The Department of Veterans Affairs has dropped plans revealed in a memo earlier this year to lay off tens of thousands of personnel in August, a news release from the department indicated Monday.
The VA announced it’s currently on pace to reduce its staff by about 30,000 employees by the end of this fiscal year, in September, thereby “eliminating the need for a large-scale reduction-in-force,” or RIF.
The department originally planned to reduce its staff to 2019 levels, or just under 400,000, according to a memo obtained by CBS News in March. The VA said in its release that it had “roughly 484,000 employees on Jan. 1, 2025” — meaning the initial plans would have required the VA to cut upwards of 80,000 jobs.
In a statement included in the release, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins said that as a result of a “holistic” department-wide review, the VA “is headed in the right direction — both in terms of staff levels and customer service. A department-wide RIF is off the table, but that doesn’t mean we’re done improving VA.”
The VA acknowledged in the release that the agency “had been considering a department-wide RIF to reduce staff levels by up to 15%,” but said “employee reductions through the federal hiring freeze, deferred resignations, retirements and normal attrition have eliminated the need for that RIF.”
A spokesperson for the VA said in a statement Monday that it spent “nearly four months conducting a holistic review of the department to see what needs to be changed.” The department claimed that in recent months, the VA has improved services for veterans, citing “huge drops in the number of Veterans waiting for disability benefits, sizeable increases in claims processing productivity, and extraordinary progress regarding our electronic health record modernization.”
The spokesperson said the original number of 80,000 staff cuts “got employees thinking outside of the box to come up with new and better ways of serving Veterans,” and the “main goal all along has been creating the best possible experiences and outcomes” for veterans and their families.
Under the Biden administration, the VA hired tens of thousands of workers, in part to help administer the PACT Act, which addresses toxic exposures veterans suffered while serving in the military. The Trump administration initially looked at cutting staff levels to pre-Biden administration levels.
The Trump administration imposed a broader hiring freeze on many government jobs earlier this year, part of a push to cut the size of the federal workforce. The VA exempted some roles from that freeze, including many health care jobs at the agency’s hospital network. The administration also offered a voluntary “deferred resignation” deal that allowed thousands of federal workers to leave their jobs in early February and get paid until September.
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut took note of the reversal of the planned mass layoffs at the VA and blamed the work environment at the department.
“This announcement makes clear VA is bleeding employees across the board at an unsustainable rate because of the toxic work environment created by this Administration and DOGE’s slash and trash policies,” Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said in a statement. “This is not ‘natural’ attrition, it is not strategic, and it will inevitably impact veterans’ care and benefits — no matter what blanket assurances the VA Secretary hides behind.”
Blumenthal noted the VA workforce usually expands by about 10,000 “in a typical year,” and its statement that it was losing 30,000 this year means the VA “still stands to lose tens of thousands more employees than ever before.” He complained that the administration “repeatedly refused to share any additional information about this plan to cut 83,000 VA employees and what positions would be targeted.”