Trump Cuts To Veterans Affairs Department Spark Alarm

NORTHLAKE, Ill. — Anthony Muro settled into a stool at the American Legion hall and ordered a High Life, placing a pair of drink chips in front of him. The bar was quiet enough this Friday afternoon to hear the news playing on the TV overhead: President Donald Trump’s massive cuts to government agencies were prompting a wave of lawsuits, including here in Illinois.

Muro had plenty of thoughts on all that, but he wasn’t looking to get into an argument at the bar on bingo night.

“I’ll tell people what happened, but I won’t get into a long discussion about it,” the 51-year-old Marine veteran explained. “Especially if people have been drinking.”

Muro was fired last month from his job at the Hines VA Hospital a few miles away, part of Trump’s sweeping and chaotic effort, led by the billionaire Elon Musk, to slash government payroll and services. He worked as a partner in the hospital’s wellness program, helping other vets figure out how to lead healthier lives after the military. Even three weeks after his layoff, he had a way of slipping between present and past tense when he talked about a job he hoped to retire from.

“I loved it,” Muro said. “You never know what challenges the day could bring.”

In February the Trump administration terminated some 25,000 “probationary” federal employees like Muro, most of whom had less than a year or two of tenure. On Wednesday, the Department of Veterans Affairs notified Muro he would be placed on paid administrative leave due to a judge’s order finding that the firings were unlawful. But he is not to report to work in the meantime, and the Trump administration continues to fight in court to end his career. (Muro spoke to HuffPost after his firing but before he was reinstated on leave.)

Muro embodies the twofold price veterans stand to pay in Trump’s cost-cutting project: He is one less worker walking the halls of a VA hospital, and one less vet with a stable job. The federal government is a disproportionate employer of men and women who served their country, particularly when it comes to the VA. Nearly 30% of the agency’s roughly 450,000 employees are veterans.

Trump’s willingness to inflict cuts on a sympathetic, conservative-leaning voting bloc has surprised plenty of his own voters — including, yes, Muro himself.

Muro had hoped to see entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis win the GOP nomination, but he still preferred Trump over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris because of primarily one issue: the border. “The border was a big thing,” he said. “I totally believe in security.” He now has deep misgivings about his vote because of Trump’s slapdash cuts to the government.

He heard the candidate’s bluster about the deep state but didn’t imagine he’d chip away at an agency that provides health care to some 9 million veterans. Nearly two-thirds of veterans voted for Trump, according to exit polls.

“Everybody can admit that we need to look at efficiency. It’s been a problem for decades,” Muro said. “[But] when you’re dealing with veterans, you have to be more intentional with your actions. You have to be more surgical. … It’s almost like he’s trying to tear the VA down.”

Muro was one of nearly 1,700 probationary workers fired at the VA nationwide — a small share of the agency’s 40,000 probationary workers overall. But much deeper cuts may loom. A leaked agency memo proposed eliminating tens of thousands of additional workers, returning the VA to its staffing level of six years ago, when far fewer veterans were eligible for care.

The Trump administration has tried to reassure veterans that VA services won’t deteriorate. VA Secretary Doug Collins, a former GOP congressman, has insisted no “mission critical” positions were eliminated, though Muro would beg to differ. He believes his own job made a difference for veterans, and he’s certain the upheaval and hit to morale wrought by the administration’s firings will dog the agency for years.

“You walk down the hall and you could see it. You can hear people whisper about it,” Muro said. “And now you get these people that are scared, that are worried, and they’re thinking about all this other stuff, and they’re trying to care for the veterans. You can’t tell me that it’s not having an impact on veteran health care.”

Criticizing Trump is not a popular activity at the Legion hall, where Muro serves as the post’s commander. But he still found some understanding at the bar from a friend who was helping run the fish fry that night. When she realized he was talking about the VA cuts, she asked if he’d had any job interviews.

“It isn’t right,” she said of the VA firings. “They shouldn’t be cutting things that help veterans.”

Muro came to the VA after working at Walmart for 13 years, mostly as an overnight manager responsible for keeping the store stocked. The Walmart job paid well but was hard on his body. He suffers from a foot condition that rolls his forefeet inward, and there were days he was so run down he rode a motorized shopping cart to his car at the end of his shift.

He enrolled in a VA program called Compensated Work Therapy, which helps veterans develop new work skills and build their résumés while getting paid. Having served in the Marine Corps from 1992 to 1999, including in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Muro liked the idea of working in veteran care.

He cleaned fitness equipment at the hospital until landing a position last summer in the VA’s relatively new Whole Health program. There he interviewed vets about their health goals, like eating better, sleeping more or reducing stress, and tried to steer them to the right resources. The program looks to promote “patient-centered care,” or, as Muro put it, move beyond “here’s your shots, here’s your pills, do your bloodwork and see you in six months.”

