Earlier this month, an internal memo from the Department of Veterans Affairs leaked, describing plans to cut 80,000 employees—about 20% of its overall workforce—as part of streamlining efforts to satisfy the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Doug Collins, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, later clarified that the number would be “approximately” 72,000, “without making cuts to health care or benefits to veterans and VA beneficiaries.” The “reduction in force” (RIF) will begin in August, and take the department back to 2019 staffing levels.
The first time I heard about these efforts didn’t come from the news, however. One of my doctors mentioned in passing that the VA was not renewing their contract. The VA under DOGE had decided to outsource the doctor’s role to the private sector. Despite Collins’s vow that DOGE cuts would not affect veteran’s care—that it was “fake news”—my care is already being affected. Please forgive my skepticism of his reassurances.
On Reddit discussion forums dedicated to veterans issues, and on social media, people seem to be increasingly anxious as DOGE makes its cuts, both to the VA workforce, and to veterans’ future benefits. These are uncertain times for veterans, and uncertainty breeds fear. Many ClearanceJobs readers are cleared veterans. Here is what has happened so far, and what is likely to come.
HIRINGS AND FIRINGS AT VETERANS AFFAIRS
Early in 2025, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) directed agencies to fire “probationary employees,” which are workers with less than one or two years in their positions. (Notably, “probationary” doesn’t just mean fresh-faced graduates new to the job market. The government would consider a twenty year veteran of the National Institute of Health, who moved over to the VA, to be “probationary” in his or her new job, for example.) Those cuts came first, because the government could fire such workers without triggering an appeals processes. A federal judge later ordered that many such employees be reinstated. However, this lawsuit won’t protect workers soon to be fired as part of the RIF.
The VA is about to look very different. The White House’s goal is to reduce the VA workforce to 2019 (i.e., pre-Biden) levels. It’s worth recalling why the VA hired so many new employees in the first place: First, there was a surge in disability claims because the federal government finally acknowledged that veterans breathing in toxic dust and fumes in Afghanistan and Iraq contributed to respiratory issues. (The PACT Act stands for the “Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics.”) Secondly, in 2019, chronic understaffing at the VA led to a rash of veterans committing suicide in VA hospital parking lots.
WHAT THE PLAN MIGHT BE
The firings are coming, and nobody knows what that means. Already, the VA takes an eternity to process disability claims. Obviously, firing a fifth of the workforce will not speed that process along. I might be more inclined to believe Collins if the VA had first unveiled some extraordinary new system to improve veteran’s care and the disability process, and then announced the need for fewer people. Instead, they’ve decided to “aggressively” fire workers, and then figure out Step 2. This is a recipe for disaster.
Though the VA is not telling us their plans, a notional guide exists for what the future holds. In 2023, the Heritage Foundation, a think tank, updated its presidential transition policy book, Mandate for Leadership, part of its “Project 2025” recommendations. At 900 pages long, it wasn’t light reading in any sense of the word. The book laid out the most comprehensive wish-list of conservative government reform ever written. Each chapter focused on a different federal agency and the changes the government should make.
Amidst rapid change, Mandate for Leadership is as good a guide as any for interpreting what’s happening at the VA, and what might happen next.
HAL 9000 AT YOUR SERVICE
The report leans heavily on management restructuring, and technology already in the private sector, as means of reform. Musk and DOGE have been unapologetic about their desire to infuse federal computer systems with artificial intelligence.
This does not fill me with hope. Elsewhere in the federal government, the IRS currently has an AI bot running its customer support line. I ran into a filing issue this year related to possible identity theft. The government’s computer made a mistake, however. I had to call them repeatedly to correct their error. I typically have to spend a half-hour each call explaining my problem to a computer, only for the AI to give up. Rather than connect me with a human, it hangs up the phone. So I wonder what will happen when we do that to thousands of veterans with severe PTSD.
DISABILITY BENEFITS
The question most veterans I know are asking is: Are disability benefits in trouble? The answer, according to Mandate for Leadership, is “Yes, but…” Qualifying for future benefits is going to be a hell of a lot harder than it already was (and it was already pretty damn hard). But as Mandate for Leadership states pretty directly: “Wholesale benefits reform is unnecessary and politically a ‘third rail.’” So at least they are slightly afraid.
Regarding the first point, the book states, specifically that the VA’s Schedule for Rating Disabilities (VASRD) “has assigned disability ratings to a growing number of health conditions over time; some are tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service. The further growth in presumptive service-connected medical conditions pursued by Congress and Veteran Service Organizations, begun with Agent Orange and most recently for Burn Pits/Airborne Toxins, has led to historic increases in mandatory VBA spending in recent years.”
The authors of the book really don’t like this. They never explain their qualifications for determining whether health conditions are unrelated to military service, or why they think that is the case. In the spirit of balance, maybe all those veterans who encountered Agent Orange are faking their deaths from prostate cancer, but I don’t know. Seems pretty extreme to me.
REASSESSING VETERANS’ RATINGS
The book’s authors also lament how long it takes for the VA to “reassess the VASRD and its ratings for compensation” (i.e. cut benefits). “The next Administration should explore how VASRD reviews could be accelerated with clearance from [Office of Management and Budget] to target significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants while preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants.”
That is at least a glimmer of good news. Though “or partially” gives me pause, they don’t seem too eager to take away benefits from veterans currently rated as disabled. But if you haven’t made any claims, you probably ought to get on it, and soon. Remember: Congress only passed the PACT Act in 2022. Not even three years have elapsed, and there are more than two million veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s going to take a little longer than that for everyone to make their legitimate claims. But DOGE is about efficiency—not service.
ELIMINATING FRAUD
Mandate for Leadership also wants to “reduce improper payment and fraud.” The authors explain that “about $500 million is improperly paid out each year. Better tools, training, and management could reduce this substantially, but rule changes at the departmental level would be needed.” I could find no citation in the book for this number, but if it is true, I think everyone would agree that yes, this would be an excellent thing to do.
It also calls for the VA to “hire more private companies to perform disability medical examinations. Delays in completing the examinations could be eliminated with more external capacity.” Every veteran I know with a disability wants the examination process to be sped up as well. But I’d like some reassurances that eliminating delays isn’t a code for denying claims quicker. Sometimes, a veteran’s cancer just doesn’t cooperate with an efficiency schedule.
GOING PRIVATE
I have had mixed experiences with privatized VA services. Accessing community care clinics for urgent care is a big improvement on the VA emergency room. But half the time, the in-network urgent care clinics I use have no idea how the process works. One clinic insisted that I needed my VA doctor to give me preapproval before I used urgent care. It was 9pm and she didn’t seem to understand that if I could get a doctor’s appointment, I wouldn’t be at an urgent care. (She also seemed to miss the point of urgent care entirely. Are veterans now supposed to plan when we will be sick?)
Pharmacies are no better. And I’m not talking about some local fly-by-night pharmacy, but the big ones. I spent two hours at CVS last month to get antibiotics because nobody knew what codes to use in the system. I gave them the VA information card that has a support line specifically devoted to CVS pharmacies. It may as well have been the Voynich manuscript, because it only confused them even more. Finally, I just paid for the medicine out of pocket, because I was sick, sick of them, and sick of the whole process. At least the VA hospital ER gives you a bed.
Nobody is arguing that the VA is perfect. And DOGE isn’t responsible for the problems veterans have had with community care, for example. But firing twenty-plus thousand workers without a rock solid plan in place is not planning for success. It’s planning to fail America’s warfighters.
