Posting #43: The Story of Veterans and the VA (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this posting, I outlined who are military veterans and what benefits and services they are granted. In that posting I also began specifying how veterans are impacted by the current administration’s hiring freeze and cutting of the civil service. In this posting, I continue enumerating how veterans are impacted.

SERVICES

Because there are laws stipulating that veterans should receive preferential and affirmative action treatment in the federal government and consequently, they constitute 30% of the federal workforce, they are the group most likely to be affected by this massive and immediate downsizing of the civilian workforce in the federal government. In the Trump II administration, for instance, the VA plans to cut at least 80K workers, Health and Human Services is dispensing with at least 20K employees, DoD aims to fire at least 70K employees, the Agriculture Department hasn’t committed yet to how many it will fire, and the IRS plans to reduce its 100K workforce by a third. These firings and reductions will undoubtedly impact veterans who have been employed by the federal government.

But even veterans who don’t work for the federal government will be adversely impacted by the firings, as fewer and weakened services will be available to them with these stark and immediate reductions. For instance, the VA MISSION Act of 2018—signed by Trump in his first administration—stipulated that full capacity staffing of the VA was to be a priority AND veterans could seek private sector care if they lived too far from a VA center. The Biden Administration abided by the law, (because it is a law and not an Executive Order), continuing to submit annual reports to Congress on full capacity staffing and growing private sector care to nearly double what it was in 2020.

Nonetheless, not only is full staffing unlikely given all the firings, Republicans in Congress are planning now to expand even further taxpayers paying for veterans seeking private sector care. This is no wonder when Project 2025 urges VHA privatization (641-655) and most of the private sector healthcare is an industry owned by for-profit corporations. “More than 3 out of 4 doctors (77.6%) are employed by hospitals or corporate entities” and “Corporate entities [health insurers, private equity firms, and large pharmacy chains] own 30.1% of physician practices.” Furthermore, as of 2020, “roughly 80 percent of the approximately 4,500 general acute care hospitals in the United States are controlled by private non-profit or for-profit organizations.” Moving veteran care to the private sector will enrich these for-profit corporations, whose first obligation is to their shareholders and not their patients. Maybe the veteran above who hypothesized that “It’s almost like he’s trying to tear the VA down” wasn’t off track.

But other veteran services will suffer from the Trump cuts to veteran employees and funding.

· Cuts to healthcare. Because the VHA makes up 90% of the VA’s workforce, “cuts to VA workers means cuts to health care.” Simultaneously, the number of veterans eligible to seek VA health care expanded in the last year while the VA was struggling to fill its 66K vacancies. With 83K employees planned to be fired or taking the offer to leave and the Republican plan to funnel VA dollars to the private sector, there may be fundamental changes to the VA.

The VA already has announced that it will phase out treatment for “gender dysphoria,” even though the “Veterans with diagnoses related to gender identity increased from 2,513 to 10,457 between 2011 to 2021.” This policy is in response to Trump’s Executive Order specifying only two “sexes,” ignoring entirely people who are intersex, let alone transgender people. The VA Director, an Air Force Reserve Chaplain, said “I mean no disrespect to anyone, but VA should not be focused on helping Veterans attempt to change their sex.” The VA has never offered sex-change surgeries.

But in Trump’s first administration, the 2018 VA policy was to protect “access to treatments like hormone therapy and pre- and post-operative care for gender-affirming surgery.” The policy also “allowed trans veterans to use restrooms and be assigned rooms in VA facilities that match their gender identity and required staff to use their chosen names and pronouns.”

This Trump I policy obviously has been rescinded by Trump II.

And meanwhile, ProPublica reports on May 6, 2025 that “Doctors and others at VA hospitals and clinics across the country have been sending often desperate messages to headquarters detailing how cuts will harm veterans’ care” like “life-saving cancer trials.”

· Cuts to other benefits. Veterans will be impacted if Medicaid is cut, as Republicans plan. Nearly 10% of veterans use Medicaid for at least some of their health care, and 40% of them use Medicaid exclusively. More than half of uninsured veterans live in states that have not expanded Medicaid, so unless they are near a VA center, they have few options for health care.

