Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels
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I have friends who were hurt 15+ years ago now, and have been through the ups and downs of the VA system; its just sad that after all that time they're still struggling (occasionally at least) with basic things and keeping their care going.
Cutting the people without cutting the programs won't do much and is (IMO) a problem in that you should be able to access government services in a way that the writers of the laws (house/senate) have clearly agreed to. When you're cutting this widely, it's hard to believe you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
You can be mad about the government spending money on things you believe are unnecessary, and you can even want to fire the people related to that program! But across the board personnel cuts don't fix the appropriations issues and will waste money in inefficiency, waste and loss as the folks that are left have to pick up the pieces.
Does the federal government employ too many people? I dunno, maybe. Do we fund too many programs? Yeah, probably. But these cuts are _fucking insane_.
The Defense part especially seems crazy. Per USASpending.gov [1], last year the federal government spent $9,700,000,000,000. Despite all the talk that Covid budgets were short term event, they never actually went back down. Dropped to $9T in 2022, and then started rising again. Post-Covid surge was $6.6T in 2019, then jumped to $9.1T in 2020. $10.1 in 2021.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
At the same time, post-Covid, the Defense Department budget has been rising at about $100,000,000,000 / yr for the last three years. 2021: $1.1T 2022: $1.2T 2023: $1.3T 2024: $1.4T
(To be fair in comparison though, the largest other single items, Medicare / Social Security, have also been rising fast. 2021: 1.4 / 1.2, 2022: 1.5 / 1.3, 2023: 1.6 / 1.4, 2024: 1.6 / 1.5 )
However, with the DoD, what have we got from that much spending? Incredibly depressing slides from The War on the Rocks like this one about the incomprehensible gap in shipbuilding capacity? A factor of 232x? The US only has 100,000 tons of shipbuilding? That's a single neo-Panamax cargo ship. [1]
[2] https://www.twz.com/alarming-navy-intel-slide-warns-of-china...
Or this one from Military.com, that the government does not know where $151 million of $225 million collected from soldiers for food supplies on garrisons was actually spent. [3] Fort Stewart, 87% of funds redirected. Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, 63% redirected. All but two bases left more than half of the money for food unspent. $225 million doesn't mean almost anything to the government, yet $460 of mandatory / month deduction in paycheck for a Basic Allowance for Subsistence that then goes "somewhere" matters quite a bit to individual soldiers. And the defense budget rose $100B every year for years.
[3] https://www.military.com/daily-news/investigations-and-featu...
Anyways, specific examples of the issues I have with current government spending and the way it's allocated.
Spending cuts have to start SOMEWHERE. Saying $24 billion is ignorable is insane. We are in a critical debt situation and my children's future is at stake.
The current firing of government workers is about political alignment, not about cost. Cost is a pretext.
Laying off the bottom 5% presumes that you’re measuring that accurately and that individual workers have control over their productivity, both of which are unlikely to be true - and if you get either wrong, you just incentivized playing political games and shying away from work which is hard, uncertain, or under-weighted by your metrics. Stack ranking almost destroyed the ability of Microsoft and Google to make anything people love, and you can see its cost in the unperformed maintenance work people know won’t juice their metrics.
Similarly, if people are leaving because you have too much work, poor working conditions, don't pay well enough, etc. capping rehiring is just going to make the situation worse.
If you’re not a PE guy looking to juice a company before dumping it, cost cutting has to be a process of understanding and identifying your true goals first. If you’ve truly over-hired, the first lesson to draw is that you have a management problem which you need to deal with first since it will make everything else likely to fail as well.
If your entire org is filled with lazy low performers, then it doesn't matter if productivity and morale is destroyed, because they don't have high productivity or morale in the first place.
* Social Security
* Medicare
* National Defense
* Interest payments
* Health
* Income Security
* VA Benefits
Which of those categories are we overspending on? Which specific cuts do you want to make? It's impossible for one to claim they're serious about saving money without talking about slashing Social Security, Medicare, and the military, which together make 40% of the budgets, so... which are you in favor of reducing?
When you've cut your budget as far as you can and you're still losing money, the only solution is to make more money. Here, that means taxes, and specifically that we must start taxing the rich. I'm not saying that as some far-left "eat the rich" kind of thing, but as basic arithmetic and economics. We need more revenue, and it has to come from somewhere.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
The American middle and lower class are the least taxed individuals in the developed world. The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.
I'm certainly open to changing how things like dividend income are treated, but the rich don't have enough money to solve our budget problems.
I think your question about what spending to reduce was intended to be rhetorical, but the answer is: everything.
Math and history. One example explainer: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/80552/total-tax...
> The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.
Citation urgently needed. That doesn't jibe with literally any report I've read about such things, except from anti-tax extremist organizations.
