It’s been a couple of months since Donald Trump’s Veterans Affairs Department announced that it’s prepared to fire tens of thousands of workers as part of an agency-wide reorganization. Soon after, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins tried to defend the move, arguing that the federal government “does not exist to employ people.”
It was a wildly unpersuasive defense: No one has ever argued that the federal government exists to employ people. Rather, the point has always been that those who work at agencies such as the VA are there to serve Americans who need assistance, and mass layoffs likely mean fewer services to those who can ill-afford the cuts.
The Cabinet secretary added, “We’ll be making major changes, so get used to it.” That didn’t help, either: If you’re an injured veteran worried about what Republicans have in store for the trimmed-down VA, getting “used to” fewer services and less care is a life-changing proposition.
Two months later, Collins had another opportunity to defend the administration’s plans — this time during a congressional hearing. As NBC News reported, it did not go well.
In testy exchanges with multiple members of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Secretary Doug Collins said that his agency was looking into potentially cutting another 70,500 nonessential positions in a move that would make the agency more efficient. ‘The department’s history shows that adding more employees to the system doesn’t automatically equal better results,’ said Collins, a Navy veteran and former U.S. representative, who was sworn in in February.
At face value, that’s not necessarily a ridiculous argument, but it leads to an unavoidable follow-up question: What makes Collins and the Trump administration assume that fewer employees doing more work will lead to better results?
The secretary went on to say the planned mass firings will focus on those filling “nonessential roles,” such as interior designers and those who work in diversity, equity and inclusion.
But this, too, seems hard to accept at face value: Are we to believe that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs currently employees tens of thousands of designers and DEI workers? Because that seems unlikely.
Collins’ woeful appearance on Capitol Hill was more than just another example of a White House Cabinet secretary who appeared unprepared to defend the indefensible. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank attended the hearing and had a great column on this, noting that the secretary and his team have thrown the VA “into absolute chaos.”
The department announced that it was terminating 875 contracts — then announced that it was terminating the terminations. It fired 2,400 workers — then took 1,400 of them back as the dismissals are challenged in court. Across the country, notices have been taped to the doors of VA clinics announcing closures because of staff shortages. The department has ended clinical trials that provided treatments to veterans for cancers, traumatic brain injuries and other illnesses, ProPublica reported on Tuesday. The department even sacked people who worked on the veterans’ suicide prevention hotline, only to hire them back. And this is but a fraction of the destruction that’s planned: Collins has announced a goal of eliminating 15 percent of VA staff — some 83,000 jobs — without any word about how he intends to go about it.
At multiple points during the hearing, Collins tried to argue that veterans need not be overly concerned, because the administration was unlikely to oust front-line health care workers. But he also failed to inspire confidence, struggling to provide basic information that a VA secretary ought to know, while conceding that he’s been forced to rehire some of the personnel he fired in haste. Given the degree to which Collins has already destabilized the VA, it seems hard to imagine many veterans feeling comforted by his testimony. It led Milbank to conclude, “What the Trump administration is doing to Veterans Affairs is, in short, a microcosm of what it has been doing to the overall federal government: sabotage without purpose.” This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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."
Latest Post
Recommended
