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The job reductions would be a major escalation of the downsizing that has already occurred at the department, which provides health care and many other services to veterans.
- March 5, 2025Updated 4:53 p.m. ET
The Department of Veterans Affairs is planning to reduce its work force by more than 80,000 people, according to a memo seen by The New York Times outlining part of President Trump’s escalating efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy.
The memo, which was first reported by the trade publication Government Executive, calls for the department’s work force to go from more than 482,000 workers as of late last year to 399,957. Some of those cuts could be made by offering early retirement or severance payments, but earlier efforts to entice employees to quit their jobs voluntarily fell short of the stated goal of the Trump administration to drastically reduce the size of the federal work force.
Doug Collins, the secretary of Veterans Affairs, released a video statement announcing the cuts, saying — as he has previously — that health care services and benefits would not be cut under the Trump administration and that 300,000 positions at the department had been labeled “mission critical” to ensure services were not interrupted.
If that “mission critical” designation remains, the cuts would have to come from a pool of about 182,000 workers — eliminating more than 40 percent of the noncritical work force at the department.
“There are many people complaining about the changes we’re making at the V.A.,” Mr. Collins said. “But what most of them are really saying is, ‘Let’s just keep doing the same thing that the V.A. has always done.’”
He later added, “We’ll be making major changes, so get used to it.”
