Veterans make up roughly a third of the federal workforce–in fact, Uncle Sam is the largest single employer of veterans in the country. According to PBS, a significant percentage of employees at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and Defense are veterans. But vets also work for other departments, including Transportation, Agriculture, the Interior, Treasury, Health and Human Services, as well as the U.S. Postal Service. It’s safe to say that vets are the backbone of the U.S. Government’s workforce. So how are President Donald Trump and his billionaire backer Elon Musk thanking these women and men for their service? With a pink slip and slashed services. Trump and Musk are looking to fire hundreds of thousands of federal employees. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, at least 100,000 federal employees have already been fired or taken buyout offers (which Congress has not approved). That’s out of the roughly 2.3 million Americans who work a federal job. At least 6,000 of those who have been fired are veterans, according to data released by Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, and the Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies. But the attacks on veterans keep coming. The Department of Veterans Affairs—the largest federal employer with an estimated 483,000 workers nationwide—has not only instituted a hiring freeze at a time when the agency is critically short on staffing, including for clinical positions, but has actively purged thousands of workers from its ranks; at least 2,400 have been fired thus far, according to a statement from Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee. These cuts not only have cost veterans their hard-earned livelihoods, but also jeopardize the critical, often-life-saving care that they receive, such as from staff that support the Veterans Crisis Line. The California Federation of Labor Unions stands opposed to these arbitrary cuts, and with the workers—both civilian and veteran —who are impacted by them. —California Federation of Labor Unions
