300,000 More Veterans Signed Up for VA Care This Year as Trump’s VA Opened Its 47th Clinic

In a little Iowa river town called West Burlington, veterans who used to squeeze into a cramped clinic now have a building five times bigger, with X-rays, physical therapy and hearing tests under one roof. The Department of Veterans Affairs cut the ribbon on Monday, and it wasn’t just another clinic. By the VA’s count, it was the 47th new one opened since President Trump took office again in January 2025.

President Trump marks Veterans Day today at Arlington National Cemetery, where he and the first lady are scheduled to join the national wreath-laying at 11 a.m. Eastern and he delivers remarks half an hour later, according to the White House schedule. Vice President JD Vance and VA Secretary Doug Collins are also set to speak. Before any of that, the VA put its own scorecard on the table, and the numbers are worth a look.

Five times the room in Iowa

The West Burlington clinic replaces a smaller one in nearby Burlington that only opened in 2021, the VA said Monday. The new building is nearly 18,000 square feet. At full speed it can serve more than 3,000 veterans, compared with roughly 900 who were seen at the old site. Besides primary care, mental health, lab work and telehealth, it adds radiology, physical therapy and audiology, so a vet doesn’t have to drive to a bigger city for the basics.

“Veterans deserve quick and convenient access to the care they’ve earned through their service,” Collins said, “and this new clinic will help ensure VA delivers for Veterans in and around West Burlington for years to come.”

Forty-seven clinics in under two years is a real pace. A year ago, in his statement ahead of Veterans Day 2025, Collins counted 20. The department also likes to point out the coincidence that Trump is the 47th president. I’ll allow it.

More vets seeing doctors closer to home

The bigger story might be what happened outside VA buildings. In fiscal year 2026, which ended Sept. 30, the VA says it set a record with 67.42 million appointments in what it calls community care. That’s the program where a veteran enrolled in VA health care sees a private doctor near home and the VA picks up the bill. The department says that’s up 25.5% from fiscal 2024.

Visits inside the VA’s own system grew too, to a record 82.68 million, but only by 4.9% over the same stretch. Put those side by side and you see where veterans are voting with their feet. When they’re given the option of a doctor down the road instead of a long drive and a long wait, a lot of them take it.

That has been the fight over the VA for more than a decade. After the 2014 Phoenix wait-time scandal, Congress passed the Choice Act and then the MISSION Act in 2018, which Trump signed, to let vets go outside the system when the VA couldn’t see them in time. Collins’s VA says it has since made outside care easier and faster to get, a claim it made again in its Veterans Day statement a year ago.

The department also says it has offered more than 3.5 million early-morning, evening and weekend appointments since January 2025, for the vets who can’t take a Tuesday afternoon off work to see a doctor.

300,000 new sign-ups and a pile of claims

More than 300,000 veterans have newly enrolled in VA health care so far in 2026, the department says. Part of that is on purpose. In fiscal 2026 the VA ran more than 11,000 live outreach events to find veterans who had never signed up, according to an October release on claims.

Signing up more people means more paperwork, and the VA is getting buried in it. It received a record of more than 3.15 million claims for benefits in fiscal 2026, an 80% jump from fiscal 2022. It also processed a record 3.1 million disability and pension claims, approved 60.1% of them and got them right 93.88% of the time, its highest accuracy rate in three years. Only 3.2% of decisions were appealed. To keep up, the VA plans to hire more than 2,000 more claims processors in fiscal 2027 on top of the more than 13,000 it already has.

There’s money going into the buildings, too. The VA says it committed $4.8 billion in fiscal 2026 to fix up and modernize medical facilities, which it calls the largest such maintenance investment in its history.

A fair word of caution here. Every one of these figures comes from the VA itself, and departments don’t tend to issue press releases about their bad numbers. An independent check from the VA’s inspector general or the Government Accountability Office would tell us more. But record appointment counts and sign-ups aren’t the kind of thing you can fake for long, and the claims accuracy and appeal rates are easy for watchdogs to test.

The push isn’t only coming from the VA. At an event at the Agriculture Department on Tuesday, USDA said it had hired more than 240 veterans and military spouses under a “100 Hires in 100 Days” drive, more than double its goal. Collins was there with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler. “Veterans dedicated their lives to defending this nation, and now many are helping us feed it,” Collins said.

In his Veterans Day proclamation, Trump called on Americans “to reflect on the fearlessness and sacrifice of our veterans through public ceremonies and private thoughts and prayers of gratitude.” For about 3,000 vets in southeast Iowa, gratitude now comes with a parking lot and an X-ray machine.