re: Trump administration plans to cut 80,000 employees from Veterans Affairs, acc to memo

quote:

---

As long as veterans are well cared for!

---

Send the Vets to private providers... They will be well cared for then...

Less is more. Most of those employees operate at the detriment of veterans. Get them out and get compassionate competent people back in.

My dad had a tear in his bladder and a VA hospital wanted to take out his appendix. The VA cut out his broken rib and butterflied his incision. One of my dad’s prescribed medications from a VA pharmacy was LSD.

My family took in a homeless paralyzed veteran. We got him medical care, his required benefits, and worked with a charity to get him a home.

frick them all. Churn all those frickers.

As a veteran of OIF twice, I applaud this. Been going the private health care route since I got out in 2011 after 6 months with a broken kneecap and our fine military doctors telling me to take some Motrin and stop being a pussy.

Turns out after they sent me to a civilian Dr and ordered a bone scan instead of a normal xray, that I should have been on crutches and no PT profile instead of running 7 miles a day.

VA is another jobs program for blacks, just like a lot of other gubment jobs.

quote:

---

You can do this with the photo-op 'chain saw approach' or you can put some deliberate intellectual rigor into it and make cuts (which most agree are possible) with a scalpel where federal organizations have excess capacity. But by all means, continue to cut services to your supporters....

---

And how do you expect these cuts with a scalpel to operate? DOGE doesn't have the manpower to individually analyze every position and employee in the federal government.

So, these surgical cuts would have to come from department heads and managers. I don't think asking the same managers who allowed the system to become rampant with fraud and waste to voluntarily selectively cut their budgets is going to produce the necessary cuts.

There will be sad stories about hard working and totally necessary employees whose sole purpose in life is to be a public servant. This was predicted as soon as DOGE was announced. What you are suggesting simply isn't feasible logistically and would not reduce the waste as much as needed.

We can't always make decisions based on emotion, especially when it's taxpayer money. We need real change and that doesn't come with a delicate touch. Politicians spent decades wasting our money, but you want to fight the guy tasked with cleaning up the mess.

quote:

---

Stonehenge

---

there he is

quote:

---

The Department of Veterans Affairs is planning a reorganization that includes cutting over 80,000 jobs from the sprawling agency that provides health care for retired military members, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The VA’s chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, told top-level officials at the agency that it had an objective to cut enough employees to return to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000. That would require terminating tens of thousands of employees after the VA expanded during the Biden administration, as well as to cover veterans impacted by burn pits under the 2022 PACT Act.

The memo instructs top-level staff to prepare for an agency-wide reorganization in August to “resize and tailor the workforce to the mission and revised structure.” It also calls for agency officials to work with the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency to “move out aggressively, while taking a pragmatic and disciplined approach” to the Trump administration’s goals. Government Executive first reported on the internal memo.

---

I think the federal government has become akin to a hog that a family farm has fed and befriended but when it's finally time to take the hog to slaughter no one has the guts to do it.

quote:

---

admire President Trump but this is a major mistake! The one department you do not want to do this to is the Dept of Veterans Affairs. You are hurting the veterans. Damn!

---

Come on man, they're not immune from criticism. I respect vets but treating them like a sacred cow is a recipe for big problems.

And are you 100% certain that this hurts vets with ZERO other possibilities?? 80,000 employees cut to reach Pre-Biden employment of 400,000 employees. That is a MASSIVE amount of people working in just ONE government agency.

Hannity's radio show interviewed a young doctor who worked for the VA and then for a private hospital. The VA expected him to see 2 patients in the morning and two more in the afternoon. At the private hospital he was expected see 8 patients in the morning and 8 in the afternoon. A half an hour per patient.

quote:

---

Veterans are gonna need to pull up their boot straps

---

pretty sure you're trying to be snarky here, but you're absolutely right.