Donald Trump’s decline across nearly every measure of presidential performance is now showing up in the polls. He’s still attacking veterans, though, first going after their benefits and now going after their jobs by undermining veterans’ hiring preferences in the federal government.
After World War I, veterans organized on Capitol Hill to protest being shafted by the federal government for pay earned serving in wars of the past. In response, President Franklin Roosevelt and members of Congress moved to make sure veterans never would have to go through that again, enacting the Veterans Preference Act of 1944 (VPA).
Since then, the VPA has been strengthened, giving veterans with disabilities and seniority stronger hiring preferences and added protections during reduction-in-force (RIF) actions. The Veterans Recruitment Appointment (VRA) created even greater incentives for both veterans to seek federal employment and for the government to hire them.
Trump wants to end all of that.
In a recent rule proposal by the Office of Personnel Management, which is headed by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, Trump seeks to effectively replace VPA and VRA with “merit”-based hiring, firing, and rehiring practices.
Under the OPM’s new proposal, layoffs would be determined primarily by performance ratings rather than service. Veterans would receive a small boost, but no longer the meaningful protection they once had. In practical terms, that means a veteran with 20 years of service could be laid off ahead of a newer, non-veteran employee or one with slightly higher performance scores. Years of experience, institutional knowledge, and service to the country would be reduced to a tie-breaker. This would help the federal government elevate political hires over career people, veteran or not.
The federal government currently gives disabled veterans three levels of hiring preference. A five-point preference adds five points to the overall score of a veteran’s application. A 10-point preference works the same way. There is also a 30-percent or more disability rating, the highest tier, which can place a veteran at the top of a hiring list and provide stronger consideration for promotions. Most importantly, if the federal government carries out a reduction in force, it must show good cause before firing that veteran. The veteran would need to be the first employee hired back in the event that rehiring happened in the future. Which is almost always certain.
The new proposal from OPM threatens to toss this standard out the window.
At the same time, the rule makes it easier for agencies to exclude certain employees from layoff protections entirely, and streamlines the process for workforce reductions. In other words, it doesn’t just change who gets laid off — it makes it easier to lay people off in the first place.
The kicker is that if a laid-off veteran applies again in the future when the reduction in force ends, the federal government — the nation’s largest employer of veterans, which make up nearly a quarter of the federal workforce — doesn’t have to rehire them. For a veteran with 10, 15, or 20 years of service or more, and a debilitating condition, this could mean a life sentence of poverty.
This gut punch may be at least partially in response to court rulings that have forced the Trump administration to abide by labor agreements made through collective bargaining. For months, though, the warning signs have been there — in quiet policy changes dropped on the federal register, in technical rule-making notices in bureaucratic language that most Americans will never read. All of this taken together tells a clear story: Veterans are under assault.
For generations, federal service has been a pathway for veterans to transition into civilian life. The government is a place where their skills are valued, their service is recognized, and their careers can continue in public service. Weakening veterans’ preference in layoffs doesn’t just change a policy. It breaks that pathway.
The VPA has lifted a whole generation of veterans, myself included, out of poverty and helped make them productive taxpaying citizens. The federal deficit has soared to over a trillion dollars. Saving money is not the reason for these cruel and senseless rule changes. The only logical explanation is that Trump couldn’t care less about the vulnerable, and will never pass up an opportunity to crush them in order to enrich himself and his cronies.
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