Democrat lawmakers and veterans’ groups are fuming over the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) plans to cut roughly 80,000 employees in the coming months, decrying the lack of transparency and lack of pushback from their colleagues across the aisle.
VA officials insist the dismissals won’t damage or delay veterans’ medical care or benefits. Secretary Doug Collins, who confirmed the planned firings on Wednesday, maintained that the effort is difficult but necessary.
But Democrats complain they have not received any response to inquiries about the dismissals — revealed in a leaked memo on Tuesday — nor to questions about earlier layoffs of several thousand agency employees last month. Among the queries are who will lose their jobs, why, and how the staff changes will impact VA offices and medical centers.
Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Ranking Member Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called the development “a gut punch” and “breathtaking in its potential significance and its malevolence and cruelty” to former U.S. service members.
“We’re on a path downward here for the VA and it is the result of the malign, reckless, cruel policies of this administration, which unfortunately regards veterans as roadkill on the way to tax cuts through the revenue they’re trying to save,” Blumenthal told reporters via video call on Thursday.
“They’re laying waste to the VA in the name of cutting waste, and they’re doing it with a meat axe.”
Blumenthal’s counterpart in the lower chamber, House Committee on Veterans Affairs Ranking Member Mark Takano (D-Calif.), said the Trump’s administration’s goals were “incomprehensible.”
“The deliberate dismantling of VA’s workforce isn’t just dangerous, it’s an outright betrayal of veterans,” said Takano, speaking on the same video call. “Any significant reduction in personnel could create devastating backlogs, delay critical care and ultimately fail our veterans at a time when they need our support the most.”
Takano, Blumenthal and 19 other House and Senate members also sent a joint letter to Collins on Thursday denouncing the planned cuts, saying it “defies logic and reason that the agency could cut an additional 83,000 employees, beyond the 2,400 or more they have already terminated, without healthcare and benefits being interrupted.”
The blowback came after the leak of an internal memo to top VA staff, first reported by Government Executive, that outlined plans to cut back the agency’s workforce to just under 400,000. That would mirror the VA’s 2019 staffing levels, before the department undertook significant hiring efforts under President Biden, who expanded coverage of veterans impacted by burn pits under the 2022 PACT Act.
The VA’s current workforce sits around 480,000, after roughly 2,500 employees were already removed via probationary employee dismissals and the elimination of diversity and inclusion jobs in the weeks after President Trump took office.
Senior agency staff are now instructed to plan for a VA-wide reorganization in August to “resize and tailor the workforce to the mission and revised structure,” according to the Tuesday memo.
It also orders agency officials to work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to “move out aggressively, while taking a pragmatic and disciplined approach” to the Trump administration’s goals of gutting the federal civil servant workforce.
Collins later confirmed the document in a video posted to social media Wednesday, saying “things need to change.”
“Our goal is to reduce VA employment levels to 2019 numbers of roughly 398,000 employees from our current level of approximately 470,000 employees — a nearly 15 percent decrease,” he said. “We will accomplish this without making cuts to health care or benefits to veterans and VA beneficiaries.”
That follows a VA spending review last week, which targeted nearly 600 contracts to be canceled for a reported savings of about $900 million — with officials declining to provide a public list of the terminated deals.
Democrats and veterans’ groups have increasingly voiced their worries that the aggressive approach the Trump administration is taking will have long-term and devastating effects for veterans, who can already face long wait times for VA care.
With the VA currently experiencing its highest-ever service levels, delivering more than 127 million health care appointments across more than 9 million enrollees, a cut of 15 percent to the agency’s workforce can only have negative consequences to those it serves, critics say.
What’s more, as more than 25 percent of VA employees are veterans, the workforce reductions likely mean lost jobs for former service members too.
Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, a senior advisor with liberal veterans group VoteVets, told reporters Thursday that while improvement is critical to the VA’s mission, “what this administration is doing is not about efficiency or improving care.”
He pointed to the remarks made by Trump advisor Alina Habba, who on Tuesday suggested that some federal workers who are veterans might not be “fit to have a job,” a quote that quickly prompted outrage.
“We have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people that actually work,” Habba told reporters outside the White House. “That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans by any means. 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.”
Eaton said that stance reflected that the DOGE cuts are “far more about cruelty than efficiency.”
And American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley called on Congress to intervene in the firings, saying that Trump and DOGE’s “reckless plan” will backfire on millions of veterans and their families
“The DOGE plunder of career VA employees, adding to the illegal mass firings of thousands of probationary employees, can only make matters worse,” he said in a statement. “Veterans and their families will suffer unnecessarily, and the will of Congress will be ignored.”
Most Republicans so far have chosen to keep quiet or offer muted responses to the Trump administration’s changes.
A former VA secretary under Trump’s first term, David Shulkin, said Thursday on CNN that he did not “know any system that slashes its way to excellence,” though did not outright condemn the move.
Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Mich.) sent a letter to Collins on Tuesday, asking for a review of the VA’s workforce reduction process and consider rehiring laid-off personnel.
“The Department of Veterans Affairs has a responsibility to those it serves to exercise the utmost degree of discipline when reducing the workforce,” Barrett wrote. “We must collectively recognize that any veteran who hangs up their boots and continues to serve their country at the VA is cut from a different cloth. It is incumbent upon us to treat them with the dignity and respect they deserve, even if separation is warranted.”
In a Wednesday evening cabinet meeting at the White House, Collins reportedly stressed the VA should not bluntly slash employees and instead need to be strategic about it, The New York Times reported.
Trump agreed, The Times reported, and said the VA should keep smart employees and get rid of bad ones.
