Washington: The US Department of Veterans Affairs is going to reduce more than 80,000 jobs in an effort to reduce the 2019 staffing levels, a decision that has caused strong criticism from veterans and Democrats, who argue that it could endanger critical support for the former.
VA staff chief Christopher Syrek sent a note to senior officials on Tuesday, telling him that the goal was to return the agency in 2019 staffing levels of just 400,000. This would mean the cut of about 82,000 employees.
Agency staff headed with the note to work with the technological billionaire of the Elon Musk government efficiency department to make cuts. He says two goals were to “eliminate waste” and “increase the effectiveness of the workforce”.
The scale of scheduled redundancies in VA is much larger than the proposed cuts to other government services and will hit a section that takes one of the most beloved teams in the US – military veterans.
“Now, we are sorry for anyone losing their jobs and it is extremely difficult for me, especially as a VA leader and your secretary, to make these types of decisions, but the federal government does not exist to concern people.
VA provides a huge range of benefits and medical assistance to veterans and critics of the plan have said the cuts would adversely affect this care.
Everet Kelley, head of the US Federation of Government Officers, who represents 311,000 VA officials, said: “Veterans and their families will suffer unnecessarily.”
Musk and his team have undertaken President Donald Trump to reduce the size and cost of federal bureaucracy. To date, about 25,000 workers across the US government have been fired, according to Reuters, and another 75,000 have been redeemed by the 2.3 million federal political workforce.
Patty Murray, the leading Democrat in the Senate Credit Committee, said the cuts in the work marked the escalation of a “full -scale, without attack with the veterans” by Trump and Musk who would put the benefits for the health of veterans in “Danger”.
A spokesman for Jerry Moran, a Republican Chairman of the Senate Veterans Committee, did not respond immediately to commentary request. The VA and the White House did not respond to requests for comments.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, an ally of Trump, was surprised by the size of scheduled cuts. “I am sure the VA can be reduced, but if you are a veteran, you read it on paper. It rings you,” Graham told reporters.
Richard Blumenthal, the leading Democrat in the Senate Veterans Committee, said work cuts seemed to be a step in a plan to privatize VA services. “It’s a shameful betrayal,” Blumenthal said in a statement.
During his first term as President, Trump in 2018 signed a law extending veterans to the health care of the private sector paid by VA.
Naveed Shah, political director of the joint defense, a group of veteran Veta, has assumed the scheduled redundancies.
“He launches the system designed to take care of our brothers and sisters.”
His new Tuesday note came on a day when Trump’s administration suffered a temporary failure in its efforts to eliminate workers from the federal bureaucracy.
A Board of Directors examining the fires of federal employees has been ordered by the US Department of Agriculture to temporarily restore thousands of workers who lost their jobs in the context of redundancies led by Trump and Musk.
Trump’s administration returned on Tuesday a directive on fire test workers, after a federal judge decided that their mass terminals were illegal.
The Personnel Management Office, the ARM of the Federal Labor Force, revised a note to declare that it does not advise organizations to shoot workers on test workers on performance -related reasons.
An OPM employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he was in contact with individual organizations what to do with their employees and could still remain.
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