VA employees are 'fearful, paranoid, demoralized' as officials share few specifics to axe 83,000 employees
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Source: The Independent
Tuesday 27 May 2025 10:39 EDT
Employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs are “fearful, paranoid, and demoralized” as plans loom to downsize the agency by cutting around 83,000 jobs but details remain vague, according to a report. Proposals to shrink the workforce by 15 percent were first reported in March after a department memo set out an objective to cut enough employees to return to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000. The move would require terminating tens of thousands of employees.
VA Secretary Douglas A. Collins was grilled about the proposed cuts by the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs earlier this month, but claimed the 80,000 target was merely a “goal to look at our restructuring.” Since then, however, morale has been “plummeting” at the department as staff anxiously wait to hear more about the plans, The Washington Post reports.
“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 newspaper. “They see the news and are very aware of the circumstances and fearful of losing VA support that they depend on.” Another contractor at a VA medical center in Palo Alto, California, said employees are currently “fearful, paranoid, demoralized.”
One veteran staffer said in a written submission seen by the outlet that “Iraq felt safer than being a VA employee currently does.” Around a quarter of employees at the VA are veterans. “My leadership in Iraq cared about me as a human and didn’t just see me as a number,” the VA communications worker said.
Read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/veterans-affairs-job-cuts-trump-musk-collins-b2758505.html
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