VA expects 30K voluntary job cuts by October, erasing need for layoffs

Voluntary retirements and resignations are expected to trim 30,000 Veterans Affairs workforce positions by the end of September, forgoing plans for potential forced resignations this fiscal year to meet administration goals to reduce the size of government, department leaders announced Monday.

Already, about 17,000 VA jobs have been vacated since Jan. 1 through a combination of deferred resignations, retirements, normal attrition and department hiring freezes, officials said. Another 12,000 posts are expected to be cleared out over the next two and a half months.

VA Secretary Doug Collins in a statement said that because of those significant workforce reductions — equalling a 6% decrease in the roughly 484,000 VA workforce last fall — department leaders are no longer discussing the idea of a department Reduction In Force process.

“Since March, we’ve been conducting a holistic review of the department centered on reducing bureaucracy and improving services to veterans,” Collins said in a statement. “As a result of our efforts, VA is headed in the right direction — both in terms of staff levels and customer service.”

A VA spokesman said the department is not looking to make any additional “major changes” to staffing levels beyond that 30,000 cut. Previously, officials had said they may eliminate up to 80,000 department jobs in coming months.

For the last several months, department leaders and members of President Donald Trump’s White House staff have insisted that workforce cuts are needed to trim down the federal bureaucracy to reduce spending and improve efficiency.

However, Democratic lawmakers and union leaders have strongly objected to those claims, saying the increased medical and benefits workload of the department mandates more staffing, not less.

They have also said that hiring freezes and staff cuts have begun to hurt veterans benefits, particularly in tasks indirectly related to medical care, such as appointment scheduling and medical supply delivery.

But Collins and top VA officials have said the department has multiple safeguards in place to ensure that staff reductions do not impact veteran care or benefits, including exempting more than 350,000 positions from the federal hiring freeze.

Department officials also pointed to positive trends in benefits processing and medical care in recent months, continuing trends from the last few years.

Collins said in his statement Monday that the staff reductions thus far have “resulted in a host of new ideas for better serving veterans that we will continue to pursue.”

Department leaders said they are looking at “duplicative and costly administrative functions that can be centralized or restructured” for additional workforce savings, as well as reducing some of the 274 separate call centers the department runs.