Photo of the VA via Wikimedia Commons. Photo of Trump compensating for his micro penis by Gage Skidmore.
On 15 December 2025, the United States Department of Veterans' Affairs under the Trump regime announced plans to “reorganize the management structure of the Veterans Health Administration, with the goals of improving health care for Veterans, empowering local hospital directors, eliminating duplicative layers of bureaucracy and ensuring consistent application of VA policies across all department medical facilities.” Naturally, this entails making redundant 37,000 vacant positions across the country. VA Secretary Doug Collins has claimed that the Department of Veterans' Affairs is “headed in the right direction” and has produced "a host of new ideas for better serving Veterans that we will continue to pursue.”
VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz offered the assurance that the positions being eliminated were “mostly COVID-era roles that are no longer necessary” and asserted, “No VA employees are being removed, and this will have zero impact on veteran care.”
However, not everyone is feeling particularly optimistic.
On Wednesday 14 January 2026, Nurses, veterans, and union workers gathered at the San Francisco Veterans’ Affairs Medical Center on Clement Street to demonstrate against the Trump regime’s decision to eliminate tens of thousands of unfilled Department of Veterans’ Affairs positions, including over 150 in the Bay Area alone. Uppermost among their concerns is the fact that the Trump regime’s budget cuts will create more strain on the VA healthcare system in the form of service delays and reductions, heavier patient loads, and increased health and safety risks for the veterans who rely on the VA system for care.
Mark Smith, an occupational therapist and the NFFE Local 1 Union president, told KQED that the positions disposed of include nurses, psychologists, therapists and peer support specialists, specifically veterans hired to help their fellow soldiers navigate the VA’s systemic infrastructure. The emergency room social worker position at the VA Medical Center on Clement Street was also disposed of, and inevitably this will inevitably aggravate veterans’ physical and psychological emergencies.
This specific scenario is particularly grim. Although the most recent data on annual U.S. veteran suicides dates from 2022, it shows that in the years from 2001 to 2022, a total of 140,436 veterans committed suicide. To put that figure into some kind of perspective, that amount is within the ballpark of the mean populations of Jackson, Mississippi, Pasadena, California and New Haven, Connecticut, rounding to the nearest ten thousand. Even more alarming, in June 2024, USA Today reported that a Pentagon analysis showed that during a period from 2014 to 2019, nine times as many soldiers died by suicide than in combat.
Indeed, President Trump's policies have played havoc upon the San Francisco Bay Area among small business owners, public broadcasting stations, the immigration court, the affordable housing industry and even tech companies. Not scorning all that, the institutional neglect by the Trump regime of U.S. veterans, many of whom struggle daily with post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries and/or substance abuse disorders will catalyze a dynamic plethora of needless and preventable death and destruction. Then again, why should we expect a President who disparaged soldiers captured and/or killed while fighting wars as "losers" and "suckers” to give a shit about his constituents who served in the military?
