As recently as last week, Donald Trump told reporters that the White House is keeping track of the number of military veterans who are losing their jobs as a result of his administration’s policies. “We hope it’s going to be as small a number as possible,” the president said.
As a practical matter, those “hopes” don’t appear to be amounting to much. Thousands of veterans have already been laid off as a result of the White House’s agenda, even as veterans’ benefits are put in jeopardy by Elon Musk and his DOGE operation.
It was against this backdrop that Trump’s Veterans Affairs Department announced this week that it’s laying off 80,000 workers as part of an agencywide reorganization. While the precise total of veterans who’ll lose their jobs as part of this effort hasn’t yet been announced, it stands to reason that the number will be significant: Veterans make up a disproportionate share of federal employees in general, and at the VA, the percentage is likely to be even higher.
The White House’s Alina Habba told reporters this week that military veterans affected by the DOGE-led layoffs may not be “fit to have a job at this moment.”
As it turns out, she wasn’t the only member of Trump’s team making controversial comments about veterans headed for the unemployment line. NBC News reported on Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, who released a video via social media this week, sharing his perspective on the developments.
“Now, we regret anyone who loses their job, and it’s extraordinarily difficult for me, especially as a VA leader and your secretary, to make these types of decisions,” Collins said in the video. “But the federal government does not exist to employ people. It exists to serve people.”
But no one has ever argued that the federal government exists to employ people. The point has always been that those who work on agencies such as the VA are there to serve Americans who need assistance.
If Collins or other Republicans want to argue that the department can lay off 80,000 people and not sacrifice care or benefits for veterans at all, they’re welcome to make the case. The fact that they’ve offered no such assurances suggests benefit cuts for those who served are, at a minimum, on the table for the Trump administration. The Cabinet secretary added in the same video, “We’ll be making major changes, so get used to it.” But therein lies the rub: If you’re an injured veteran, worried about what Trump and his team have in store for the trimmed down VA, getting “used to” fewer services and less care is a life-changing proposition. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement, “Slashing nearly 80,000 VA staff is a benefit cut by another name. This staffing cut is a betrayal of our promise to our service members. It will mean longer wait times, fewer appointments, less health care service for our veterans.” The New York Democrat added, in reference to the VA cuts, “It is outrageous. No one in America bargained for this and Democrats are going to fight this tooth and nail working with our veterans service organizations to fight these awful, unfair cuts that take out the desire to give tax cuts to billionaires on our veterans who served us so well. This is just one of the most outrageous things they have done and there’s a long list.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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