Civilians and military service members watch a Joint Services Drill Off at the Lincoln Memorial on Oct. 19, 2022. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Shaneka Best’s job at the Department of Veterans Affairs came with a $30,000 pay cut — a sacrifice she was willing to make last year to work among other military veterans navigating the same kind of anxiety and depression she has experienced after serving 20 years in the U.S. Air Force.
But last month, Best got an email that felt like a stab in the back from the federal government that had assured her and other veterans of a life of stability after serving their country, in many cases risking their lives and losing limbs during battle. Her job was gone, the email said, a casualty of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce in the name of efficiency.
“You feel betrayed, let down and like you don’t matter,” said Best, summing up her feelings and those of veterans across the country who are now wondering how they’ll support themselves and their families.
Roughly 6,000 veterans have been laid off in recent weeks by the U.S. DOGE Service, according to federal data compiled by Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee. A spokesperson for the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee said that number is probably understated amid ongoing job cuts at the Social Security Administration, the General Services Administration and other agencies. Veterans Affairs, where military veterans make up about 26 percent of the workforce, announced plans Wednesday to cut 80,000 jobs.
Veterans make up about 30 percent of the federal workforce, serving in every department.
The cuts, many of which target probationary employees, cast a shadow on the implicit promise the United States makes to military members that they’ll get preference in federal hiring — leading to a secure job that can ease them into the civilian workforce. Those roles, veterans said, also give them opportunities to keep serving their country, flexibility to seek treatment for service-related disabilities and, in many cases, a sense of purpose.
Whether many of those veterans will remain fired is uncertain.
Last week, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which serves as human resources for the federal government, to temporarily rescind directives to fire probationary employees inside more than two dozen agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Science Foundation and others identified in a lawsuit seeking to permanently reverse the job cuts. After that ruling, the Trump administration said the firings will be up to the agencies themselves.
But the current precarity of those jobs could impact military recruitment and make veterans think twice about joining the civil service, said Jim Craig, a veterans studies and sociology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
“They are a symbol of the best of us,” Craig said, “and when they’re affected, that means something.”
McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson for OPM, said Tuesday that it “recognizes the dedication and service of all federal employees, including our veteran workforce, and remains committed to supporting them during this transition.”
“While workforce restructuring can be a difficult process, we are working to ensure affected employees have access to available resources and opportunities,” Pinover said in a statement.
Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, did not respond to questions from The Washington Post.
Democratic lawmakers have been sounding the alarm about the firings at town halls, in letters to the Trump administration and at the U.S. Capitol. Several Senate Democrats invited laid-off veterans to be their guests at President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.. said he is pushing for amendments in the federal budget reconciliation process that would create financial penalties for agencies that fire, furlough or reclassify veterans on a large scale.
“It’s really hard to get people into the military these days,” Kaine, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. “And these kinds of contemptuous actions directed toward the veterans community and directed toward active duty, it’s not going to make it any easier.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, introduced a resolution Tuesday condemning the mass firings at the Department of Veterans Affairs. On the Senate floor, he said the layoffs represent “an assault on the veterans of America.”
Senate Republicans blocked the resolution.
“This resolution divides the Congress and the administration and makes it more difficult for us to find consensus,” Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who chairs the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said on the floor. “We should work together to determine what is the right kind of workforce at the VA.”
The federal government provided a pathway to civilian employment for Aaron Fontenot, who deployed to Europe, Asia and the Middle East as a U.S. Marine Corps infantryman, suffering hearing loss, anxiety, and knee and feet issues. His military service helped him get a human resources job at a VA hospital in Denver last year, although he had little experience in HR.
But when Fontenot recently checked his email after a post-work hike, he learned that he had been fired during his one-year probationary period. He was stunned that his veteran status hadn’t protected him, he said.
“You’re told from the time you join, if you sign your name on the dotted line, that we’ll take care of you when you get back,” said Fontenot, who, like about one-third of veterans who work for the government, is disabled as a result of his service. “And that just seems, at this point, to be a lie.”
Al Lipphardt, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said laying off veterans deprives the United States of public servants who are committed to their mission.
“On top of all this, studies show having gainful employment is a social [determinant] of health and gets ahead of arguably one of the root causes of veteran suicide,” Lipphardt, whose organization is the largest of its kind in the United States, said in a statement.
“Since the federal government is the single largest employer of veterans in the nation, it’s veterans who are being indiscriminately harmed in this bull-‘DOGE’-ing of the federal work force.”
Lyndsay Butts, a 38-year-old former Air Force medic, loved her job as an executive assistant for the U.S. Forest Service. It was gratifying to take notes during meetings and serve as the member of her southern Utah office who knew how to get things done, she said.
After Butts was terminated, she struggled with the feeling that the administration was treating veterans with indifference despite all they had done for their country.
“I just can’t imagine that they would be doing this if they knew what they were doing,” said Butts, who said she has service-connected post-traumatic stress disorder. “But they have to know what they’re doing, because they’re doing it.”
Other veterans who still have their government jobs are trying to stay out of the spotlight. For Melissa P., a psychiatric nurse practitioner for the VA who spoke on the condition that her full name not be used due to fear of retaliation, that means putting a screen in front of the LGBTQ Pride flag that is in the background of her telehealth calls, in accordance with Trump’s order banning Pride flags at government buildings — even though she works from home.
Melissa said she has also started using gender-neutral terminology when taking notes on her calls with transgender patients.
Instead of “Mr. Smith” or “Mrs. Smith,” she writes “Veteran Smith” to protect the patient from being outed and herself from being accused of acknowledging a gender different from sex assigned at birth. She worries that, if she gets fired, her patients will never know what happened to her.
Even the possibility of being laid off can be destabilizing for veterans, said Melissa, who spent 14 years in the U.S. Army Reserve and participates in multiple veterans groups where the firings have been discussed.
“They feel betrayed,” she said. “They feel like they had this expectation and this social contract and this literal, ‘This is what you will get for signing this blank check.’”
In Melissa’s view, that social contract can’t be made whole by simply reinstating fired veterans. Veterans who do get hired back, she said, will never again trust their departments in the same way and the feelings of having been written off will linger.
“These things are not reparable,” she said. Andrew Ba Tran contributed to this report.
