BY SONNER KEHRT
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This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
For years, his morning routine was as therapeutic as the job he loved: Wake up at 4:30. Run or lift weights by 5 a.m. Then head to the veterans mental health facility where he works in California to help veterans who are struggling after leaving the military—just as he once had.
But these days, he says he sleeps through his alarm and wakes up already exhausted, with a pulsing dread in his stomach. The first thing he does is check his email: Does his staff still all have jobs? Does he still have a job? Does his team still exist?
This decorated veteran-turned-veterans’ therapist shared his distress when The War Horse reached out to VA workers across the country to get a look at how the frenzy to downsize the federal government is impacting care for the nine million veterans who rely on VA.
At work, it’s hard to concentrate, he said. He tries to hide his anxiety from his employees, who he knows are feeling the same way. He especially tries to hide his worries from the veterans he counsels throughout the day. But he’s finding it harder to stay calm and grounded for his patients, he said, and he keeps second-guessing care decisions he normally wouldn’t have thought twice about—“Is this outside of policy?” “Is this something that could get me fired?”
The drumbeat of news from Washington makes him antsy, he said, and he’s reminded of his deployments to the Middle East, where he earned a Purple Heart. He remembers the dread of waiting before a firefight began.
“Honestly, the last time I felt this level of fear was in combat,” he told The War Horse.
The difference this time, he said, is how alone and unmoored he feels.
“At least in combat, I knew my mission. I was supported in it by my teammates, by my leadership, and I had agency. I had a weapon. I could fight against a tangible enemy,” he said. “Now it’s just an invisible cloud of dread.”
Over the past month, VA has cut 2,400 positions, and VA Secretary Doug Collins said this week the department plans to slash more than 70,000 jobs. The goal would reduce VA staffing to 2019 levels, three years before the historic PACT Act expanded benefits to more than a million veterans sickened by exposures to toxins.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has repeatedly promised that the quest to shrink the federal government will not harm veterans or their care.
“We’re going to make the department work better for the veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors,” Collins said this week.
But VA employees from across the country said the cuts and a climate of fear are already hurting veterans.
The War Horse spoke with eight current employees who work directly with veterans in eight different states, as well as one employee who was among the 1,400 workers fired during the reporting of this story. We interviewed therapists, social workers, researchers, and others, from supervisors to trainees. Since the employees were not authorized to talk and feared repercussions for speaking out, The War Horse agreed to withhold their names so they could candidly describe their experiences.
VA employees from North Carolina to South Dakota said the federal hiring freeze has left teams short-staffed at their facilities. Mental health workers described scrambling to find private, HIPAA-compliant spaces to take telehealth appointments after the return-to-office mandate—one worker described a clinic where the only space with a closing door was a storage closet.
Multiple providers talked about the difficulties of worrying about losing their jobs while trying to provide care to patients nervous about exactly the same thing—veterans make up 30 percent of the federal workforce, and close to 6,000 have already been fired, according to estimates late last month from Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have expressed concern about the mass firings at VA, which Collins, the VA secretary, confirmed would slash 15 percent of the workforce after an internal memo about additional cuts leaked to the news site Government Executive. “We’ll be making major changes, so get used to it,” Collins said.
Illinois Republican Rep. Mike Bost, the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in a statement he had “questions about the impact these reductions and discussions could have on the delivery of services.”
In a statement to The War Horse, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, called the plan “an attack on our veterans.”
“The Trump administration’s plan to conduct mass firings of VA employees—more than a quarter of whom are veterans themselves—is a betrayal of those who have served our country,” she said.
The anxiety has made it especially difficult for VA mental health workers to create the therapeutic environment needed for working with veterans, many of them who struggle with complex psychiatric conditions.
“How do you go through therapy session after therapy session, talking to a veteran and helping them through their traumas while you’re also simultaneously being traumatized?” said one VA therapist.
A therapeutic relationship depends heavily on trust, says Carl Castro, a 33-year Army veteran and the director of military and veterans programs at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work.
The irony, he said, is “the VA in particular has really, really come a long way in building trust…The old adage is it takes years to build trust, and it can be destroyed in a matter of minutes. Or in this case, by an email.”
Multiple therapists recounted veterans beginning sessions in recent weeks expressing relief that their therapist hadn’t been fired.
“Why should our veterans—the ones that we are serving, the ones we are working for—why should they be concerned about us?” a social worker in the Midwest said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”
President Trump has promised to shrink the size of the federal government, which he has called “bloated” with “unnecessary” people, and has directed the new Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk to root out fraud, waste, and corruption. Last month, Musk appeared at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference waving a chainsaw. “Waste is pretty much everywhere,” he told the crowd.
Many VA employees say they could have found work elsewhere, but they chose to work at VA because of its mission helping veterans. They agree there is bloat in the federal government, including at VA. But they argue taking a chainsaw to the workforce won’t result in a more efficient department.
The Trump administration has had to scramble to reinstate some fired workers, such as those who work in nuclear safety and avian flu prevention, and the Department of Veterans Affairs has also been forced to halt hasty cuts. After Collins on February 25 trumpeted $2 billion in cuts, including what he called millions in contracts to create PowerPoints and meeting minutes, the department reversed course the next day when it discovered it had slashed cancer programs, medical and burial services, and other vital programs.
