ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The second-largest department in the U.S. government after the Pentagon is Veterans Affairs. About 470,000 doctors, nurses, therapists and benefits claims experts work at more than 1,300 sites across the country. As part of the DOGE initiative, the Trump administration aims to cut about 15% of that staff. For the first time today, the VA Secretary Doug Collins appeared on Capitol Hill to answer questions about how he intends to do that without hurting VA health care or benefits. NPR's veterans correspondent Quil Lawrence is here with more. Hi, Quil.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.
SHAPIRO: You've reported that the VA has chronic shortages in frontline health care staff. So what did Secretary Collins say about how he plans to cut staff without making that worse?
LAWRENCE: Yeah, this hearing got contentious, that Collins sat for about two hours taking questions from senators about how he would cut as many as 83,000 staff. Democratic senators accused Collins of cutting to fit some arbitrary goal that was imposed by Elon Musk's DOGE initiative. And Collins, in turn, accused the senators of trying to terrify veterans that they're going to lose their health care. Listen to this exchange between Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal and the VA secretary.
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DOUG COLLINS: I will not let you sit here and scare my veterans and scare my employees because no one has discussed firing doctors or firing nurses. We've always said that we're going to keep frontline health care.
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: You've said you are firing 83,000 people. You will be firing physicians, nurses, surgeons, counselors, workers who are frontline.
SHAPIRO: So did the secretary ever answer the question of who will be fired and how they'll reach that number?
LAWRENCE: Well, there was a lot of asking, a lot of responsing (ph). Senators said that they'd been writing to the VA, sending questions and writings about what contracts were going to be cut, who would be let go. Collins said he had answered about 90 written requests, but Blumenthal shot back that some of those letters from VA were so devoid of information that they were, quote, "an insult to my intelligence and perhaps yours." Collins said that there's this analysis underway to decide what they're going to cut. But Senators pointed out that when the deputy chief medical officer of VA testified in recent weeks, he hadn't been consulted about how these cuts are going to be made.
We did glean a little bit of hard data, which has been hard to come by, that in the two rounds of probationary staff who were fired - about 2,400 had been fired earlier this year - and Collins updated the senators that only a thousand were actually let go because the VA was forced to hire back the rest.
SHAPIRO: And let's drill down into that. I mean, NPR has reported that even staff from the veterans suicide hotline were cut, only to be rehired days later.
LAWRENCE: Yeah, the VCL, the Veterans Crisis Line, made for another contentious exchange. Senator Tammy Duckworth, who is a combat-disabled vet, asked Secretary Collins about key staff who had been fired.
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COLLINS: That's why we brought them back, Senator. And I think there's something, though, that we need to also clarify here. And this was clarified not by our senior level. It was clarified by career employees that no VCL who answers the phone, who talked to our veterans was let go.
TAMMY DUCKWORTH: Right. But it's - the VCL...
COLLINS: Now, no...
DUCKWORTH: ...Can't operate without the other people, as well, like the supervisors on shift or the people who trained the VCL. You are parsing your words.
LAWRENCE: And Duckworth and other senators on both sides of the aisle pointed out that firing people and then hiring them back does not inspire a lot of confidence that this is sort of a well thought out, considered plan going into effect. You know, Collins, again, accused the senators of trying to scare veterans that they're going to lose their health and benefits. And we can say, veterans are concerned. A recent poll by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America found that 81% of veterans that they polled are worried that recent federal cuts could impact veterans' benefits and health care.
SHAPIRO: That's NPR's Quil Lawrence, who covers veterans affairs. Thank you.
LAWRENCE: Thanks, Ari. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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