Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, the parent organization of The Fulcrum.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
The health care of veterans is a matter that transcends partisanship and is part of the United States' solemn promise to the men and women who have served in its military. The Department of Veterans Affairs is responsible for administering not only the Veterans Health Administration, but also a wide range of benefits for veterans, including disability compensation, pension programs, education, home loan guarantees, life insurance, burial and memorial benefits, survivor benefits, employment services, and caregiver support.
Public polling consistently shows that Americans support enhanced benefits for veterans, specifically affordable housing, free college and free health care, more so than for the general population. A 2024 RAND Corporation study confirmed past polling reflecting broad bipartisan support for veteran-specific programs, with most Americans willing to pay higher taxes to fund these initiatives.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties also generally demonstrate strong support for veterans and their benefits. However, both parties still debate specific policy implementation and budget allocation. The Republican Party has expressed a preference for moving to a public- private partnership to administer many veterans benefits, while (most of) the Democratic Party favors investing in public infrastructure to meet VA mandates. So it’s not surprising that proposed changes to the VA included in Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration, focus largely on privatization.
From a nonpartisan perspective, the stated aims of Project 2025’s proposed reforms are worthy goals: to enhance the efficiency, responsiveness, and veteran-centric focus of the VA by addressing health care delivery, benefits administration, infrastructure, and workforce management. But would these reforms achieve their intended goals?
Key proposals in Project 2025
Political and operational changes: One notable political proposal would extend the term of the under secretary for health to ensure continuity and protect the position from political changes by the next administration. Additionally, the plan calls for the dismissal of Biden administration appointees on day one to establish political control over the VA.
Health care proposals: These are particularly controversial. The plan recommends eliminating services deemed contrary to conservative principles, such as abortion and gender reassignment surgeries, and emphasizes adjusting services to meet the needs of an aging veteran population transitioning from Vietnam-era to post-9/11 veterans. It also proposes codifying the 2018 VA MISSION Act standards to ensure veterans have access to private-sector care, potentially expanding privatized outpatient clinics and telehealth.
Veterans Benefits Administration reforms: For the VBA, the focus is on outsourcing and technology to streamline claims processing. The goal is to process the first disability claim within 30 days and reduce improper payments and fraud. There is also an emphasis on accelerating reviews of standardized disability ratings and increasing IT funding for automation and improved efficiency.
Office of Human Resources and Administration reforms: The HRA reforms include rescinding Biden administration delegations of authority, reevaluating hybrid and remote work policies, expediting a new HRIT system, and enhancing recruitment of veterans and military spouses. Additionally, the plan suggests sunsetting the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection and decoupling HRA from the Office of Security and Preparedness to streamline operations.
Concerns and considerations
One of the primary goals of Project 2025 VA reforms is to outsource many core health care services to private companies. This includes outsourcing exams for evaluating claims, adjudicating claims automatically with private tech companies and facilitating care through private health care providers. While some conservative groups, like Concerned Veterans for America, support expanding veteran access to private care and cite polling that indicates wide support for that plan, this polling seems to directly contradict years of surveys of veterans who use the VHA.
For the quarter ending March 2024, 80.4 percent of veterans expressed trust in the VA, with 91.8 percent specifically trusting VA health services. Why the disconnect? The difference in perceptions may come from the fact that outside polling often includes a large percentage of opinions from the public rather than just veterans who use VHA services, skewing the results, or perhaps past scandals at individual VA facilities remain salient in the public's minds. However, multiple systematic reviews comparing VA and non-VA health care outcomes show that the VHA generally provides equal or better quality care, particularly regarding mortality rates and in safety, equity, and specific surgical and clinical outcomes.
Without a doubt, there are veterans who have negative experiences with their VA-administered care, and those veterans need to be heard and have their concerns addressed. However, privately administered health care in the U.S. is already overburdened, and it doesn’t seem logical to move veterans into that private system, risking the real net positive results most veterans experience through the VHA. A recent audit by the VA Office of Inspector General concurred and highlighted concerns that increased spending on community care could erode the VA's direct care system and limit choice for veterans who prefer VA services. It warned that diverting funds from the VA to private care could reduce the quality of direct VA care.
To be clear, under the Biden administration, the VA has continued the trend of privatization that began under Obama, grew, and was codified by the MISSION Act in 2018 under Trump. The Project 2025 report on the VA hints at this when offering rare praise that the Biden appointees have "adopted some of their predecessors’ governance processes." Ensuring that changes truly benefit veterans should be the priority for the current administration as well as future administrations looking to improve the VA.
Project 2025 focuses on conservative political goals and extensive outsourcing, risking politicizing the VA further and undermining its ability to serve veterans effectively. Given the high trust and satisfaction among veterans with current VA services, nonpartisan support for veteran-centric benefits, and research indicating the importance of retaining the private model of care, it is crucial to approach these reforms cautiously
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.