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We Love Our Veterans, Except When We Don't [1]
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Date: 2025-03-25
When you elect a president who has called people serving in the military losers and suckers you probably shouldn’t expect the government he runs to care much about them.
Here’s a real-life example: Personnel cuts in mental health services provided by the Veterans Administration and the demand that specialists working remotely must now return to VA offices are threatening to damage efforts to help veterans facing serious mental health issues, according to a story in the New York Times.
The story is titled, “Trump and DOGE Propel VA Mental Health System Into Turmoil.” The subhead reads, “A chaotic restructuring order threatens to degrade services for veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan”
Does this surprise anyone?
So far, only supervisory clinicians have been affected by the return-to-office policy. Unionized workers will be expected to report to the office in the coming weeks.
“The end of remote work is essentially the same as cutting mental health services,” a clinician at a mental health center hub in Kansas, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Times. “These remote docs aren’t moving and they have other options if they are forced to drive to some office however many miles away every day to see their patient virtually from there.”
But it’s more than that. The Times uses as an example a government psychiatrist who had to move her work from her home office to an open office space, where she works in one of 13 cubicles while doing telehealth treatments. Not surprisingly, patient privacy, an important tenet of her profession, is her main concern.
I don’t know about you, but I’d think it’s hard to have serious conversations with a mental health professional while you can hear talking from other cubicles and see people walking back and forth behind your doctor. I don’t think that’s just me.
“Psychotherapy is a very private endeavor,” Ira Kedson, president of AFGE local 310 at the Coatesville V.A. Medical Center in Pennsylvania, told the Times. “It’s supposed to be a safe place, where people can talk about their deepest, darkest fears and issues.
“If they can’t trust us to do that, I think that a sizable number of them will withdraw from treatment.”
The Times wrote that “Clinicians warn that the changes will degrade mental health treatment at the VA, which already has severe staffing shortages. Some expect to see a mass exodus of sought-after specialists, like psychiatrists and psychologists. They expect wait times to increase, and veterans to eventually seek treatment outside the agency.”
Of course, we know that four-time indicted, twice-impeached, sexual assaulter, tax fraudster, insurrection inspirer, wannabe fascist dictator, convicted felon, Russian puppet, President Donald Trump and co-president Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency, would love to see frustrated doctors and veterans go elsewhere.
Maybe that’ll help them privatize the VA, allowing the government to walk away from its responsibility to these men and women who have served their country. This in turn will provide a windfall for their buddies in for-profit health care, and the money the government doesn’t spend to help these veterans can go towards paying for the GOP’s tax cuts for the rich.
See, it’ll all work out.
A VA spokesman told the Times that complaints about patient privacy are “nonsensical.” I don’t know. I think I’m going to believe the doctors working in the field over a Trump hack spouting the company line for the most corrupt presidential administration in history.
Another real-life example: Veterans commit suicide at a much higher rate than the general population. In 2022, the rate for veterans was 34.7 per 100,000, compared to 14.2 per 100,000 for the general population, the Times said.
But a suicide prevention team in California, which is responsible for covering about 800,000 veterans, had three additional social worker positions cut as a result of the administration’s hiring freeze, the Times reported.
The team’s coordinator said the stress around the staff reductions is intense, and fears it’ll cause her to miss something critical.
“I’m so scared I’ll make a mistake,” she said. “I’m not sleeping well, and it’s hard to stay focused.”
Still another real-life example: In Denver, the staff of a homeless service center for veterans was reduced by a third. The work will be taken over by already overburdened social workers
“They’re not going to have enough time to serve any of the veterans properly, the way that they should be served and cared for,” said Bilal Torrens, an employee who was fired.
The VA provides care to more than nine million veterans. The administration has said it plans to eliminate 80,000 VA jobs. Some research studies have been stopped due to the first round of firings, the Times said.
We all know Musk and his incels of DOGE are just picking numbers – big numbers – out of a hat as they go about trying to destroy government. It’s beyond ludicrous to think these clowns are capable of making good, responsible decisions about things like mental health care for veterans.
They simply want to cut everything in front of them no matter who gets hurt. Any idiot can cut without nuance or understanding or even caring about what he’s cutting. That’s what’s going on here.
You can read the Times story here.
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The Trump administration has shut down the Veterans Benefits Administration’s Office of Equity Assurance, which was created under President Joe Biden to address disparities in how the federal government provides disability compensation to military service members, according to a report from ProPublica.
This “effectively hobbles internal efforts at the VA to investigate and eliminate long-standing racial inequities the department itself has acknowledged. … The office was eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s purge of programs broadly aimed at addressing diversity, equity, or inclusion according to emails obtained by ProPublica,” the story said.
Several VA sources said the office was not exclusively focused on race, and that it takes on cases for a range of veterans to ensure no one is denied proper benefits – including for reasons of age, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, and geographic location.
No matter. They’re just collateral damage in the ultimate goal of Trump and his accused drunk/sexual assaulter/incompetent boob Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s been trying to erase the history of minorities and women in the military. The pair wants to make our armed forces as white and as male as possible.
The reason? The answer here it to produce a military where as many members as possible would be willing to follow any illegal orders given by the president. We all know nobody likes Trump likes white men, while minorities and women are more likely to see through and stand up to his corruption.
You can read the ProPublica story here.
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Speaking of Hegseth, this would be a good time to look back at something from a previous post about his and VA Secretary Doug Collin’s support for privatizing veteran health care.
Hegseth is also a supporter of policies that would restrict VA care and believes veterans should ask for fewer government benefits, CNN reported. He’s lobbied for providing VA health care only to veterans with service-connected disabilities and specialized needs, a policy that would significantly restrict the number of future veterans eligible for VA care.
And he’s argued that health care benefits for both active-duty service members and veterans should be cut significantly so that the Pentagon can spend more on “war-fighting capability,” according to a Wall Street Journal op-ed he wrote in 2014.
CNN writes that Hegseth and Collins have “the opportunity to push for a dramatic overhaul of the military and veteran health care system, one that could significantly cut government health benefits for service members and veterans – many of which Hegseth says veterans should not be asking for at all.”
Dr. David Shulkin, who served as Trump’s Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary and also worked in President Barrack Obama’s administration, has called this “the worst-case scenario” for veteran health care, and he repeatedly warned Hegseth that.
“Your version of choice would cost billions more per year, bankrupting the system,” Shulkin recalls telling Hegseth in his memoir. “How can we responsibly pursue this? Unfortunately, he didn’t want to engage at the level of budget and other aspects of day-to-day reality. He seemed to prefer his sound bites on television.”
You can read the CNN story here.
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I don’t know what’s most evident about this administration – its cruelty, its racism, its corruption, or its stupidity. I do know all four are there in ample amounts.
We made a contract with our veterans. A great country keeps up its end of the bargain. The kind of country we’re well on our way to becoming – if we’re not there already – doesn’t.
In November, we voted to be what you’re seeing today. We can’t wait two more years with the hope the 2026 midterm elections will somehow stem the damage. By then it may very well be too late.
If you’re having problems wrapping your head around what’s going on in Washington try to not focus on all the aspects of the endless series of breaking news. Instead, concentrate on who all these actions will hurt. In this case, veterans.
That list is pretty endless too, but at least it puts some kind of face on the carnage this president, his sycophantic cronies, his cult, and the corrupt Republican Party are more than willing to inflict.
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Thank you for reading my post. You can see my other writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody. Please share and subscribe for free via email on its home page.
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