The New Yorker:

V.A. insiders describe themselves as miserable—and they worry that the Trump Administration will do long-term damage to the agency.

By David W. Brown

On March 5, 2025, Samantha Crowder sat in a corner of her bedroom which she’d turned into a home office, staring in disbelief at a leaked memo. The chief of staff of the Department of Veterans Affairs, where she’d worked for nearly a decade, had notified agency leaders that the V.A. would “aggressively” shrink its footprint. In partnership with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (doge), the memo said, the V.A. would “identify and eliminate waste” and “reduce management and bureaucracy.” This apparently meant firing about eighty thousand of the agency’s four hundred and eighty thousand workers.

After that, Crowder told me, meetings frequently devolved into discussions about the looming cuts. Her office paused work on a project to speed up the process for granting treatment privileges to new V.A. doctors; hiring was frozen and a number of job offers for doctors had been rescinded, so there was no one to bring on board. (Even after the Trump Administration reversed course on the offers, some doctors declined them.) Meanwhile, a stream of executive orders were affecting federal workers. A return-to-office mandate felt, to Crowder, like an accusation that she wasn’t doing her job from home. The V.A. had hired many people specifically to be remote workers, and the agency was short on desks. One of her colleagues was assigned to the back room of a local post office, and another was placed in the break room of a courthouse. Crowder was a data analyst based in Orlando, Florida; in her view, the downsizing was not being driven by any data. Several meetings discussed an executive order that, among other things, prohibited the word “gender” in any federal document, policy, or system. An application that helped veterans request doctors had to be updated so that it used the word “sex” instead.

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