“One of the big barriers is pain,” Muro said. “I can identify with that. I have a walker, because every step I take is pain. It’s like having a Lego in your shoe and you’re walking. A lot of these guys are in a lot worse shape than me, but … I know.”

Like a lot of other fired feds with short tenures, Muro was relatively new to the government and didn’t make a great deal of money. His annual VA salary was just under $50,000, a significant cut from his managerial position at Walmart, where he brought home close to $80,000 after bonus, he said. But the VA job was enough to cover his bills and the mortgage on his condo, and it felt more meaningful than moving pallets around at Walmart.

One of his final chores at work before getting fired was responding to Musk’s ultimatum that he explain what he accomplished the previous week in an email, Muro said. He wrote up a list detailing his meetings with veterans, sent it off, and received a termination notice later the same day. As with other fired probationary employees, Muro says his notice cited performance as the reason for his layoff, though he says he never received a negative work review.

“My supervisor, she was in tears,” Muro said. “My whole team was in tears. I was the only person who wasn’t crying.”

HuffPost readers: Do you work at the VA? You can contact our reporter over Signal at davejamieson.99, or email him here.

Probationary workers may have weaker job protections than permanent employees, but there are still rules around terminating them. Federal unions — and, so far, two federal judges — believe what the administration carried out was an unlawful mass firing.

Thanks to their reinstatement to administrative leave following court orders, employees like Muro will now be paid without working and receive back pay dating to their terminations — an ironic outcome for Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which purportedly aims to cut wasteful spending. Asked whether the laid-off employees would be put back to work soon, a VA spokesperson said only that the department is complying with the court order and declined to comment further due to litigation.

In a court filing last week, the Trump administration argued that re-onboarding these workers would be burdensome to them and the government, since it would require “filling out human resources paperwork, obtaining new security badges, [and] re-enrolling in benefits programs and payroll,” among other tasks. The administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block a judge’s order requiring agencies to rehire some 16,000 workers.

Even if the courts find the probationary firings were illegal, Muro and others could still get caught in their agencies’ looming “reduction in force” plans. A February outline from the VA’s chief of staff called for dropping the agency’s headcount to back below 400,000. The VA is expected to submit an official downsizing plan to the White House for review.

Muro said he wishes the administration would spend more time looking at waste in the way agencies operate, as opposed to eliminating workers.

“I don’t disagree with him wanting to look at efficiency, but the way he’s acting on that … it’s very counterproductive, it’s very destructive,” he said. “Every leadership instinct in me says this is wrong.”

The VA is a sprawling department with plenty of financial mismanagement and waste in its past. But the administration’s blunt cuts to the government so far — largely spearheaded, it seems, by DOGE operatives with little or no government experience — haven’t inspired much confidence the White House will take a surgical approach to streamlining the VA or other agencies.

Several current VA employees who asked to speak anonymously said they were concerned about the message the Trump administration is sending to talented doctors and nurses who might consider working there. Even if such positions are exempted from cuts, they noted, frontline providers might expect a leaner administrative and support staff, and a mandate to do more with less.

“The VA is already so shortstaffed with direct providers,” said a VA social worker, who asked to speak anonymously for fear of retaliation. “Then there are schedulers, administrative folks, and people like me — what will the impact be from the removal of ‘less essential’ people? Does that mean the quality of care is going to go down?”

Plenty of veterans who rely on the VA have the same fears. Logan Bland, a 32-year-old former Marine now in a wheelchair, said he sometimes waits several hours for a transport to his home, which is an hour away from the Hines hospital. After his military service Bland was paralyzed from the chest down in an altercation with some bouncers at a bar. He now relies on Hines’ spinal cord injury clinic.

“Hearing about any kind of cuts makes me think the care won’t be adequate,” he said recently as he waited for a ride outside Hines.

Sean Lane, a 56-year-old Air Force veteran who used to work at Hines as a housekeeper, said he felt terrible for the workers who stand to lose their jobs. He lives in an affordable housing unit for veterans adjacent to the hospital.

“It sucks. I can’t understand it,” Lane said of the cuts. “You have a lot of uneasy people right now wondering if they’re going to have jobs.”

Muro considers himself lucky compared to other probationary workers who may have lost their careers. He is not married and has no children, so he doesn’t worry about other mouths to feed.

But after his layoff he applied for unemployment benefits and food stamps, and received a card for the local food pantry — the same place he’d been spreading the word to veterans about VA programs.

On a recent afternoon, Muro swung by Hines and caught up with the co-worker who trained him in the Whole Health program. As he sat in the hospital lobby afterward, he said he planned to apply for a job with the local veterans’ assistance commission. If he can’t win permanent reinstatement at the VA, he’d like to find a way to continue working in veteran care.

And even if the VA doesn’t employ him, he said he hopes can volunteer there.

“With morale and everything else, they’re going to need all the help they can get,” he said.