reports that 82% of veterans who used VA services in the first quarter of FY2026 said they trusted the VA to fulfill its commitment to them—a record high.
So the picture isn't uniformly negative.
My assessment
I'd characterize the evidence this way:
The cuts have produced genuine staffing shortages in portions of the VA, particularly in health care, and those shortages have produced longer waits and reduced continuity of care in some places. The evidence is particularly strong for mental-health services.
But the evidence does not support saying that VA health care as a whole has been destroyed or that every veteran is experiencing worse care. Some administrative reductions may indeed have eliminated unnecessary bureaucracy, and some VA performance measures have improved.
The bigger concern, in my view, is the loss of institutional capacity. A VA hospital can continue operating reasonably well for a while after losing personnel. But if it loses experienced physicians, nurses, schedulers and therapists and then eliminates the vacant positions, it becomes progressively harder to recover.
And that is especially consequential for the VA because the VA's principal advantage is that it provides an integrated health-care system. Losing a patient's established physician or therapist isn't quite equivalent to losing an employee somewhere else in government. It can disrupt an ongoing relationship and require the veteran to start over.
I thought about these issues yesterday as I waited - and waited - for an operator to answer the phone at the Zablocki VA Medical Center so I could ask to be switched to the Urology Clinic to schedule an appointment. Before Trump II, DOGE, and Collins, when I called the medical center switchboard, the call was answered promptly. Now there is inevitably a long wait for an operator to pick up the phone. When I finally got through and was switched to Urology, I connected with a recorded message, and my call was returned about 5 hours later. I was able to schedule an appointment with a urologist, but I was advised to 'reach out' to my primary care provider to alert her to my situation. My primary care provider for about 8 years pre-Trump was a physician; now she is a nurse practitioner. My advisor in the Congestive Heart Failure Clinic is another nurse practitioner. She tells me that, pre-Trump, she was able to concentrate on heart failure patients; now she is spread out over other departments within the Cardiology Clinic. I admire nurse practitioners, and trust them, but they are not physicians, and replacing doctors with NPs is a marked step downward at the VA. We had a nursing clinic at the House of Peace when I was executive director for about 2 and 1/2 years. It was staffed by nurses from the UWM School of Nursing and headed by a very capable nurse practitioner. That clinic, along with other services we offereed, was a very valued resource in Milwaukee's inner city. Maintaining it wouldn't have been feasible if we had needed an M.D. at its helm.
I'm reminded too of when I was hospitalized for 5 days in March of this year for bradycardia, or very low blood pressure and slow heart rate or pulse. I was wheeled into the Emergency Department in the morning by the Infectious Disease doctor I had come to see on a follow-up appointment after my cellulitis hospitalization in September/October 20025. I wasn't able to be admitted into the hospital as an inpatient until 11 o'clock that night because 'the house was full,' i.e., there were no beds available. This has become too common a problem at Zablocki because of the substantial increase in demand for VA services with the aging veteran population, plus the impact of the PACT Act, passed in 2022, and staffing shortages.
I, and literally hundreds of thousands of other vets, am fortunate in that Zablocki has weathered better than most VA facilities the storm created by the simultaneous increase in demand for services and decrease in staffing, but I don't fool myself by thinking that Donald J. Trump, draft dodger, is a friend either to current service members or to veterans.
Janice Jenkins Anderson. I stopped on the side of the road to snap this in Bailey’s Harbor - it just felt like a scene in an impressionist painting to me.
Charles D. Clausen. You have an artist's eye.
Janice Jenkins Anderson I joke that I see the world through a view finder in my mind’s eye and often make Larry pull over so I can stand in a road and snap a pho
Charles D. Clausen. On my drive along Hilltop Rd in the Town of Fredonia yesterday, I pulled off the road to get a photo of 3 elegant cranes in a field of soybeans. I've tried to get a good photo of the rolling hills one sees from that vantage, but the photos never capture how breathtakingly beautiful the sight is to the eye.. I have a hunch that you are probably the only person I know who would say "Sure!" when I'd suggest a ride in the country. Most look at me with a look that suggests I must be nuts.😄
Janice Jenkins Anderson. Wonderful!
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