The worst RIFs are evaded for now, but the long-term future of veterans’ health care is still threatened by privatization. The post VA Secretary Says No Department Wide RIFs, But It’s No Time to Cheer appeared first on Washington Monthly.
The woes of organized labor aren’t new to us. One of us (Steve) spent many years as a labor representative in the telecom industry, which has been downsizing its unionized workforce for 40 years, often issuing corporate announcements of significant pending “reductions in force” (RIF). When that RIF alarm bell goes off, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have repeatedly mobilized against looming cuts.
Through workplace mobilization, outreach to labor, community, and political allies, and direct negotiations with telecoms like Verizon or AT&T, these unions have often averted layoffs by securing early retirement incentives.
Are buyouts and early retirement offers cause for celebration or a reminder that management still wants to put heads on the chopping block?
That’s the question facing Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employees after getting a modicum of good news from VA Secretary Doug Collins. Four months ago, a leaked memo revealed that Donald Trump’s administration wanted to shed 83,000 VA workers this year.
That downsizing of an agency that began the year with 484,000 employees triggered protests nationwide—by veterans’ organizations, VA unions, and patients and their families. Collins stonewalled critics and presided over VA contract cancellations demanded by President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which produced few savings. The former U.S. House member from Georgia denied that DOGE-driven job cuts might hurt care for nine million VA patients.
Headed in The Right Direction?
On July 7, Collins took a different stance, announcing that a 15 percent reduction in his agency’s workforce is no longer necessary since 17,000 VA employees have already left, and another 13,000 will do so by September due to “normal attrition” or the lure of early retirement or severance payments.
“A departmentwide R.I.F. is off the table,” Collins said. “As a result of our efforts, VA is headed in the right direction—both in terms of staff levels and customer service.”
However, a far better indicator of where the VA is headed can be found in Collins’ more consistent—but equally misleading—messaging about “making it even easier for veterans to get their health care when and where it’s most convenient for them.”
In the VA Secretary’s view, this means letting eligible veterans choose between highly qualified VA caregivers and referrals to a nationwide network of 1.7 million private-sector providers, whose performance has sometimes been inferior.
Collins’s proposed discretionary budget for FY 2026 favors the latter; it calls for a $14.4 billion increase in federal spending on outsourced care, a 67 percent hike from last year, and an unprecedented 17 percent reduction in funding for VA direct care. In addition, sources report that Collins also seeks Congressional approval to transfer $1.8 billion from the VA’s clinical care budget to boost spending on non-VA providers during the current fiscal year.
This ongoing defunding of direct care will eventually result in more staff reductions and facility closings.
Popular opposition to the threat of both under the Biden Administration helped derail a poorly conceived White House plan to review VA “assets and infrastructure” three years ago. But then Biden’s
VA Secretary Denis McDonough never used his rule-making authority to shore up financing of VA direct care by curbing costly and unnecessary patient referrals to private doctors and hospitals. So, under the second Trump administration, Collins picked up where McDonough, a chief of staff to Barack Obama, left off.
A Divided Reaction
Veteran advocates and other stakeholders in caring for the nation’s eighteen million veterans cheered Collins’s July 7 walk back to varying degrees.
While noting that “30,000 job cuts, even through attrition, risks degrading services, “American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley called this lesser blow ‘a major victory.’” He urged other federal department heads “to follow Secretary Collins’ lead” and abandon their DOGE-driven RIF plans.
Kelley also pledged that, “if the administration continues down the path of privatization, mass layoffs, and unlawful reorganizations, they will hear from us again.”
The million-member Disabled American Veterans (DAV) declared itself “cautiously optimistic” about Collins’s action. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) hailed it as “a notable and encouraging departure from the previously discussed, much larger cuts.” In their statements, unlike AFGE’s, neither group mentioned ongoing privatization spurred by the VA MISSION Act of 2018. DAV, IAVA and other veterans service organizations favored its passage via a bipartisan vote that handed President Trump one of his biggest first-term legislative victories.
Other veterans’ groups, like Common Defense and VoteVets, remain far more critical of Collins. Common Defense national organizer Joanna Sweatt, a Marine veteran, “warned that Trump’s attacks on VA healthcare haven’t stopped.” On behalf of VoteVets, retired Army Major General Paul Eaton predicted, accurately, that the White House still plans to “demonize, downsize, and privatize VA care.”
As Robert Anderson, a Veterans for Peace member and VA patient in New Mexico, told the Washington Monthly, “the decade-long diversion of funds from the VA for privatization continues at breakneck speed… As a result of cutbacks and shortages, I hear some vets complaining that the VA can’t do anything right. And proving that to be true has always been the goal of the Republican jihad against ‘government-run’ healthcare.”
Russell Lemle, former chief psychologist for the San Francisco VA healthcare and co-founder of the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, praised the grassroots organizing and lobbying that resulted in fewer jobs being cut this year. “But the focus on the number 83,000 was always problematic,” he points out. “It set the stage for Collins to scale back his plans and, in the process, appear more reasonable and flexible than he actually is.”
A Roller Coaster Ride
A VA local union activist, who wished to remain anonymous to avoid management retaliation, agreed that “announcing big cuts and then implementing smaller ones results in everyone breathing a sigh of relief when we can’t afford to let our guard down.”
Lemle argues that staff reductions through steady attrition will still hurt the nation’s largest public healthcare system. “When backfilling a vacated position is slowed to a crawl or indefinitely suspended or, worse yet, a position gets removed from the organizational chart, you end up not having enough staff to serve veterans’ needs, which is a recipe for outsourcing more care to the private sector.”
The roller coaster ride that VA workers have been on since Trump moved back into the White House in January has left tens of thousands of talented, skilled, and committed healthcare professionals and support staffers wondering whether they have any future at the VA. “The administration’s message is look for a job elsewhere,” one former VA medical center director told the Washington Monthly.
VA defenders’ organizational challenge is maintaining morale in their ranks, while building on recent protest activity that attracted many previously unengaged veterans.
Saving the VA requires further resistance to Collins’s performative campaign against “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and the GOP’s longstanding goal of restructuring veterans’ healthcare delivery, via incremental privatization. Doing so will be an inspiration to other federal departments and their stakeholders. So no one is better positioned to display red state resistance to Project 2025—and broader disillusionment with Trump—than military veterans, their families, and the federal workers who support them.
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