WASHINGTON: The US Department of Veterans Affairs is set to cut over 80,000 jobs in an effort to scale back to 2019 staffing levels, a decision that has drawn fierce criticism from veterans’ groups and Democrats, who argue it could endanger crucial support for former military personnel.
The VA’s chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, sent a memo to senior agency officials on Tuesday, telling them the goal was to return the agency to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000. That would mean cutting about 82,000 staff.
The memo directed agency staff to work with tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to make the cuts. It stated that two goals were to “eliminate waste” and “increase workforce efficiency”.
The scale of the planned layoffs at the VA is far greater than proposed cuts at other government agencies and will hit a department that looks after one of the most beloved groups in the US—its military veterans.
“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, but the federal government does not exist to employ people. It exists to serve people,” Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins said in a video posted on X on Wednesday.
The VA provides a huge array of benefits and medical help to veterans, and critics of the plan said the cuts will adversely impact that care.
Everett Kelley, head of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 311,000 VA employees, said, “Veterans and their families will suffer unnecessarily.”
Musk and his team have been tasked by President Donald Trump to slash the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy. To date, about 25,000 workers across the US government have been fired, according to a Reuters tally, and another 75,000 have taken a buyout, out of the 2.3 million federal civilian workforce.
Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the job cuts marked an escalation of a “full-scale, no-holds-barred assault on veterans” by Trump and Musk that would put veterans’ health benefits in “grave danger”.
A spokesperson for Jerry Moran, Republican chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The VA and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, sounded surprised by the size of the planned cuts. “I’m sure the VA can be reduced. But if you’re a veteran, you read it in the paper, it kind of rattles you,” Graham told reporters.
Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said the job cuts appeared to be one step in a plan to privatise VA services. “It’s a shameful betrayal,” Blumenthal said in a statement.
During his first term as president, Trump in 2018 signed a law that expanded veterans’ access to private sector healthcare paid for by the VA.
Naveed Shah, political director of Common Defence, a grassroots veterans group, decried the planned layoffs.
“He’s gutting the system that was designed to care for our brothers and sisters in arms.”
News of Tuesday’s memo came on a day when the Trump administration suffered a temporary setback in its efforts to cull workers from the federal bureaucracy.
A board that reviews the firings of federal employees has ordered the US Department of Agriculture to temporarily reinstate thousands of workers who lost their jobs as part of the layoffs spearheaded by Trump and Musk.
The Trump administration walked back on Tuesday a directive to fire probationary workers after a federal judge ruled that their mass terminations were illegal.
The Office of Personnel Management, the human resources arm of the federal workforce, revised a memo to state that it is not advising agencies to fire probationary workers on performance-related grounds.
An OPM official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was up to individual agencies what to do with their probationary employees, and they can still be let go.
