In the first week of March 2026, word got out that the only VA clinic in McMinnville, Tennessee was closing. The clinic confirmed it to WSMV on Wednesday, March 4; the Tennessee Department of Veterans Services announced it that Saturday. About 1,840 veterans got their primary care and mental health care there. The VA said it would shut the doors on May 31.

The congressman who represents McMinnville learned about it the same way everybody else did.

Scott DesJarlais wrote to VA Secretary Doug Collins on March 9. Here is what he told him:

"My office received no notice prior to the public disclosure that this facility was facing staffing shortages or that these shortages would lead to the shuttering of this important VA Outpatient Clinic in my district."

He went further. The clinic's leaders, he wrote, "did not consult with or inform my staff or myself about the issues facing this Clinic, and the answers they gave as to why this was happening and the information they have provided to the community have been woefully inadequate."

DesJarlais has represented Tennessee's 4th District since 2011. He is a physician. By his own account he once worked in a VA hospital. And more than 46,000 veterans live in his district.

Nobody called him.

What closing it would have meant

The nearest alternatives were the VA clinics in Tullahoma and Cookeville — both about 45 minutes away by the VA's own estimate, and 36 and 45 miles away by Military.com's. Roughly 200 veterans would have been sent to Nashville, Chattanooga, or Murfreesboro instead.

For a lot of the people who used that clinic, an hour each way isn't an inconvenience. It's the end of their health care.

Gary McComis, a Marine veteran, put it plainly to WSMV: "You depend on it. You got a lot of veterans that this is our only insurance, the only health insurance we have."

Kris Gore, who spent twenty years in the National Guard, told the same station: "We have to get this out into the community. We have to start doing something about this."

The VA's reason should have been a red flag years ago

The clinic was never staffed by the VA. It was run by a contracted staffing company, and the VA's own account of what went wrong is damning: the contractor "was unable to consistently staff the facility," and over five years the average patient had their assigned provider swapped about twenty times. Only 79% of patients said they trusted the clinic — below the VA's national average.

Twenty changes of provider in five years. That is not a sudden crisis. That is a facility that had been failing veterans for half a decade, in a district represented the whole time by a doctor who sits on the House Armed Services Committee.

The VA has an answer for why nobody told him, buried in the same FAQ: "pre-decisional information was shared ahead of schedule leading to confusion and misinformation within the local community," and the system had "anticipated informing Veterans in mid-March via phone calls, appointment letters, and at the March 20 town hall." In other words, the decision leaked before anyone had been told — the congressman included.

He says nobody told him. That may well be true. It is not obviously better than the alternative.

What he was doing while the VA shrank

Here is the part that doesn't appear in the press release.

Through all of 2025, DesJarlais was one of the loudest cheerleaders for shrinking the federal government. He sat down for a February 2025 interview on his own channel to talk up the House budget and DOGE. On April 2, 2025, he posted on X that the Labor Secretary was "working hard to root out waste, fraud and abuse by returning $1 BILLION in unused COVID funds," with three applause emoji and a link to a Fox News story headlined "Trump Labor Department secures eye-popping sum to return to taxpayers amid DOGE push."

While he was posting that, the VA was losing people. On July 7, 2025, the department announced it would shed nearly 30,000 employees by the end of the fiscal year — about 17,000 already gone between January and June, and another 12,000 expected by September 30. The mechanism was the governmentwide hiring freeze, deferred resignations, early retirements and attrition.

The VA has not said the McMinnville contractor's failure was caused by any of that, and we're not going to claim it was. What we will say is this: you cannot spend a year celebrating a campaign to make the federal government smaller and then act astonished when a federal health facility in your district can't find anybody to work in it.

DesJarlais didn't vote against any of it. He cheered it. Then he wrote a letter demanding to know why nobody warned him.

The victory lap

On May 14, 2026, DesJarlais announced that the clinic would stay open after all.

"After a multitude of meetings with Secretary Collins and the VA, I am excited to announce the McMinnville VA Clinic will be staying open."

Good. Genuinely — that's the right outcome, and his office worked for it.

But read on in the same statement:

"Under Secretary Collins' leadership the VA has been focused on ensuring our Nation's heroes get the best care possible that meet their needs and expectations."

That is DesJarlais praising the leadership of the same VA that, nine weeks earlier, he said had given his constituents answers that were "woefully inadequate" and had never bothered to pick up the phone.

The May release does mention the March letter — once, as "a formal letter and series of phone calls" — and never says a word about what it actually demanded. The March letter demanded accountability. The May release handed out thank-yous. Nothing in between explains what actually changed — not how the clinic will be staffed, not who is providing the doctors, not what happens when the contractor fails again. The VA simply reversed itself, and the congressman announced it.

Why nobody in McMinnville got to ask him about it

There was a public meeting about the closure. The VA held it on March 20. DesJarlais did not hold one.

That is not a one-off. According to a July 2025 op-ed by Victoria Broderick — who ran against him as the Democratic nominee in 2024, and so is hardly a neutral party, though he has never disputed the specific claim — DesJarlais has not held an in-person town hall since 2013. She wrote that he declined an invitation to one in Murfreesboro in June 2025.

Thirteen years is a long time to go without standing in a room and letting 46,000 veterans ask you a question.

Three weeks after the clinic reversal, DesJarlais got back to the work he does most: on June 4 he read out his subcommittee's piece of the defense bill, authorizing "full funding" for nuclear weapons modernization and a "historic increase" for the Space Force. The eleven weapons contractors whose programs that bill funds have given his campaign $94,000 this cycle.

The clinic in McMinnville stayed open because a contractor's failure finally got embarrassing enough to make the news. Not because anyone in Washington was watching.

Sources

• Tennessee Lawmakers Concerned Over Planned VA Clinic Closure, Military.com, April 10, 2026 (photo: McMinnville VA Clinic, VA.gov)
• DesJarlais Voices Concern to VA Secretary Over Closure of McMinnville Clinic, March 9, 2026
• McMinnville VA Clinic Transition, VA Tennessee Valley Health Care