New Chesapeake VA clinic will open with 25-30% of required staff, Kaine and Scott say

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (WAVY) — A Southside Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic was planned to help address the increasing veteran population in the Tidewater region, however, lawmakers are now casting doubt if that will be possible due to recent job cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Chesapeake’s new VA Outpatient Clinic on North Battlefield Boulevard in Greenbrier is expected to open April 17.

The 196,000 square foot, two-story facility, developed by Las Vegas-based The Molasky Group, was built to provide outpatient services such as primary care, mental health and eye clinic services.

In 2022, the Hampton VA Healthcare System’s former executive director said the new clinic would make it possible for more than half of the systems, nearly 70,000 enrolled veterans, to no longer be required to cross from the Southside to the Peninsula for care.

Following a tour of the property Wednesday, Sen. Tim Kaine, (D-Va.) and Rep. Bobby Scott, (D-Newport News) both cast doubt on if the shiny new building will be able to live up to its promises.

More than 1,000 probationary VA employees were laid off in February, and the VA’s chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, told top-level officials at the agency he was looking to eliminate roughly 80,000 additional positions.

The Trump administration’s cuts to the VA have been criticized by both major political parties in Virginia, where the veteran population is expected to grow more than 2% over the next several years.

Kaine, who, along with Scott, have been critical of the current staffing at the VA, is concerned this will only set veterans back.

“This full staff here is 550,” Kaine said. “They think they’ll open with about 150 staffers … in this area where the veterans population is growing so quickly, where the taxpayer has funded this state of the art facility that we’ve worked on for years to open with a 25 to 30% staff … it is definitely not anything we can feel good about.”

While a federal judge has recently issued an injunction directing the Trump administration to reinstate fired probationary workers, Scott thinks it could already be too little too late.

“With the unfreeze by the courts, they’ve called some of them back and they’re saying, ‘no, no, no, I’ve had enough,'” Scott said. “And so, it’s making it difficult, very difficult.”

A spokesperson for the Hampton VA Medical System did not respond to an email Wednesday asking if the smaller staff was indeed due to ongoing federal cuts.

“Two months into this administration … there’s a war on veterans,” Kaine said. “I mean, I’ll just say it as bluntly as that. When you willy nilly fire federal employees and 30% of the federal workforce is veterans, you’re disproportionately hurting veterans more than any other group.”