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WASHINGTON — As House Republicans continue to neglect their responsibility to hold President Trump accountable, House Democrats are demanding answers from VA Secretary Collins regarding the mass terminations taking place at VA.
To date, the Department of Veterans Affairs has failed to respond to numerous inquiries about the late-night firing of over 1,000 VA employees nationwide – many of whom are service-disabled veterans or military spouses.
Despite Secretary Collins’s claim that the firings “will not negatively impact VA healthcare, benefits or beneficiaries,” the affected positions are critical to healthcare, benefits, and research. The Trump Administration must provide Congress with answers and justify these reckless actions.
Link to full letter.
Dear Mr. Secretary:
The Administration’s late-night actions on February 13, 2025, to terminate over 1,000 dedicated federal civil servants at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) directly contradicts your recent testimony before the U.S. Senate, where you said, “I want to strengthen VA so it works better for America’s heroes, and I will embrace your oversight and seek your counsel as we work together to do just that.” Yet, rather than seeking the counsel of Congress, you took unilateral action to abruptly dismiss service-disabled veterans, military spouses, medical researchers, and countless others without any apparent justification—undermining the very mission of VA. There is nothing strengtheningabout gutting the workforce with the sacred mission to serve veterans, caregivers, and survivors.
It defies logic that you would terminate employees who are veterans themselves and who are serving veterans daily, all without regard to their performance or the devastating consequences of these firings. We know this to be the case because, on February 14, 2025, when congressional staff requested these justifications from your Office of Congressional and Legislative Affairs, the official currently performing the delegable duties of the Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Legislative Affairs claimed no one in that office had knowledge of these actions until VA’s press release was issued the night of February 13, 2025, at 9:06 p.m. This admission underscores the reckless, ill-planned nature of these firings, as well as a completelack of transparency in how they were executed.
Adding to our concerns, this mass firing follows a directive from the Office of Personnel Management instructing federal agencies, including VA, to provide justifications for retaining probationary employees. The sequence of events strongly suggests that the OPM directive was nothing more than a hollow exercise, ignored in favor of an ideological purge. This lack of meaningful review casts serious doubt on your claim that “these moves will not negatively impact VA health care, benefits or beneficiaries.”
Given these serious concerns, we demand that you personally brief Members of Congressby no later than February 26, 2025, and that at this briefing you be prepared to thoroughly answer Members’ questions and to produce documentation and other evidence to support your claims.
This Administration may believe it can run government agencies the way Elon Musk gutted Twitter—by arbitrarily slashing staff and expecting operations to somehow function seamlessly—but VA is not a tech start-up, and veterans are not an experiment. We will not allow reckless political games to undermine the care and benefits our veterans have earned.
We look forward to your prompt response.
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