By Alexandra Alper and Phil Stewart
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Department of Veterans Affairs will begin mass layoffs at the politically sensitive agency as early as June, according to a memo reviewed by Reuters.
The memo, which is dated March 6, directs the department’s human resources team to begin reviewing the agency’s operations with an eye toward firing civil servants. It said it expects the review to be done by June, after which “VA will initiate Department-wide RIF actions,” using an acronym for “reduction in force.”
In a response to a request for comment, the VA sent Reuters a link to VA Secretary Doug Collins’ recent opinion piece in The Hill in which he defended the cuts as “thorough and thoughtful.”
Veterans groups, Democrats, and some Republicans have already voiced concern over the planned reductions at the department, which is seeking to cut more than 80,000 workers from the agency.
The scale of the layoffs at the VA is greater than proposed cuts at other agencies and will hit a department that looks after a group that typically garners wide bipartisan support in the U.S., its military veterans.
Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said last week that the job cuts marked an escalation of a “full-scale, no-holds-barred assault on veterans” by President Donald Trump that would put veterans’ health benefits in “grave danger.”
Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who said he learned of the cuts from the media, called it “political malpractice” not to consult Congress about the measures.
The cuts are part of Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk’s efforts to dramatically slash the size of the federal government.
(Reporting by Alexandra Alper and Phil Stewart; Writing by Raphael Satter; editing by Bill Berkrot)
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