VA boss slashes veterans’ benefits, cuts 80,000 jobs

The author is a transgender veteran, retired from the Veterans Administration.

Doug Collins, secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), announced March 5 that the VA plans to cut over 80,000 workers. Many of these workers are veterans themselves and have been patients for a long period. This amounts to an outrageous assault on the veteran workforce since at least 30% of the workers fired from the VA were in the military and are veterans themselves.

The VA secretary is acting with direction from the centi-billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called department of government efficiency (DOGE). These outrageous criminal cutbacks would impact veterans’ health care and benefits and potentially affect transgender veterans’ gender affirming care.

Collins said the goal was merely to reduce the VA workforce to 2019 staffing levels. He failed to mention that in 2019 in Trump‘s first term there were cuts that amounted to 49,600 vacancies at that time. He absurdly claimed that a 15% cut in funding could be made without making cuts to VA health care and benefits to veterans and VA workers.

This claim is an absurd outright lie that people at the Manhattan VA hospital would never believe for a minute. The bureaucrats claim that this “aggressive reorganization” is planned to take place in August of this year.

This new round of cuts comes on the heels of plans to close many VA hospitals and clinics. One proposal floating around projects closing three out of four hospitals and large clinics in the New York metropolitan area. What an outrageous insult it is to claim this would improve services to veterans. What an outrageous lie.

These cuts instead would lead to an increase in death, especially to veterans in their 80s and 90s who need more comprehensive care. If Musk and Trump were honest, they would say their goal is to murder tens of thousands of veterans and other workers and oppressed people who rely on the administrative state to survive.

Guards at the Manhattan VA hospital have told this reporter that right now on some wards there are dozens of veterans with only one nurse caring for all of them. The objective of these criminal cuts is to sabotage the effectiveness of VA health care, which is centralized and free.

Then the MAGA crowd could use the decline in care as a pretext to attack the VA for shortcomings in processing applications for benefits. At the same time they demand doctors see twice as many veterans in the same time frame when the number they see now is already too much.

It would also increase wait times for appointments and other services. To put it bluntly, these criminal bureaucrats are pyromaniacs complaining about the arson they create, and then they use the chaos they cause as a pretext to privatize health care. This would be an outright disaster for veterans.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) issued a statement in reaction to the new announcements from the VA head saying, “We slammed these layoffs and said the VA will no longer be able to fulfill the will of Congress if it returns to the 2019 level of staffing.”

Union national president Everett Kelley said most VA workers “were hired explicitly to provide the benefits provided for in the PACT Act.” (In 2024 this act expanded VA health care and benefits for Veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances.) He called on Congress to intervene in these taxes and put a stop to Elon Musk’s rampage through America’s agencies in a blatant attempt to justify privatizing governmental services.

The only response for veterans and veterans health workers is to fight this blatant attempt and to join in a united front on many levels available to fight this reactionary regime. Veterans and VA workers refuse to take these attacks lying down and are prepared to do whatever is possible to stop them.