If Donald Trump and Elon Musk have their way, a document obtained by the Associated Press lets us know, the US Department of Veterans Affairs will have fired some 80,000 employees by the time we celebrate Veterans Day in November.
Sure, that’ll leave millions of US military veterans with crappier healthcare and far fewer services, but they knew when they enlisted — or for older vets, possibly when they were drafted — that they would be called on to sacrifice for their country. Or at least to sacrifice for the billionaires and megacorporations who own it. The GOP has to at least partly offset its planned $4.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the very wealthy, and we all need to do our part. (The majority of us who never served will pitch in by having all our other government services slashed, including Medicare and Medicaid.) Per the AP:
The VA’s chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, told top-level officials at the agency Tuesday that it had an objective to cut enough employees to return to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000. That would require terminating tens of thousands of employees after the VA expanded during the Biden administration, as well as to cover veterans impacted by burn pits under the 2022 PACT Act.
The memo 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.” It also calls for agency officials to work with the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency to “move out aggressively, while taking a pragmatic and disciplined approach” to the Trump administration’s goals. Government Executive first reported on the internal memo.
The memo talks all military, so there’s really nothing to be done but follow the orders, right? Surely they must be legal. We’re all waist deep in the Big MAGA, and the big fool says to push on.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins helpfully insisted in a video Wednesday that laying off tens of thousands of employees wouldn’t result in any cuts to veterans’ healthcare or benefits, which is a very careful way to parse things. Vets will clearly have the same benefits and coverage as ever; there simply won’t be that many people to deliver them.
“This administration is finally going to give the veterans what they want,” Collins said. “President Trump has a mandate for generational change in Washington and that’s exactly what we’re going to deliver at the VA.”
None of that is actually true, but that’s the line the administration is sticking with, despite veterans’ protests against the cuts. The White House is pretty sure vets, who make up about a quarter of VA staff, won’t mind being laid off, because as spokesperson Anna Kelly explained, Donald Trump
“refuses to accept the VA bureaucracy and bloat that has hindered veterans’ ability to receive timely and quality care.” She added that the changes would “ensure greater efficiency and transparency” at the VA.
How true this is. People are happy to lose their jobs once they understand they’re simply bloated bureaucrats getting in the way of efficiency.
Even so, there are some grumpy Gusses who say wholesale firings aren’t the lean efficient machine Trump believes them to be, like former VA Inspector General Michael Missal, who did that job for nine years and isn’t named Gus at all. He was among the many IGs Trump shitcanned in February, so that Trump and Musk could pursue efficiency and transparency in secret, which is way easier.
“What’s going to happen is VA’s not going to perform as well for veterans, and veterans are going to get harmed,” said Missal, who was a guest of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. at Trump’s Tuesday address to Congress.
Missal said that the VA is actually a “really complicated, hard to manage organization,” easily as complex as a major corporation, but maybe he’s wrong and it’s actually no more complicated than a lemonade stand where you squeeze our former service members and collect the “juice,” if you know what we mean. (We mean human blood, in which Elon must bathe several hours a day. Don’t ask.)
Trump voter Nathan Hooven, an Air Force vet, was given the heave-ho from his job at a veterans’ health facility in Virginia in the early rounds of cuts, even though heave-ho’s are more of a Navy thing. Hooven told the AP, as a leopard casually gnawed on his nose and left cheekbone, “I think a lot of other veterans voted the same way, and we have been betrayed. […] I feel like my life and the lives of so many like me, so many that have sacrificed so much for this country, are being destroyed.”
Army vet James Stancil, 62, who voted for Harris and was fired from a VA hospital in Milwaukee, compared the experience to being shot and dropped from a helicopter, which please do not give Elon any ideas. MAGA creeps already think jokes about tossing political enemies from helicopters are the third funniest thing in the universe, right after “identifying as an attack helicopter” and saying their pronouns are “attack” and “helicopter.”
“And you just free fall and hit the ground — that’s it,” said Stancil. […] “I’m not dead weight. You’re tossing off the wrong stuff.”
Stancil said the email he received telling him his performance wasn’t good enough came as “a complete shock” because he had previously received positive feedback. Hooven also said his performance was cited despite similarly positive feedback during his 11 months as a probationary employee.
“I’ve been blindsided,” Hooven said. “My life has been completely upended with zero chance to prepare. I was fired without notice, unjustly, based on a lie that I’m a subpar, poor performer at my job.”
This does not mean, however, that the administration is insensitive to the difficulties faced by the useless deadwood it’s throwing into the wood chipper so that billionaires can have more tax cuts!
Former Trump personal lawyer Alina Habba, now on Trump’s legal team at the White House, made clear that she is very empathetic to the predicament of those hardworking billionaires, explaining to reporters that
“[We] have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people that actually work. […] That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans, by any means. We are going to care for them in the right way. But perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment, or not willing to come to work.”
Oddly, the AP reporters appear not to have sought comment from any veterans on Habba’s sympathetic characterization of them as useless eaters who are dragging down our nation and must be very thoughtfully and respectfully disposed of in a burn pit along with other waste product of war, the end.
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[AP / AP]
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