I honestly have no idea why you think information about aggregate tax revenue over time is relevant to your original claim. If you want to see the tax rate increased on the upper extremes (like the top 400 mentioned at that link), I would too but it's a drop in the bucket.
> Citation urgently needed. That doesn't jibe with literally any report I've read about such things, except from anti-tax extremist organizations.
From https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/top-personal-income-ta...
The average statutory top personal income tax rate in the EU is 42.8%.
"For comparison, the average combined state and federal top income tax rate for the 50 US states and the District of Columbia lies at 42.14 percent as of January 2025, with rates ranging from 37 percent in states without a state income tax to 50.3 percent in California."
Feel free to call the Tax Foundation an "anti-tax extremist organization" if you'd like, but I wouldn't agree and they are just reporting facts here.
Even if you are a single person in California making $400k/year (which I would call pretty rich!), you are only paying 8.38% of your income in state tax (you don't even hit the 13.3% bracket until a million dollars or so?). In total, you are paying 39.22% of your income in taxes (including federal and payroll). As a baseline, if you are in Texas which doesn't have state income tax, you are paying around 31% for the same income.
Your example of a CA resident who is making $400k is paying a marginal rate of 35% at the federal level and 10.30% at the state level (not 8.38%), which is above the EU average.
That's why poor wind up paying more in flat tax states, it is simply WAI.
Marginal rates don't matter as much as how much you actually pay. On paper, CA has a top rate of 12.3%...on income over 720k dollars. It exists, but it doesn't seem like a thing we should ponder too much.
States only have so much power in setting tax rates, given that people are somewhat mobile. California being overpopulated for so long gave them some latitude here, but honestly income inequality isn't going to be handled at any level below federal.
But the point about Europe is right, but only in the sense that Europeans don't pay nearly as much in income taxes as most Americans think they do.
Why do you say this? Middle class Europeans pay significantly higher taxes than middle class Americans.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-co...
Denmark is the highest at 45%, compared to America's 27%. Switzerland, the only European country I've lived in, is just a hair above the USA at 28/29%. UK is only a few points above that, while France is just below Denmark. So I guess it really depends?
Also, the US has a more progressive federal income tax code than Europe (or every other developed country), so the tax burden in the US is carried more by the upper class than it is in those other countries, resulting in the average middle class American paying significantly lower taxes than a peer in Europe.
You keep comparing the US to Switzerland, which is a giant outlier in Europe and probably the most like the US in many ways (as you pointed out), when you should be comparing it to France, Germany, and all the other larger EU states with a stagnant economy and populations that have gotten substantially poorer relative to the US over the last 20+ years.
Also, because healthcare in the US is such a disaster, we do pay about what many other countries pay for socialized medicine via taxes, and then basically everyone under 65 (aka the people who cost way less to insure) have to pay for it again in the private sector.
If we could get that under control, there would be no competition economically.
> If we could get that under control, there would be no competition economically.
I don't think America would be the same if it did, and I don't think Europeans are pining for "American success" even if you discount our broken healthcare system.
The top tax rate perhaps:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IITTRHB
Maybe just a coïncidence that inequality started going up around 1980, when it was cut the most.
The US has the most progressive tax code in the developed world, and the average American has more disposable income than their peers anywhere else on Earth. Why is it that the upper class is the only one that needs to kick in more?
And?
They can afford more, and taxation is a way to reintroduce actual risk of financial ruin for the wealthy. If financial ruin is a good motivator for the rest of us, it should be for them, too.
It's not about percentage, it's about the reality that taxation brings about for you. When you have a net worth that's equal to the entire economic output of a major American city, you can endure massive tax bills because you make enough off of your holdings to equal the average lifetime earnings of dozens of Americans.
There's a reason nearly every developed nation has a VAT.
Other people sign me up to pay for their preferred government services all the time. It's called living in a civilization. And don't get me started on the retirees getting a slice of my labor because they have a piece of paper saying they own part of my company.
I'm under no illusion that taxing at 100% would cover the deficit. It'd probably mean a better financial picture for the government, though, and if this whole national debt thing is the existential threat that fiscal conservatives say it is, well, is any improvement not good?
Unless you're one of the wealthy you're talking about (which would be odd to say the least), no one is asking you to pay for government services for somewhere between dozens to thousands of your fellow citizens who pay approximately $0 federal income tax on average, so it's not the same.
> And don't get me started on the retirees getting a slice of my labor because they have a piece of paper saying they own part of my company.
Hint: it's not actually your company. Those people actually employ you.
> I'm under no illusion that taxing at 100% would cover the deficit. It'd probably mean a better financial picture for the government, though, and if this whole national debt thing is the existential threat that fiscal conservatives say it is, well, is any improvement not good?
Confiscatory tax rates are counterproductive, other than making the envious far left feel better about themselves.
