Ever since Donald Trump has been back as the American President for the second time, one of his primary agendas has been slashing various federal departments. Elon Musk is his key ally regarding this and he has been given his own government department, called Department of Government Efficiency, which also aims at making various cuts to the federal workforce, citing budget reasons.
Despite the Trump-Musk duo vehemently trying to establish that these cuts are necessary to save the tax payers money, they seem to be more motivated by their own agendas of slashing any department that does not align with their view of the new America. It is no wonder that USAID happens to be one of the worst victims of this slashing spree of Trump and Musk.
Now, with the Department of Veterans Affairs planning to get rid of 83,000 jobs that would bring a reduction of almost 17 percent to the workforce of the agency that provides healthcare to millions of veterans, these people seem to be getting the worst of the federal cuts decisions by Musk and Trump.
The department called VA directly provides various services to veterans. These include short- and long-term housing options, healthcare, pensions, life insurance, assistance in courts and jails, education stipends etc. However, with the rampant federal cuts, the veterans are now going to suffer in multiple aspects.
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It should be noted here that federal law makes it mandatory to hire veterans over other candidates in a number of different job profiles. This is done to show the country’s respect to veterans who go through a lot and offer their services. However, this also means that given the number of federal employees who have been fired over the past few months, a huge number among them would be veterans.
Moreover, the fact that the VA department’s workforce will also be reduced, it would affect the healthcare and other benefits that the department brought to veterans. A reduction in workforce would essentially mean a problem is workflow where there will be fewer people than necessary while the workload remains the same or increased.
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There is already a shortage of staff at America’s Veterans Crisis Line, which is overseen by VA and the Department of Health and Human Services. Now, because of the mass firing of federal employees, this department, which already needs more people, is seeing a reduced number of employees in its workforce.
This means that veteran suicide, which stands at 17.6 veteran suicides per day, might get worse because of the lack of help available on these suicide prevention helplines. This would affect the veteran population extremely badly as a huge percentage of them already suffer from burnout and various other issues and not having professional help would only make things worse.
With such radical and troubling policies introduced by Trump and Musk, the veterans are seeing dark days. It now remains to be seen whether the situation gets better anytime soon or is it only downhill from here.
