Recommendations of the Editorial team
Donald Trump’s decline in almost all evaluation categories is now reflected in the surveys. Nevertheless, he continues to attack veterans – first their benefit entitlements, now their jobs. His means: to undermine the hiring preferences of veterans in the federal service.
After World War I, veterans organized on Capitol Hill to protest government rip-offs for pay they had earned in past wars. In response, President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress ensured that veterans would never have to go through that mill again with the Veterans Preference Act of 1944 (VPA).
Since then, the VPA has been further strengthened: Veterans with disabilities and long-term service received stronger hiring preferences and better protections in the event of job cuts. The Veterans Recruitment Appointment (VRA) created additional incentives for veterans to seek federal employment—and for the state to employ them.
Trump wants to end all of this
Trump wants to abolish all of this.
In a recent proposed rule from the Office of Personnel Management, headed by Russell Vought – the architect of Project 2025 – Trump seeks to effectively replace VPA and VRA with “merit-based” hiring, firing and rehiring processes.
Under the new OPM proposal, layoffs would be based primarily on performance ratings rather than length of service. Veterans received a small bonus, but no longer received any real protection as before. What this means in practice is that a veteran with 20 years of service could be fired ahead of a newer, non-veteran employee or someone with marginally better performance records. Years of experience, institutional knowledge and service to the country would be reduced to a mere tiebreaker. This would primarily benefit political appointments – at the expense of professionals with long careers, whether veteran or not.
Three Levels of Veterans Protection
The federal government currently provides three levels of hiring preferences to veterans with disabilities. A five-point preference adds five points to an application’s overall rating. The ten-point preference works the same way. There is also the highest level – a disability level of 30 percent or more – which can put a veteran at the top of a hiring list and receive greater consideration for promotions. Most importantly, if the federal government conducts job cuts, it must demonstrate good cause before firing such veteran. And in the event of a later new hire, this veteran must be the first to be considered again – which is almost always the case.
The new OPM proposal threatens to throw those standards out the window.
At the same time, the regulation makes it easier for authorities to completely exclude certain employees from dismissal protection and simplifies the process for job cuts. In other words, it’s not just about who gets fired – it simply makes it easier to fire people in the first place.
Lifelong poverty as a risk
The real kicker: If a laid-off veteran reapplies after the job cuts end, the federal government – the largest employer of veterans in the country, who make up almost a quarter of the federal workforce – does not have to rehire him. For a veteran with ten, fifteen or more than twenty years of service and a severe disability, that could mean a life of poverty.
This slap in the face may be at least partly a response to court rulings that have forced the Trump administration to comply with collective bargaining agreements. But the warning signs have been there for months — in quiet policy changes in the Federal Register, in technical rule change notices in bureaucratic jargon that most Americans will never read. Put it all together and you get a clear picture: veterans are under attack.
For generations, federal service has been a path to civilian life for veterans. Government is a place where their skills can be valued, their service recognized and their careers in the public sector can be pursued. Weakening veterans’ hiring preferences during downsizing does not simply change policy. It destroys this path.
A system that has changed lives
The VPA has lifted a generation of veterans, including me, out of poverty and turned them into productive, tax-paying citizens. The federal deficit has risen to over $1 trillion. Saving money is not the reason for these cruel and pointless rule changes. The only logical explanation is that Trump simply doesn’t care what happens to the most vulnerable – and he never misses an opportunity to crush them to enrich himself and his cronies.
