Dear Doug Collins

Open letters to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs — a public record of what the VA promised, what it delivered, and how long it has stayed silent.

Letter No. 1 — To Secretary Doug Collins

Status: Mailed October 15, 2026 — sent to the VA by email (Executive Correspondence) the day this site went live; certified mail follows. Awaiting a substantive reply.

October 15, 2026

The Honorable Doug Collins Secretary of Veterans Affairs U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs 810 Vermont Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20420

Re: Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr. — 100% service-connected Navy veteran, now in hospice — and the family your department made carry him Case references: IMA00361973 · VA Hotline 15115179 · AskVA A-20260727-3112888 · Community Care consult #9247778

Dear Secretary Collins:

My father, Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr., served this country in the United States Navy from 1964 to 1970. He is 100% service-connected. He was promised that when he could no longer stand on his own, the Department of Veterans Affairs would stand behind him.

He received a fraction of what he was promised. What he actually received was delay — on everything. And the weight your department would not carry did not disappear, Secretary Collins. It was transferred, without pay, without help, and without choice, to his family. To me. I am writing so that you hear, once, from the man who has been carrying your department’s weight — and so you can do your job, for veterans and for the caretakers carrying them, before my father dies without the help he deserved.

The delays are a matter of your own record:

  • March 11, 2026: your VA surgeons wrote that they still strongly felt advanced endoscopy was needed and still highly recommended transfer, after his December 2025 surgery left a gallbladder remnant with stones. Community Care consult #9247778 was authorized. It was never scheduled. Not delayed — never scheduled.
  • Testing: an A1c was ordered three times for an insulin-dependent diabetic. It was never drawn. His power wheelchair was waited on for six months.
  • Placement: I first asked for help placing him on July 23, 2026 — admission inquiries, a service-officer request, long-term care benefits. I resent the Bennett inquiry marked urgent on July 25, because by then he was hospitalized with GI bleeding. He reached the Emory L. Bennett Veterans’ Nursing Home in September — roughly six weeks after a 100% service-connected veteran’s family first asked, most of it spent in a civilian rehab.
  • His record: on August 14, 2026, his own VA.gov Blue Button report showed my birthday, my email, “Service connected percentage: 0,” and no military service found. Your department still lists my mother — Julieanne Bowman, dead since August 27, 2019 — as his caretaker. I asked your department to correct that dependency record on July 25. It was still wrong in August. It may be wrong as I write this.

Now let me tell you how the one thing that did change my father’s life got done — because it was not your team, and it was not your system. None of the case numbers did it: not the Senate casework, not the VA Hotline, not AskVA, not the patient advocates, not the oversight complaints, and not the two hundred emails this family and its AI sent into your apparatus. All of that, together, accomplished almost nothing for my father. What got him into Emory Bennett was an accident. I ended up face to face with Alan Hubert, the man running admissions at Bennett in Daytona Beach, and I laid my father’s condition on him in person. He visited my father the next day and put the packet through himself. One man, reached by chance, did in days what your entire department would not do in six weeks. That is not a system working, Secretary Collins. That is a system rescued by luck and one decent human being — and a father should not need luck to receive what he was promised in writing.

And through all of it, the VA’s instructions to this family amounted to: carry it yourselves.

I have been his registered VA Family Caregiver since July 15, 2024, enrolled through the Orlando VA’s Caregiver Support Program — in the general program, the unpaid tier. On July 23 and again July 25 of this year I asked, in writing, for the things your department advertises to families like mine: the comprehensive caregiver program (PCAFC, Form 10-10CG), Special Monthly Compensation — Aid and Attendance, a HISA home-access grant, respite care, wheelchairs. I hold his Durable Power of Attorney and his Health Care Surrogate designation, and in the worst month of this case I worked 75 to 85 hours a week on his care — driving him to a Gainesville emergency room at midnight myself, because that was the transport available. I have not been compensated one cent for any of it. I did not volunteer for this role, Mr. Secretary. It was forced on me by your department’s failures, one unscheduled consult and one unanswered letter at a time. Two years of my life went into carrying a weight the United States government promised to carry — and I am one caretaker. There are thousands of us, invisible in your statistics, holding up your system for free while it fails the people we love.

My father has suffered great loss — his health, his independence, his dignity, and now his life; he tells me he wants to die and be with my mother, and he is in hospice in Daytona Beach. He will in all likelihood die without half the services he was entitled to. I cannot accept that the family that carried him gets silence in return.

Do better, Secretary Collins — not just for veterans, but for the caretakers your system runs on. I am asking for:

  1. A named human being in your office accountable for this file, who calls me.
  2. A written accounting of consult #9247778 — who held it, why it was never scheduled, and what has changed so an authorized consult cannot die in silence again.
  3. A written accounting of every caretaker request this family filed — PCAFC (10-10CG), Aid & Attendance, HISA, respite — the status of each, and an explanation of why a registered, full-time, unpaid caretaker was routed around while a woman dead since 2019 stayed on the file.
  4. Written confirmation his record is corrected — caretaker of record, dependency record, and the conflated VA.gov data — at the source.
  5. An audit of how many other veterans’ records carry the same conflation, because a defect any family can find in five minutes on Blue Button is not one family’s problem.
  6. A substantive reply within 30 days, with an Executive Correspondence tracking number — not an acknowledgment from an address that accepts no replies. Your office sent me one of those on August 28, seven weeks ago, promising VHA leadership would follow up. No one has.

One more thing, Secretary Collins, so there are no surprises later. If you do not answer me — a named human, a tracking number, a substantive reply inside the 30 days above — I will publish all of it. Every email I sent to every one of your departments. Every form acknowledgment, every redirect, every unanswered request, every promise that VHA leadership would follow up and didn’t. The complete correspondence record of this case, dated and in full, on a public site I have built for exactly that purpose: DearDougCollins.com — an open record of what your department did to my father, and of every veteran whose story joins his there. It will stand as a permanent record of what your department did to one veteran and the family that was forced to carry him — and I intend to keep it standing, and keep adding to it, for as long as it takes to be answered. I would rather spend my father’s remaining days with him than building it. Whether I have to is your decision, and the clock in this letter is how you make it.

Everything above is documented, and the documentation is preserved. This letter, and your answer or your silence, will be part of that public record — his story, and mine, told in full. I would rather the record show you acted while he was still alive to see it.

Thomas Alan Bowman, Sr. by Thomas Alan Bowman, Jr., his Agent Durable Power of Attorney · Health Care Surrogate · Registered VA Family Caregiver (Orlando VAMC, since July 15, 2024) care@bowmanwebservices.com · (720) 498-1989

Enclosures: Blue Button report (8/14/2026) · VA General Surgery note excerpt (3/11/2026) · Consult #9247778 authorization · Caregiver requests (7/23 & 7/25/2026) · One-page case timeline · Evidence summary Cc: VA Office of Inspector General (Hotline) · Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (oversight@vetaff.senate.gov) · Sen. Rick Scott casework (IMA00361973) · Rep. Randy Fine (FL-06)