A VA employee who worked with veterans with mental illness told The War Horse that her supervisors were blindsided by her dismissal a month before her probationary period ended. One had told her earlier that day her job was likely safe. She said she learned she was being fired just minutes before the end of the workday and scrambled to try to contact the veterans she was scheduled to meet with the following day.
Collins has promised that “mission-critical” positions will be exempt from cuts. But lawmakers and union officials have reported that Veterans Crisis Line workers—positions the VA specifically said would be safe—have been let go. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel and Illinois Democrat, has said she intervened on behalf of at least two crisis line workers, who have since been told they would be reinstated.
VA employees said they worried about the impact of cutting non-“mission-critical” programs and jobs. Transportation for disabled veterans and suicide prevention trainings have been canceled, according to Democratic senators. Two employees at different facilities said that therapy groups for veterans who had experienced racial trauma have been cut. The Phoenix VA fired three music therapists who worked with PTSD patients.
Programs like these can offer veterans critical social connections, says Jenny D’Olympia, a professor at William James College who teaches courses on veterans’ mental health needs.
“A lot of veterans live socially isolated,” she said, “and they’re looking for experiences to be with other people who understand what it’s like to be them.”
Several VA workers told The War Horse a moment that crystallized their fears came when VA facilities removed signs celebrating LGBTQ veterans that said, “We serve all veterans.”
“I just felt a lot of pride walking into work and seeing it and knowing, ‘This is a pretty cool place,’” one VA employee in Wisconsin said. “I really want to ask the VA now: Do we not serve all veterans anymore?”‘
Several clinicians told The War Horse that veterans have brought up concerns that their medical information might be accessed by people outside of VA. A representative from DOGE has access to internal VA systems, a VA spokesperson confirmed. DOGE employees have also accessed Treasury Department systems that include information about veteran disability payments.
Veterans who are federal workers have told VA providers that they are hesitant to discuss sensitive information—racial or gender identity, disability information, a history of military sexual trauma—worrying it could somehow be accessed and used against them at work, as DOGE looks for ways to shrink the federal workforce.
A VA spokesperson has said DOGE does not have access to veteran data. But VA providers said, given the secretive nature of DOGE’s work, they didn’t feel able to reassure patients. They said they are also second-guessing what they write in a patient’s chart.
“What do you do?” one mental health worker asked. “It feels wrong to withhold that from someone’s record if that’s the diagnosis they have, but it also feels like you as a provider might be putting someone’s…well-being in jeopardy.”
And then there’s the constant fear of losing resources, staff, or even for one’s own job. One employee described it as “a campaign of cruelty and terror.” Another said it felt like an “ax over my head.”
Several providers said they worried restrictions on what they could and couldn’t say or do might lead to ethical quagmires—they pointed out that their professional licenses require them to provide the best care possible to all of their patients, which means considering their identities.
This, and sinking morale, is leading some workers to consider employment elsewhere, even if they feel assured that their positions are secure at VA.
“As much as we want to serve the population, there’s only so much that some people can watch and be victim to before they’re overwhelmed and they can’t do it anymore,” one VA therapist said.
Over the past several weeks, veterans have started reporting they’re seeing the impact of the cuts. An Army veteran near Hampton, Virginia, told WTKR that her annual mammogram last month was canceled because of a staffing shortage, and the earliest she could reschedule it was in June. In a letter to the editor in The Villages, Florida, a veteran said he was told he could “no longer drive the five minutes in my golf cart to my hearing aids specialist,” and instead had to travel to a VA clinic 45 minutes away.
Veterans and VA employees also say wait times for appointments are increasing. One VA employee who works to enroll veterans in health care told The War Horse her department is seeing a big uptick in enrollments as veterans fired or worried about losing health care through their federal jobs turn to VA care. VA did not respond to questions from The War Horse about increased wait times or enrollment numbers in the new administration.
VA employees who spoke with The War Horse also shared concerns about the larger impacts of the cuts and cultural changes. The VA employs close to 5,000 researchers who work on projects that impact not just veterans but the broader public. It also has a lesser-known legal mandate to serve as the country’s backup healthcare system; during the Covid pandemic, every VA in the country put aside ICU beds for nonveterans as hospitals reached capacity. Some employees fear a gutted VA will be unable to provide backup care if the nation faces a bird flu or other pandemics in the coming years.
Similarly, one of VA’s foundational missions is “to educate for VA and the nation.” Seventy percent of all doctors in the country complete some of their training at VA facilities, and the department is responsible for training more than 1,000 psychologists each year. One psychologist intern at VA said she worried that under the new DEI guidance, she wouldn’t be able to complete a diversity-based project required for her certification.
“It’s these things that people don’t really focus on as much as they should,” Castro said. “They take it for granted, and they don’t see its importance until it doesn’t exist.”
For VA employees who spoke to The War Horse, the cuts to the department feel personal.
“We’re increasingly feeling, and the rhetoric is out there, that federal employees are corrupt people, that we’re gaming the system, that we’re somehow just skating through and just laughing all the way to the bank,” the mental health worker in California said.
He said knew he wanted to work with veterans after he found the support he needed through the VA.
“It turned my life around…I’ve worked in the [VA] my entire career post-military, and now to be seen or cast as this bad person after I served this country this whole time, it just feels really awful,” he said. “I feel betrayed.”
