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.
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.