Why Is Trump Targeting Veterans?

Currently, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) proposes to fire 83,000 of the 492,000 Veterans’ Affairs employees, or about 17% of the VA’s workforce. This seems like a strange decision from several angles.

According to a study from last September by the Pew Research Center, “Military veterans remain a Republican group, backing Trump over Harris by wide margin.” Pew estimated that about 61% of registered voters who say they have served in the U.S. military or military reserves planned to support former President Donald Trump in the then-upcoming 2024 presidential election. This compared to 37% who planned to back Vice President Kamala Harris.

Partly because federal agencies are required to give preference to veterans in their hiring decisions, about 30% of federal employees were veterans at the end of fiscal year 2023, far higher than their proportion among Americans. According to the Census Bureau, only about 6% of American adults have served in the military, a much lower figure than a few decades ago. In 1980, about 18% of U.S. adults were veterans.

The media in Wisconsin have run several articles on protests against the firings at the Clement J. Zablocki Veterans’ Administration Medical Center in Milwaukee. Nationally, a number of papers have joined in. One article from The New York Times was headlined: “Chaos at the V.A.: Inside the DOGE Cuts Disrupting the Veterans Agency. Clinical trials have been delayed, contracts canceled, and support staff fired. With deeper cuts coming, some are warning of potential harms to veterans.”

Of federal agencies, according to a Pew survey, the VA is quite popular. In a survey of views towards 16 federal agencies, twice as many people (56%) said they had a positive view of the Department of Veterans Affairs as those with a negative view (28%).

The most common complaint about Zablocki and other VA facilities is understaffing. For example, in a televised interview one of the protesting veterans complained that the first available appointment was a year away.

A report issued last August from the Inspector General entitled “Determination of Veterans Health Administration’s Severe Occupational Staffing Shortages” concluded that:

Psychology was the most frequently reported severe clinical occupational staffing shortage and also the most frequently reported Hybrid Title 38 severe shortage occupation.

Custodial Worker was the most frequently reported severe nonclinical occupational staffing shortage.

Only two facilities identified no severe occupational staffing shortages.

If understaffing is a serious problem, it is hard to believe that the solution is to fire people.

One question on the most recent Marquette University Law School poll of Wisconsin voters asked, “Do you think Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been properly carrying out Trump’s agenda by taking control of government agencies and shutting down programs, or do you think this is disrupting government programs that are required by law?”

As the next graph shows, the answer depends mainly on one’s political allegiance, with 87% of Republicans saying DOGE was properly carrying out Trump’s agenda, versus just 2% of Democrats.

One factor underlying the DOGE strategy is the belief among many on the right that government size is a threat to freedom. This is reflected on “freedom” indices developed by two of the major players in the conservative community.

The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom is “based on 12 quantitative and qualitative factors, grouped into four broad categories, or pillars, of economic freedom.” Those four pillars are rule of law, government size, regulatory efficiency and open markets.

A second measure comes from the libertarian Cato Institute. Its Human Freedom Index measures “86 distinct indicators of personal and economic freedom,” including “size of government.”

This belief that bigger is worse when talking about government is combined with an impression that the federal government has been growing. In fact, particularly if population is considered, the federal government has not kept up with population growth. As the next graph shows, in 1970 there were about 70 residents for every federal employee. More recently, there were around 115 residents per federal employee. This happened despite the introduction of additional federal activities, such as those aimed at expanding the number of people covered by medical insurance. One can think of many situations in which hiring more people makes for a better world. An obvious example is hiring more people to operate help centers to reduce the amount of time people are stuck in hold.

Rather than analyzing how to improve government services, DOGE starts with the unproven assumption that firing people will reduce waste and fraud. The likely result is that a reduced government workforce will do a much poorer job of serving the needs of the public. In the fight between ideology versus good policy, ideology wins.