Robyn Stevens Brody/Sipa USA via AP Images
Thousands of veterans and supporters rallied on the National Mall in Washington to oppose Elon Musk’s DOGE VA cuts under the Trump administration, March 14, 2025.
In America, veterans are reliably conservative. In 2024, pre-election polls showed that about 61 percent of them supported Donald Trump, while just 37 percent supported Kamala Harris. In the past, this made some sense, as Republicans traditionally have showered money and benefits on the military, despite the fact that the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department constitute the only fully socialized, cradle-to-grave welfare system in this country. The bargain has gone like this: Give the government several years of your life, potentially putting life and limb at risk, and you will get access to a European-style welfare state.
But this time is different. Trump, together with Elon Musk and his DOGE goons, are carrying out sweeping attacks on veterans and soldiers alike, from active-duty troops, to veterans who receive a wide range of benefits, to the hundreds of thousands of veterans in the federal workforce.
Probably the most directly impactful cuts are the ones to the VA, particularly research and treatment. As Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early have covered here at the Prospect, the VA has a scientific arm that has developed dozens of medical innovations useful not just to veterans, but all people. Agency scientists were central to the development of advanced prosthetic limbs, the cardiac pacemaker, the liver transplant, the CAT scan, and dozens of important medications.
Great chunks of that scientific apparatus are being ripped out, more or less at random. Hundreds of researchers have been fired and hundreds of studies, including clinical trials, have been halted. “Over 10,000 veterans may have their medical care affected immediately because of this assault on VA research, the National Association of Veterans’ Research and Education Foundations tells the Prospect,” Gordon and Early write. A lot of veterans, and likely ordinary citizens too, are going to die because of this.
Thousands of VA staff have already been canned, and more than 80,000 layoffs are planned for coming months. As Gordon and Early detail in another piece, Trump’s VA chief Doug Collins is cutting contracts not with abusive monopolists who rip off the agency, but others providing basic services. The quality and accessibility of veterans’ care will suffer. Even the VA’s suicide hotline is not immune, as perhaps two-thirds of the people staffing it will not be able to comply with Trump’s order ending work-from-home policies.
Trump and Musk are also coming for veterans’ homes. As NPR explains, back in 2023 the VA abruptly canceled a pandemic relief program that allowed veterans to stop making payments for up to six months, which is forcing borrowers to make up the missed payments all at once. Up to 40,000 veterans faced foreclosure. In response, the agency set up a mortgage assistance program, called VASP, that’s similar to the New Deal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which bought up distressed mortgages and negotiated new terms within borrowers’ ability to pay. More than 17,000 veterans are now enrolled in this program.
But now Trump is axing that program before even half the affected population is enrolled, and possibly ending it for the veterans already enrolled in it. In this, he has the support of House Republicans. “The Trump administration rightfully put an end to VA’s VASP program,” said a joint statement from Reps. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) and Mike Bost (R-IL), the chair of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
It’s not just veterans, either. Back in February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he wanted an 8 percent annual reduction in the military budget for each of the next five years, which will likely add up to a roughly 50 percent total cut in inflation-adjusted terms at least. (Completely deleting the Navy would not even come close to reductions on that scale.) As Military.com reports, these proposed cuts may be why the Army is considering sacking 90,000 active-duty troops.
Finally, we have Trump and Musk’s all-out assault on federal government workers and their unions. About 30 percent of federal workers are veterans, thanks to numerous initiatives to give them priority access to federal jobs. Ironically, these job placement programs and protections constituted a large fraction of the DEI initiatives at federal agencies—the ones that Trump has been canceling wholesale, as he has with the contracts with almost every federal workers’ union. It’s a safe bet that veterans will make up a similarly disproportionate share of those laid off.
It would be a mistake, of course, to think that George W. Bush was all that concerned with the lives of American soldiers, given how many he got killed by starting a disastrous war of aggression in Iraq. As Kurt Vonnegut (a Second World War veteran himself) wrote, “They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.” But at least Bush and his other Republicans pretended to care. That manifested in support for the VA and other programs.
Trump can’t even do that. To him, troops aren’t even toys. Recently in Lithuania, four American soldiers were killed in an apparent training accident. Before their remains were shipped back home, they were honored at an elaborate ceremony attended by the Lithuanian president, along with the country’s top generals and religious leaders. But Trump declined to attend the “dignified transfer” procedure when the bodies arrived back on U.S. soil, because he was at a Saudi golf tournament in Florida.
