Trump administration plans to fire over 70K employees at Department of Veterans Affairs, memo shows

CHICAGO (WLS) -- It appears President Donald Trump's administration is planning to fire more than 70,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The department chief issued a memo this week saying he was working with Elon Musk's "DOGE" to "aggressively" restructure the VA.

The VA secretary says the planned layoffs will not impact healthcare or benefits, but some fear the nine million veterans served by the VA will feel the weight of those cuts.

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The memo issued this week made reference to August being the target for an agency-wide reorganization.

The VA's chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, told top-level officials at the agency Tuesday that it had an objective to cut enough employees to return to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000. That would require terminating tens of thousands of employees after the VA expanded during the Biden administration, as well as to cover veterans impacted by burn pits under the 2022 PACT Act.

The memo instructs top-level staff to prepare for an agency-wide reorganization in August to "resize and tailor the workforce to the mission and revised structure." It also calls for agency officials to work with the White House's Department of Government Efficiency to "move out aggressively, while taking a pragmatic and disciplined approach" to the Trump administration's goals.

"Things need to change," Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins said in a video posted on social media Wednesday afternoon, adding that the layoffs would not mean cuts to veterans' health care or benefits.

"This administration is finally going to give the veterans what they want," Collins said. "President Trump has a mandate for generational change in Washington and that's exactly what we're going to deliver at the VA."

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"The fact of the matter is that veterans need more access to their benefits and their resources, not less," U.S. Army Veteran Marcos Torres said.

Torres is a commander of a Chicago-area American Legion Post. He said the veterans he sees every day are fearful of the Trump administration's latest directive to slash the federal workforce, this time targeting the Department of Veterans Affairs.

At the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center on Chicago's Near West Side, workers are feeling anxious.

"You don't know if you're going to be walked out while you're taking care of a vet, you know, and so it's kind of stressful," an anonymous VA hospital worker said.

The proposed job cuts comes as thousands of probationary VA workers have already been let go, and nearly a billion dollars worth of VA contracts are being canceled.

"What we're seeing across the board, and not just at the VA, is that this Department of Government Efficiency is really acting more like a Department of Government Elimination," Illinois U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider said.

Even before the announcement, 47th Ward Alderman Matt Martin said he was told the VA was pausing its veteran outreach program at his North Side ward office.

"Taking a buzz saw to critical programs that impact people's lives is unconscionable," Martin said. "You can't defend decisions like that."

Martin said just on Wednesday his office was informed that the VA will no longer have the capacity to staff the Veterans Affairs Office at their ward office. He said once or twice a month, several VA employees would come to the 47th Ward and other wards across the city and connect veterans with a vast array of resources.

"There are going to be people who aren't getting access to health care that they need, that don't have a roof over their heads because of the Trump administration's decision, there are others who are going to have to pay a lot more than they otherwise would," Martin said.

Meanwhile, Torres said stripping down Veterans Affairs is un-American, and the government is not delivering on the back end of a contract that U.S. servicemen and women sign when they serve our country.

"Nobody wants to cut veteran benefits. That sounds real ugly, right?" Torres said. "That doesn't sound good, but what you can do is just make it so incredibly difficult for the veteran to access their benefits and get their benefits that people stop trying."

The GOP chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, downstate Illinois Congressman Mike Bost, also appeared to be cautious about the proposed job cuts, saying in a statement he has questions about the impact the reductions could have.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.