President Donald Trump’s plan to fire about 83,000 employees with the Department of Veterans Affairs was met with outrage from veterans groups and individuals who have served.
A memo leaked on Wednesday revealed the department, “in partnership” with billionaire Elon Musk’s nebulous government cost-cutting task force DOGE, planned to return to 2019 staffing levels, Military.com reported.
The goal is to return to 2019 staffing levels, even though the bipartisan 2022 PACT Act expanded VA healthcare and disability benefits to cover millions more veterans who had been exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances.
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VA Secretary Doug Collins confirmed the plan to return to 2019 staffing levels in a video posted to social media. He said the VA is conducting a “department-wide review of its organization, operations, and structure,” and that the move will increase efficiency and improve healthcare, benefits and services.
The Daily Beast has contacted the VA for comment.
Many veterans were quick to call BS.
“Trump’s all-out assault on the VA is a complete betrayal of our Veterans,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois and veteran of the Iraq War, wrote on X. “Mark my word. This is the Republicans’ plan all along—Gut the VA, then push to privatize the Department so they can fund tax cuts for billionaires. And our heroes will pay the price.”
Vote Vets, a group that encourages veterans to run for office, called the plan “infuriating” on X.
Disabled American Veterans wrote on X that it had received calls, messages and emails expressing concerns about government layoffs. It directed veterans who had lost their jobs or government contracts, or experienced shortfalls at the VA, to fill out a form so it could monitor the cuts’ impact.
Collins’ announcement comes after 2,400 VA employees were fired in February. Thousands of veterans have also been fired as Musk’s so-called “department” of government efficiency has spent the past six weeks trying to purge the civil service.
Nearly 30 percent of federal workers are veterans, according to the National Federation of Federal Employees.
The proposed layoffs at the VA would therefore deliver a one-two punch in which veterans are being laid off at the same time that it becomes more difficult for other veterans to get care, many argued on social media.
“Reducing staff to 2019 levels when the PACT Act passed in 2022 and subsequently more than a MILLION vets enrolled for the first time in the VA… and that’s supposed to reduce wait times and improve service? Math isn’t mathing,” Marine Corps veteran Janessa Goldbeck wrote on X.
Army combat vet and voting rights advocate Fred Wellman called the planned layoffs “bulls--t,” saying that firing the people hired under the PACT Act wasn’t “efficiency,” it was undoing all of the progress that had been made in recent years to improve VA services.
He and other social media users were quick to point out that Collins had settled on a number of lay-offs before the review, instead of waiting for its findings.
“MAGA veterans… they are playing you. There was no review as to what was the right cuts in what area. They made up a number and now they are going to justify it. Stop being their suckers and losers. They want us to fight each other instead of them,” Wellman wrote on X.
He added that the Trump administration seemed to think it could get away with the cuts because veterans “support them no matter what,” but that in fact he and his fellow vets planned to “fight every inch of the way.”
“People have dedicated their lives to fixing veterans health and support, and some evil little DOGE munchkin and Dougie Fresh aren’t going to dismantle it without a fight,” he wrote in a post.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), a former U.S. Navy helicopter pilot, wrote on X that VA benefits offers “essential services” that are “hard earned and deeply deserved.” The proposed cuts were proof that Trump and Musk “don’t care about our country or those who serve it—they’re only in it for themselves.”
And Army veteran Kristofer Goldsmith argued in a video posted to YouTube that Trump, Musk and Collins were “sabotaging [the VA] from the inside.”
After the first round of VA lay-offs, Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba claimed Trump “has always cared about” veterans, even as she said she “didn’t feel sorry” for any of the veterans who had been fired.
“We are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment, or not willing to come to work,” she said.