Really? You think I don't pay for services I don't use?
> Hint: it's not actually your company. Those people actually employ you.
Do they? What do they know of the company? If I asked the beneficiary of a pension fund what the company does and where it was headquartered, would they know?
> Confiscatory tax rates are counterproductive, other than making the envious far left feel better about themselves.
It's not far left to want general stability in your society. People with too much money and a government with too much debt are destabilizing forces.
The world is literally filled with examples of how this works, if you'd stop pretending that the current system in the US is working.
This is why we end up with indiscriminate and thoughtless cuts, because the alternative is people who seem to believe that every penny of government spending is absolutely essential the second after the line item is conceived, and the only way to fix any issues that exist is with more spending.
If you wanted to cut things responsibly, you’d plan it in advance and think about how to avoid shocking the economy into a recession.
Absolutely. I in no way support what DOGE is doing.
But when people think cuts are needed (and the majority of Americans seem to think that's the case), and the options are your position that the country would seemingly collapse if a single job was cut and someone who is going to take a figurative chainsaw to the federal budget, don't be surprised when the chainsaw wins due to your refusal to compromise on your unreasonable and largely unpopular position.
If you want to cancel it out, there are many easier ways to do it, including things like more IRS auditing for tax evasion. There’s roughly a 10:1 return rate for enforcement, with an estimated gap of over half a trillion dollars.
Idk why this is a political issue? As a progressive I also support firing people who aren't producing effective outcomes for veterans. With all we save that money SHOULD be used to actually help veterans.
A billion here, a billion there, soon it adds up to real money.
These people are irreplaceable. And I know one of these forecasters very well, he's an old friend of mine. He is done with the federal government; even if they offer him his job back he's not going back, because his trust that his job as a meteorologist was safe is smashed to pieces. That's irreparable harm.
All businesses above a certain size do that, because there's no other practical way.
These are decades-old problems that the government refused to address until 2022.
As a follower of Austrian economics, monetary creation by the government most certainly does matter. But this myopic focus on "debt" completely hides the actual separate dynamics like domestic people/institutions parking their savings, foreign entities buying treasuries for longer term stability, or the political martingale of accounting for legislative monetary creation as paper "debt" to the Federal Reserve.
The current cries about government spending are basically aiming at killing the goose that lays golden eggs because some people got frustrated by having to spend some of the proceeds of selling the eggs on the goose's own feed.
If the government instead switched to simply printing more money, we'd have runaway inflation, and history tells us what happens next (Weimar Republic).
If so, how can you claim said debt is meaningless?
This is most certainly not to say that the government could just create an unlimited amount of money and expect there to be no repercussions! Rather the overall point is that it's specious to analyze a government budget in terms of "debt", especially while giving a pass to all of the monetary creation that happens outside of the legislative (loans issued/bought by the Fed).
In short: no, no one cares. Particularly not the guys in the party who are carrying out these cuts.
The main reasons we are, in the year 2025, spending so much on interest, are:
1) A financial crisis that required massive bailouts 2) A pandemic crisis that required massive bailouts 3) Two wars in the Middle East that cost a lot of money 4) Perhaps the most important one here: a steadfast refusal by about half of the country to have a realistic, adult conversation about government revenues since George H.W. Bush said "Read my lips: no new taxes", which solidified the Reagan practice of deficit spending and the belief that any and all private holdings of massive amounts of money were still better than giving that money to the government, regardless of the economic reality.
The VA hospital in your nearest city is a drop in the bucket.
Given that there's been a fairly steady ~2.9M federal employees for a few decades now, 83k isn't that much:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
> Does no one care we are $36T in debt?
The GOP certainly doesn't, given that they keep cutting revenue:
Additionally, I question whether attacking the VA's budget, which in its entirety is less than four percent of government spending, is the place to start looking for efficiencies, especially since nearly three percent of the spending budget is unreported.
There are way, way worse things we could be wasting our money on than providing the decent healthcare we promised our veterans.
> Veteran suicide can be massively helped with psilosibin and ketamine therapy, things that I hope RFK Jr will implement quickly.
This take combined with the immediate cuts at the VA when DOGE opened up are reminiscent of when Trump publicly toyed with putting us all on antidepressants [1]. I'm curious when people who hold the opinions you do just pull the wool off and admit you'd prefer (or just be okay with) us drugged up or dead? Are you afraid someone will judge you for saying you'd rather have a dead veteran than doing what the American people promised to the people who fought their wars?
1: https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-veterans-spr...
Unlike SSRIs which changes brain chemistry and you need to be on it for the rest of your lives, most people suffering from PTSD recover after a single treatment. That's why ketamine and psilsobin therapy is being pushed by everyone who cares about veteran suicides.
Educate yourself.
> most people suffering from PTSD recover after a single treatment.
