According to a Pew poll shortly before the 2024 election, 60 percent of the 16 million Americans who have served in the military supported Donald Trump, and 55 percent believed his policies would make things better for veterans. Have they?
Consider the wrenching stories emerging from the massive, haphazard cuts that Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are making to the federal workforce. There’s the retired Navy captain and high-ranking official at FEMA who accepted DOGE’s buyout offer, only to be later fired anyway; the security specialist at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency whose termination letter emphasized his probationary status even though he’s a medically retired veteran with multiple years of service at the Department of Defense; the disabled Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan and was fired from his job in public affairs at Veterans Affairs; and so many more. As one disabled veteran who voted for Trump and was fired last week put it: “We didn’t think they were going to take a chainsaw to a silk rug.”
These wholesale cuts, which ultimately could target more than 300,000 federal workers, have fallen disproportionately on veterans because the government is by far the largest employer of veterans in America: They comprise 28 percent of the federal workforce, versus 5 percent in the private sector. House Democrats estimate that nearly 6,000 veterans have lost their jobs already. A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the cuts so far, and those currently planned, finds that as many as 100,000 veterans will be out of work when all is said and done.
What happens then? Around 36 percent of veterans in the civil service are disabled or have a serious health condition, so roughly 36,000 disabled veterans will be added to the unemployed rolls, where they are certain to face much more difficulty in landing a private-sector job than others fired in the purge—many will no doubt spiral. The question then becomes whether there will still be sufficient government services to help them.
After all, more than 2,500 Veterans Affairs employees have been fired, including staff critical to the functioning of the Veterans Crisis Line, a 24/7 toll-free hotline that has been instrumental in mitigating the catastrophic suicide rate among veterans. To the members of Congress who voted to send U.S. troops to war, the generals who led the campaigns, the presidents of both parties who gave the orders, and the citizens who voted for them: Who will be responsible when a veteran calls the VA crisis line and nobody answers?
Although I didn’t think I would when I signed my contract, as a combat veteran, I’ve come to rely on numerous “benefits” that were promised by my military recruiter. Like many veterans, I’ve used a handful of them over the years—from the G.I. Bill, which allowed me to attend graduate school and find my first private-sector job after leaving the military, to the VA health care I still use today. I have all my prescription drugs mailed to me from the VA, receive a yearly pair of glasses and an eye exam, undergo biannual primary care visits, and receive the occasional colonoscopy. I received my first Covid shot at the Manhattan VA, and although I have never used the VA’s mental health services, it’s good to know that they’re there should I ever feel the need to speak to someone who specializes in the issues all veterans deal with.
The federal government plays a unique but critical role for veterans, providing a professional stepping stone, or even sanctuary, for many who retire from military service. Transitioning from the military to the civilian workforce can be extraordinarily difficult. In addition to extremely different work cultures, veterans often face the lifelong burden of recovery from their deployments. It can be hard to work a “regular” job, whether it’s on a production line or in an office, after killing another human being, losing friends in combat, and suffering life-altering physical injuries, such as burns, amputations, and brain damage, in addition to the invisible symptoms created by war like moral injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. I know. I’m a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who is currently rated 70 percent disabled due to a mix of burn pit exposure and only recently diagnosed PTSD, even though I returned from Iraq and Afghanistan more than a decade ago.
The government thus allows veterans with disabilities to continue serving their country without wearing a uniform many of them were forced to take off due to debilitating injuries. It is a place of work where, unlike in the private sector, your supervisor has done a few tours and knows how it can be, where others have prosthetic limbs and know the difference between what you need help with and what you want to do on your own. (The government is also much more rigorous than the private sector in its openness to hiring people with disabilities and ensuring that applicants aren’t discriminated against.)
Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, is now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, where he has partnered with Musk in the mass firing of federal workers. Last year, Vought said this: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. 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.”
The trauma that these cuts will cause is even more devastating than Vought can imagine. The DOGE purge will affect every corner of the country, devastating military-veteran communities like Huntsville, Alabama, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. As the country is driven into recession, veterans will face chronic unemployment and the ripple effects of poverty, homelessness, epidemics of self-medication, and suicide. Whatever pittance these federal cuts save will pale in comparison to the costs, literal and figurative, of the misery they will cause.
In President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, he laid out the essential covenant that binds American society to those whom it sends to war on its behalf: “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” It is an ethos that has existed within our republic since Congress approved the first veteran pensions in 1818, for those who’d fought for American independence under George Washington. Veterans rely on these programs, services, and “benefits” because they followed orders given by political and military leaders who now either tacitly support Trump’s cuts or are remaining silent. This is unconscionable. All members of Congress who are afraid to stand up for these fired veterans ought to resign in shame. Otherwise, on primary day, they will undoubtedly find someone with years of distinguished government service and expertise who, having been cruelly laid off, is ready to do the job.
