WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs says it's on pace to slash its workforce by 30,000 total employees by the end of FY25 without needing to carry out a large-scale reduction, citing other factors like attrition and retirement.
The updated reduction estimate, shared in a release from the VA on Monday, is less than half of the number of employees VA leaders initially planned on cutting.
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In March, we reported that amid the Trump administration's efforts to make cuts to the federal government, VA Secretary Doug Collins announced the department was looking at reducing its staff by about 15%. At the time, that translated to about 70,000 employees.
The VA's release does not share why its projected workforce reduction has drastically dropped.
Leaders say they're already more than halfway to its goal of eliminating 30,000 staff members: from Jan. 1 to June 1 of this year, the VA reduced its staff by roughly 17,000. They believe the remaining reductions — about 12,000 employees — are expected to leave through "normal attrition, voluntary early retirement authority or the deferred resignation program," the release states.
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The release emphasized that the reductions will not impact "mission-critical positions," something the VA said in a statement shared with News 3 back in May.
"As we reform VA, we are guided by the fact that even though the Biden Administration astronomically grew the department’s budget and number of employees, VA wait times and backlogs increased. We are doing things differently. Our goal is to increase productivity, eliminate waste and bureaucracy, increase efficiency, and improve health care and benefits to Veterans. We will accomplish this without making cuts to health care or benefits to Veterans or VA beneficiaries," the VA's statement said, in part.
If the VA reaches its reduction goal, the department will have about 454,000 employees — meaning the workforce will have been trimmed by roughly 6% from the start of 2025 to the end of September 2025.
