The Department of Veterans Affairs has backed down from its plans to cut 83,000 jobs after the decision provoked a public outcry.
The cull was initially announced earlier this year as part of the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to slim down the federal workforce, spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency.
The administration had stated in a March memo that it planned to downsize the department to its 2019 level of 400,000 employees, which had risen to 484,000 as of January this year when Trump returned to the White House.
Its staffing levels were down to 467,000 by June and are now set to fall to 455,000 by the end of September, meaning that 27,000 people will have lost their jobs since the president took office, with no further redundancies deemed necessary.
The department has moved to reassure veterans that it has “multiple safeguards in place to ensure these staff reductions do not impact veteran care or benefits.”
While VA Secretary Doug Collins had insisted the much bigger reduction in the workforce was tough but necessary, veterans’ advocacy groups warned that it would have devastating long-term consequences for former members of the armed forces, who deserved better after serving their country.
“Gutting VA will result in delayed appointments and substandard care, leading directly to more veteran deaths,” said Kayla Williams, an Iraq War veteran and senior policy advisor at VoteVets.
Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, also slammed the plan as “a gut punch” and “breathtaking in its potential significance and its malevolence and cruelty.”
Blumenthal was no happier with Monday’s U-turn, insisting the structural changes at the VA indicate it “is bleeding employees across the board at an unsustainable rate because of the toxic work environment created by this administration and DOGE’s slash and trash policies.”
The atmosphere to which he alluded was reported earlier this year when the remaining staff at the department were said to be “fearful, paranoid, and demoralized” about their prospects.
“The veterans now check in and ask us how we are doing,” a social worker at a hospital in the Great Lakes region told The Washington Post in May.
“They see the news and are very aware of the circumstances and fearful of losing VA support that they depend on.”
VA spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz told The Independent at the time that the reporting was “inaccurate” and accused The Post and “other biased media outlets” of writing “dishonest hit pieces” about the Trump administration’s efforts to “fix” the department.