Furthermore, more than a million veterans receive food aid through the Supplemental Nutritional Access Program (SNAP) while the Trump government is gutting food banks.

Republicans have proposed “cuts and other policy changes” to the SNAP program, increasing food insecurity for veterans.

· Lack of concern about mental health treatments. At a time when more veterans are seeking mental health therapy and with the order for VA mental health practitioners to return to what are often overcrowded offices, one VA facility offered its therapists this script: “Before we begin our session, I want to inform you that I am currently in a shared office space. While I will do my utmost to maintain your privacy, I cannot guarantee complete confidentiality.” The VA spokesperson offered this retort at the end of March: he called privacy concerns “nonsensical” and added, “VA is no longer a place where the status quo for employees is to simply phone it in from home.”

Not only is privacy a baseline tenet for mental health practitioners and the lack of privacy “violates ethics regulations and [federal] medical privacy laws,” many of these VA practitioners were hired to be remote workers. NPR reports that “Telehealth has become common in recent years among medical professionals—especially for mental health therapists—and the VA hired many clinicians on a remote basis. The practice allowed the VA to expand its reach of mental health services into rural areas” (emphasis added). In fact, the VA “pioneered the practice of virtual health care two decades ago as a way to reach isolated veterans” (emphasis added).

With the VA system “under a lot of duress” from the firings, return-to-office mandates, and more veterans seeking mental health therapy, the already insufficient number of mental health clinicians are looking for new jobs. All this stress undoubtedly will lead to a degradation of care for veterans.

Still, the VA is committed to a blanket, return-to-office policy. On April 12, 2025, it issued a memo in response to qualms about privacy laws: “providers must have private workspaces ‘that foster trusted, confidential, and therapeutic relationships with Veterans,’ when they return to their offices in the coming weeks.”

As NPR points out, however,

The memo does not explicitly say therapists would be allowed to continue working from their homes, if private office space is unavailable. But the clinicians said they do not see how they would both meet the privacy requirements and return to work, where many say there is simply not enough space for things like parking and bathroom traffic, let alone adequate private spaces for therapy.

· Veterans Suicide. As I pointed out in Posting #34, “The story of suicide in the military", veterans take their own lives at “a higher rate than for most active-duty servicepeople and for the US civilian population.” I also point out that:

· Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for post-9/11 veterans

· The 35-54-years-old age group is somewhat prone to suicide

· American Indian and Alaska Native Veterans are very prone to suicide

· LGBTQ veterans are exceptionally prone to suicide, at 7 times more likely

· Women veterans are twice as likely to take their lives as non-veteran women

· The rate of suicide is significantly higher for those who were NOT deployed but served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

The Trump Secretary of the VA, however, says to “get used to” the cuts he’s instituting, especially those for veteran suicide prevention. He ignores that “the last two years have seen a 25 percent reduction in suicide deaths among those who had contacted the Veterans Crisis Line in the last month.” And rather than minimizing the firearms that account for 72.2% of veterans’ suicides, ensuring that veterans are not at a socioeconomic disadvantage, or ensuring that veterans are housed, the VA instead is cutting by 71% the staffing of the Veterans [Suicide] Crisis Line and is reducing dramatically the dollars committed to suicide prevention.

Btw: The first Trump administration made preventing veteran suicide a priority. That policy obviously has been rescinded, too.

· Continuing to direct GI Bill educational benefits to for-profit institutions. According to Inside Higher Ed, even though the Post-9/11 GI Bill offers veterans money for tuition, books, and fees, veterans on average have less higher education than the national average. “Instead,” the column concludes, “veterans have, over the last several decades, disproportionately enrolled in for-profit institutions, which often fail to deliver the same career outcomes as our nation’s public and private nonprofit colleges.”

That’s a nice way of saying that for-profit institutions lie about outcomes. Federal law “forbids VA from paying GI Bill to schools that utilize deceptive or misleading advertising, sales, or enrollment practices.”

But in Trump’s first administration, he ignored that law as he protected “predatory for-profit colleges at the expense of veterans.” He would have had an interest in offering that protection, as “Trump University” (2005-2011) had been one such predatory college whose 7000 students took it to court and the “University” settled for $25M…in 2018, during Trump’s first administration.