That is incorrect. Ketamine therapy for PTSD or cPTSD (what most at the VA have) requires years of treatment. Psilocybin therapy is the same; I live in Oregon where we have clinics and practitioners for this stuff. None of those clinics claim that one time treatment will cure you.
I am a veteran and obviously do care about veteran suicide otherwise I wouldn't be calling out this gobbledegook you're spreading on a public forum in lieu of all the various different kinds of work the VA does.
Psilosibin only needs 1-2 treatments and is very long lasting. Same as ketamine, which might need up to 6. Both are nothing compared to SSRIs. You are lying when you say it needs years of treatment.
There is no other way out. "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else." -- Churchill
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...
Ever since Reagan said "I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." there's been a cadre of monied business interests who want to replace all government with "private" services, basically making themselves the new royal families of the US.
That pretty much sums up the difference between USA vs the rest of Western countries.
In the US, People are protecting themselves from their own Government.
Other Western Countries, The Government is there to protect the people (and the people understand this).
It’s become a meme (sans context of course) in conservative circles since Vance recently reiterated it. Never mind that the US uses such free speech exclusion zones frequently.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/christian-bourne...
Do better.
People care the most about their own wallet and income. The policies have no indirection or subtlety.
On the other hand, it's amazing that people seem to hear "Republicans will make the Government better" Rather than "Republicans will slash and burn the Government regardless of who it hurts" even when they're not particularly quiet about it.
They voted for this. Sounds like they chose their destiny, to die in a gutter homeless and no medical care. And with other public benefit cuts, low/no food stamps, delayed or stopped social security.
Its hard for me to actually care. They knew the debacle and hate, and they voted for it.
like jokingly in this Fry and Laurie sketch
Not true - I've gotten five fundraising texts today.
Now effective action? Not wrong.
The main things that many Trump supporters care about is fighting for “American culture”, trying to stymie it from becoming a minority majority company, those evil trans people using the wrong bathroom, immigrants bringing diseases and crime and woke something or other.
In 2019 there were 399,000 workers. Now 482,000. In 2022, the Biden admin tried to slash 50,000 workers and was stymied, and then the VA hired 61,000 the following year.
What's the right number? I'm sure people leaning one way politically will confidently say one thing, though they may have said something else in 2022, and vice versa. I find it hard to have a problem with a plan if its at least partially originating internally, and its hard to say there's no problem if the current and previous administration were both trying to curtail growth.
The PACT Act is perhaps the largest health care and benefit expansion in VA history.[22] The PACT Act brings these changes:
- Expands and extends eligibility for VA health care for Veterans with toxic exposures and Veterans of the Vietnam, Gulf War, and post-9/11 eras
- Adds 20+ more presumptive conditions for burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic exposures
- Adds more presumptive-exposure locations for Agent Orange and radiation
- Requires VA to provide a toxic exposure screening to every Veteran enrolled in VA health care
- Helps VA improve research, staff education, and treatment related to toxic exposures
Such person will never hold veterans in high esteem, all people under him are meat bags to use and throw away once not needed and long term care for wounded is expensive, especially in US. Compare it to somebody who actually went through the experience, be it just mandatory draft or actual combat.
I'm pretty left leaning these days, and I'd be fine with cuts, even large cuts around, just with intention and reason behind them. I'm not a fan of the tear it all down that's going on right now.
The VA doesn’t and shouldn’t have unlimited funds but at the same time, cutting personnel without addressing the core problems seems like it’s only going to make things worse for veterans.
Both great in my experience, and in my friends I have seen in the VA system.
That said, I still hear old veterans bitch about it like it sucks, even as they're completely taken care of and hand held throughout the care process.
What rubs a lot of people the wrong way is an executive branch run by billionaires acting with no constitutional or statutory authority to terminate the employment (and vital benefits that come with it) of tens of thousands of ordinary people without any real consideration for the institutional knowledge being lost, all in the name of "efficiency" and "cost savings", while the people in the executive branch have far more value than they could have ever produced in a human lifetime, and stand to benefit the most from such destruction.
* DOGE - Cut Expenses
* Tariff - Bring Revenue (another form of Tax, the victimized countries can't/don't influence USA politics); this is essentially Sales/VAT Tax without being said as Sales/VAT Tax.
* Cutting Aids - Cut Expenses
* Ukraine - Cut Expenses
They're looking for all avenue to fund $4.5 trillion tax cut for the Billionaires.
That is the main logic and reason behind all these moves, not the smoke and mirror they said to the media.
What they're really doing is handicapping as much as possible to make government appear inept so that they can come in and privatize.
If that happened, good, otherwise, the Rich will still get their tax cut.
No matter what, The Rich wins.
This is me laughing bitterly. We know darn well that's not what'll happen.