According to public reports, at least 2,400 employees in the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs have been fired by the Department of Government Efficiency. (Getty Images)
This article was originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal’s neighboring sister publication, West Virginia Watch.
Two hundred workers were laid off from the Bureau of Fiscal Service in Parkersburg. Thousands from the Department of Veterans Affairs (including at least 10 in West Virginia). And hundreds each from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Caring for our veterans, responding to natural disasters, and keeping our skies safe — these are all among the roles of government that most folks across the political spectrum agree upon, and even so, they have all been impacted.
And these layoffs aren’t coming after professional and thorough reviews of departments identifying redundancies or unnecessary functions. The Department of Government Efficient (DOGE) is using a hatchet rather than a scalpel, largely firing probationary employees — not because they were found to be unnecessary but because they are easy to fire with few civil service protections.
And promoted employees are also subject to probationary periods, meaning many workers who are moving up the ladder due to their professional success are also being fired. This is in line with DOGE’s broader lack of thorough analysis, cutting off critical grant programs without a full understanding of what they do and dramatically overstating the supposed savings, often later having to unfreeze important dollars and walk back those “savings” claims.
But where is this all coming from? It cannot be about saving money. Laying off a quarter of the entire federal workforce would only reduce spending by 1%. Perhaps Russ Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and a lead author of Project 2025 summed up the real reason: “When [federal employees] wake up, we want them not to want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains… We want to put them in trauma.”
So who exactly is the federal workforce he is referring to? There are just over 2 million federal employees, 637,000 (30%) of which are veterans; notably, the federal government is the nation’s leader for veteran employment. These are many of the workers being intentionally “traumatized” by attacks on the federal workforce. Earlier this week, the chief information officer of a Department of Justice Office, a 100% disabled veteran, resigned citing the “relentless stream of unwarranted criticism and negative remarks we all have been enduring for the last several weeks.”
Twenty percent of the 2 million-person federal workforce is employed by Veterans’ Affairs (VA), an agency whose mission is “to care for those who have borne the battle.” Combined with the Navy, Army, Air Force, Defense, and Homeland Security, two-thirds of federal employees are in defense and security agencies.
According to public reports, at least 2,400 VA employees have been fired already. My brother is a psychologist for the VA, working with veterans daily to provide the mental health support they need to successfully transition from military to civilian life and, sometimes, just to stay alive. In 2020, 5.2 million veterans experienced a behavioral health condition, so the need for highly qualified, compassionate VA staff is significant. While he and many of his co-workers have not yet been impacted by layoffs, many are now looking for the door after relentless attacks, which could dramatically undermine the workforce needed to serve our veterans.
In West Virginia specifically, the impacts of federal worker layoffs could be significant. While West Virginia has just about 20,000 federal workers living in the state, the federal government constitutes more than 2% of the state’s total workforce, a higher share than 45 other states. As a result, cuts to the federal workforce could have an outsized impact on the economy in West Virginia.
Federal workers have become an easy target for the folks who think the government should “run like a business.” But a quick look at the federal workforce shows that the roles federal officials fulfill are ones “free market” business can’t or won’t, but that are morally or societally vital: educating our children; providing health care for the young and old, veterans, and the disabled; ensuring food and product safety. These services by nature won’t be efficient in the business sense.
Government workers provide vital services to society and our population, largely in the background and without acknowledgement. Often when they are successful, nothing happens — at least nothing that the majority of us can see. To borrow from a recent article from West Virginian Michael Tomasky: “No one takes a drink of water and thinks, ‘Hey, I didn’t get sick or die from that water, thank you, Environmental Protection Agency.’ No one gets on a flight that lands safely and thanks the Federal Aviation Administration. No one buys a toy for their infant or toddler that does not contain any parts the child could accidentally choke on and thanks the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”
But make no mistake, as we see federal workers laid off arbitrarily and others leave due to relentless criticism, we will witness the significant impacts across our daily lives and in our economy. And those we all agree are deserving of care — veterans, the elderly, victims of natural disasters, and children — will likely be among the most impacted.
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