The Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) plans to cut more than 80,000 agency workers that help manage benefits to US army veterans, according to an internal memorandum seen by Reuters.
VA Cabinet Chief Christopher Syrek sent a memo to senior authorities of the agency last Tuesday, saying that the goal is for the agency to return to the level of just under 400,000 employees from 2019. This means firing about 82,000 workers.
The memorandum directs agency employees to work with the department of efficiency of the government of billionaire Elon Musk to make the cuts.
Musk and his team were in charge by US President Donald Trump of reducing the size and cost of federal bureaucracy. So far, about 25,000 US government officials have been fired and another 75,000 have accepted a dismissal agreement out of 2.3 million federal civil servants.
Veterans groups spoke about cuts to the agency after recent layoffs of thousands of workers. About a quarter of the VA workforce is made up of army veterans.
Richard Blumenthal, the main Democrat of the Senate Committee that supervises veterans -related issues, said in a statement that the cuts of the memorandum represent a “total attack … against the VA workforce and the veterans it serves.”
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Connecticut’s Blumenthal said that job cuts appear to be a step of a plan to privatize VA services.
“It is a shameful betrayal, and veterans will pay the price for the undescribable corruption, incompetence and immorality,” he said in a statement.
Navened Shah, political director of Common Defense, a group of veterans, criticized planned layoffs.
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“Donald Trump is once again proving what we always knew – that he has nothing but contempt for our veterans,” he said.
“Many VA workers are themselves veterans and this is a total betrayal to those who have served. He is destroying the system that was designed to take care of our brothers and sisters in arms. ”
News about Tuesday’s memorandum was published on a day when the Trump government suffered a temporary setback in its attempts to dismiss workers from the federal bureaucracy. A commission that analyzes the layoffs of federal civil servants ordered the department of agriculture temporarily restore thousands of workers who have lost their jobs amid the cuts led by Trump and Musk.
