Last spring and summer, The Fulcrum published a 30-part series on Project 2025. Now that Donald Trump’s second term The Fulcrum has started Part 2 of the series has commenced.
The Trump administration’s plans for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) have reignited fierce debate over whether these moves represent a much-needed correction or an outright dismantling of essential services. While the administration frames these actions as a return to the VA’s core mission—serving veterans—critics warn that privatization, the elimination of diversity programs, and federal hiring freezes and cuts are leaving the agency understaffed, underprepared, and at risk of failing those who have served our country.
These changes also mirror the recommendations of Project 2025 —a right-wing blueprint for reshaping the federal government that Trump himself has publicly distanced from. Yet, his administration’s early actions suggest otherwise.
Loyalty Tests and Political Purges
On day one, Trump signed an executive order reclassifying thousands of career civil servants, making them at-will employees subject to dismissal for perceived disloyalty. Shortly after, the Senate confirmed former GOP Rep. Doug Collins —a staunch Trump ally and 2020 election denier—as VA Secretary. These steps are aligned with the political and operational changes proposed in Project 2025 to establish political control over the VA.
Despite reassurances from Acting VA Secretary Todd Hunter on January 21 that critical healthcare positions would be exempt from Trump’s government-wide hiring freeze, uncertainty remains.
Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, warns that replacing career officials with political appointees and gutting the VA staff risks undermining VA expertise in areas critical to veterans’ healthcare.
It’s also clear that preserving “critical healthcare positions” does not mean preserving the quality and speed of care. "Government serves the public," Mattingley explained. "When you think about Veterans Affairs or national security, those have real implications... It's, do we have the HR staff? Do we have the data folks? Do we have all the adjacent pieces that make an organization work? There's a lot of impact to just doing good business if you start arbitrarily cutting folks."
No Department is an Island
The VA insists that core services remain unaffected, but that promise is difficult to uphold when layoffs and budget cuts ripple across interconnected programs. Many programs are overlapping or interdependent, such as medical research for veterans. Cuts being made to the National Institutes for Health (NIH) affect many VA studies and treatment research. A VA scientist overseeing five studies on terminally ill patients described her department as a “skeleton crew” that will likely disband when their contracts expire in the coming months. "We can’t effectively proceed with the research any longer," she told NBC News anonymously, fearing retaliation.
Already, the VA has terminated over 1,000 employees, who were abruptly fired on February 13, including service-disabled veterans and military spouses, leading House Democrats to demand transparency and justification. Those fired were probationary employees —with two years or less on the job, depending on the position.
Perhaps the most chilling revelation concerns the Veterans Crisis Line, an essential suicide prevention service. Though VA Secretary Doug Collins insisted that the cuts would not affect the hotline, reports surfaced that at least a dozen crisis line employees had been fired before at least two were reinstated after political intervention by Democratic lawmakers. With veteran suicide rates increasingly and alarmingly high—6,407 veteran suicides were recorded in 2022—this disruption is not just reckless; it is dangerous.
Secretary Collins has attempted to downplay these firings, posting on social media that reports of cuts to critical services were a “whopper.” But if the administration is eliminating the very employees who deliver healthcare and benefits, how can those services remain intact?
The Fallout for Veterans as Patients and Employees
The Office of Personnel Management’s most recent (2021) report on veteran employment in the federal government shows that more than 30% of the country’s 2.2 million federal employees are veterans. The Trump administration’s plan to shrink the size of the government threatens the employment of many of these veterans.
The VA has long struggled with severe staffing shortages, particularly in medical roles. A 2024 inspector general report found that out of 139 veterans' healthcare facilities surveyed last year, only two were free of critical staffing shortages. Yet, instead of addressing this crisis, the administration’s policies seem to be exacerbating it.
New hires have already seen their job offers rescinded. Supervisors initially froze hiring, then reversed course, allowing limited exemptions—leading to confusion and discouraging potential applicants. Coupled with the VA’s lower-than-private-sector salaries, this uncertainty weakens the agency’s ability to recruit and retain qualified professionals.
Another executive order issued on day one that fulfills a promise of Project 2025 requires eligible VA employees to return to full-time, in-office work, affecting nearly 96,000 workers—20% of VA staff. Secretary Collins defends the move, but critics note that remote work policies predate COVID and were implemented to address VA staffing shortages. Many remote employees, including Veterans Crisis Line staff, now face logistical challenges as their designated facilities lack space to accommodate them.
As these upheavals continue, employees—many of them veterans—are left wondering whether they will have jobs when the dust settles.
Privatization: A Step Toward or a Step Too Far?
The most contentious debate in VA policy has long been the push toward privatization. Now, the administration and Republican lawmakers are accelerating that shift.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.) introduced the Veterans' ACCESS Act, expanding private-sector VA care under the 2018 MISSION Act. The bill aligns with Project 2025’s playbook, which prioritizes privatization. But is this what veterans want?
Evidence suggests otherwise. In a 2024 VA satisfaction survey, 80.4% of veterans expressed trust in the agency, with 91.8% specifically trusting VA healthcare. Yet, Community Care spending—the funding mechanism for privatized VA healthcare—has ballooned by 15-20% annually. This redirection of VA dollars to the private sector weakens direct VA care while handing profits to private healthcare providers. If this trajectory continues, veterans will be left in the same broken healthcare system the rest of the country struggles with—stripped of the specialized care the VA was designed to provide.
Furthermore, the private healthcare system is already overburdened. A recent VA Office of Inspector General audit raised concerns that increased reliance on Community Care could erode the VA’s direct care system, limiting options for veterans who prefer VA services. For example, with half of U.S. counties and 80% of rural counties lacking a single psychiatrist, funneling more veterans into an unstable private sector risks exacerbating gaps in care.
The stakes are especially high as the VA’s patient load expands. The PACT Act, which provides care for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, has driven an influx of nearly 400,000 newly enrolled veterans. Shrinking the VA at this moment defies logic.
The Human Cost of Political Experiments
The Trump administration argues that its VA restructuring is necessary to eliminate inefficiencies and direct taxpayer dollars toward veterans. But the growing outcry from researchers, frontline workers, lawmakers, and veterans themselves suggests otherwise.
If the administration’s goal is truly to serve veterans, it must answer these pressing questions:
- Why were service-disabled veterans and crisis hotline workers among those terminated?
- How will the VA address its widening staffing crisis?
- What safeguards exist to ensure that political purges do not endanger critical services?
These are not partisan concerns. They are questions of competence, responsibility, and honoring the nation’s promise to those who have served.
Veterans don’t need political fights. They need care. And they need it now.
Update on Feb. 26 after posting: Another 1,400 union VA employees have been terminated.
Samples of Phase 2 articles about Project 2025
Samples of Phase 1 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
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
- Voters oppose the far-right playbook
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
- The Department of Justice
- A blueprint for Christian nationalist regime change
- How anti-trans proposals could impact all families
- The Federal Reserve
- A threat to equitable education
Kristina Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.