It is not beyond the pale to imagine Trump trying again to take advantage of veterans for his own profit and those of his fellow predators.

· VA researchers are being fired and their (inconvenient) findings eliminated:

With overall budget cuts at the VA and the federal workforce reduction, at least 350 VA researchers will likely lose their jobs. That, along with a Trump directive to stop research on how poverty and race shape veteran health outcomes, will undermine not only the general well-being of veterans but also the entire medical establishment’s knowledge about substance use, mental health and deeper insights that VA research can provide on prevention and treatment of cancer and cardiovascular disease. (emphasis added)

· Tens of thousands of veterans with VA home loans are likely to face foreclosure. During the COVID-19 emergency in the Biden administration, when so many people lost their employment, many Americans with government-backed mortgages struggled to make their monthly payments. As part of the American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration extended a foreclosure moratorium and mortgage forbearance enrollment period so American mortgage-payers could get back on their feet. Reportedly, during 2023 alone, the VA helped 145K veteran mortgage-holders avoid foreclosure under this plan.

Meanwhile, those with VA loans suffering financial hardship were permitted to “skip mortgage payments for months and move the missing payments to the end of their loan term.” That Partial Claim Payment program ended, however, in October 2022 and, (according to the Biden administration) without Congressional approval, could not be renewed. Consequently, as many thousands of veterans were threatened with foreclosure and refinancing at a much higher rate was unaffordable, the Biden administration VA created the emergency VA Servicing Purchase (VASP) program. In this program, “the VA purchased delinquent loans from holders and became the primary loan servicer, providing borrowers a stable payment plan at a fixed rate of 2.5% for the remainder of their loan.” That program began on May 31, 2024 and reportedly has helped more than 20K veterans avoid foreclosure.

The VA taking on the full loan is not desirable. But the Trump II administration ended the VASP program on May 1, 2025 with no alternative in place. Says one veteran, this lack of an alternative is “intentionally cruel” as it will lead to foreclosures.

· Erasing veterans’ stories. In the Pentagon itself and on its website, the stories of veterans are being disappeared. The portraits of the recent Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and the recent Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, were removed from the Pentagon halls. Dozens of documents were removed from the DoD website to “scrub the department of race- and gender-focused policies and communications.” See here, here, here, and here for those disappeared from the Pentagon website.

The Arlington National Cemetery has also disappeared race and gender-focused history materials from its website “on the orders by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth targeting race and gender-related language and policies in the military.” These many-page erasures include “histories of prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members buried in the cemetery,” lesson plans, self-guided walking tours of notable veterans, and “phrases like ‘civil rights’ and ‘racial justice’ erased in favor of cliches referring to ‘service’.”

These erasures are vengeful pettiness, dishonoring—for no apparent reason—the service of American veterans.

This childish vindictiveness toward veterans and other civil servants is no accident. In two speeches made in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who has and is serving in both Trump terms as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and is reported by Bloomberg to be the “architect” of Trump’s imperial presidency, said about the civil service:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.” (emphasis added)

And now Trump says he wants to take away the one day—November 11—in the United States that for 87 years has honored all US veterans and name it instead, “Victory Day for World War I.” (This ignores the United States’ very late entry into the war and subsequent disputes about Americans’ isolationist, delayed impact.) Trump also wants to establish May 8 as “Victory Day for World War II,” ignoring, first, the role that the Soviet Union played in the European front, and second, that the US continued fighting World War II in the Pacific until Japan formally surrendered on September 2, 1945.

Not only is Trump revising history and ignoring the accomplishments of US allies, he demonstrates how he cares more about showy victory than veterans with these pronouncements and a $45M military parade scheduled for his birthday and paid for by American taxpayers.

What an obscenity.

With all of this—the cuts to employment, services, the erasure of stories and the intentional infliction of trauma—we can honestly say that Trump, the Commander-in-Chief, does not care about veterans.

And if he doesn’t care about venerated veterans who are preferred citizens with affirmative action benefits…what hope do the rest of us have?

And check out rantagainsttheregime.substack.com!