The Trump administration is looking to roll back staffing at the department charged with caring for American veterans by firing as many as 80,000 workers who were hired as part of a Biden administration initiative to improve care and cover veterans exposed to burn pits and toxic substances.
The plan is laid out in a memorandum, first reported on by Government Executive, which came from VA chief of staff Christopher Syrek and calls to reduce the number of employees on the payroll to 2019 levels.
It instructs top-level staff to prepare for an agency-wide reorganization in August to "resize and tailor the workforce to the mission and revised structure."
The memorandum also calls for agency officials to work with the White House's Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency to "move out aggressively, while taking a pragmatic and disciplined approach" to meeting objectives laid out by the administration, which has started a concerted effort to reduce the number of people on federal payrolls.
In public social media posts, Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and a prominent Trump campaign donor, has alluded to presidential election results in the District of Columbia — a heavily Democratic city that has never given its electoral votes to a Republican candidate — as justification for slashing the federal workforce.
Veterans have already been speaking out against the cuts at the VA, which so far have included a few thousand employees and hundreds of contracts. More than 25 percent of the VA's workforce are veterans themselves.
In Congress, Democrats have decried the cuts at the VA and other agencies, while Republicans have watched the Trump administration's changes with caution.
Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate committee that oversees veteran's affairs, said in a statement that the Trump administration "has launched an all-out assault" against progress the VA has made in expanding its services as the number of covered veterans grows and includes those impacted by toxic burn pits.
"Their plan prioritizes private sector profits over veterans' care, balancing the budget on the backs of those who served. It's a shameful betrayal, and veterans will pay the price for their unforgivable corruption, incompetence, and immorality," he said.
Doug Collins, the former Georgia congressman who now serves as the Trump administration’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs, responded to the reports of the massive layoff plan in a lengthly video posted to X (formerly Twitter) late Wednesday in which he confirmed the plans to reduce staffing levels by 80.000, back to pre-Biden levels.
The days of kicking the can down the road are over. We owe America’s Veterans solutions! pic.twitter.com/KDHMefOWOH
— VA Secretary Doug Collins (@SecVetAffairs) March 5, 2025
Collins groused that the department he leads “has been a punching bag among veterans, Congress and the media for decades” and said veterans “have been asking for a more efficient, accountable and transparent” for years.
He said the department is “conducting a department wide review of its organization, operations and structure” as part of a “pragmatic and disciplined approach to eliminating waste and bureaucracy, increasing efficiency and improving health care, benefits and services to veterans” in consultation with Musk’s cost-cutting efforts.
“There are many people complaining about the changes we're making at the VA but what we most of them are really saying is, let's just keep doing the same thing at the VA has always done,” Collins said. “We'll be making major changes, so get used to it right now.”
With additional reporting by agencies
