Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins is setting straight the left-wing story that President Donald Trump’s cuts to “waste, fraud, and abuse” will harm veterans.
“That’s all I’ve been doing for a little over four and a half months now is fighting lies, innuendo, rumors from the hill and other parts of the press, saying that we’re destroying everything at the VA,” Collins told The Daily Signal. “The reality is we’re actually helping veterans. We’re actually putting the VA back in the proper mode of being a service organization and not a jobs program and not something that’s just perennially complained about on the hill.”
While the Trump administration has cut many government grants and laid off tens of thousands of employees, Collins, an Iraq veteran, has made it clear that veteran care is a priority.
“I’ve made it clear from day one: No health benefits and no disability benefits are being cut,” Collins said. “The budget that the president just submitted proves that we’re not moving anything.”
“I guess they just have the opinion that they just keep telling a lie long enough, somebody will believe them,” he said of Democrats and the corporate media.
Contrary to Democrat criticism, Collins said he hears from veterans every day finding better service under the Trump administration.
“They’re getting disabilities claims process quicker. We’re 25% down on the backlog,” Collins said.
The Department of Veterans Affairs will soon work with the Office of Personnel Management for assistance to carry out widespread layoffs. The VA is still in the evaluation process to determine how many people will be included, Collins said.
“What makes much better headlines for Democrats and others on the hill to try to demonize the VA of what we’re trying to do to make changes, but in the end, they’re just scaring veterans and scaring our employees, which I find offensive,” Collins said.
The VA is the largest single agency in the administration.
“We’re trying to make sure that that’s much more streamlined so that our center directors and our hospitals can make decisions much quicker,” Collins said.
One aspect of Veterans Affairs Collins is particularly dedicated to is lowering suicide rates.
“We’re spending over $500 million a year in quote ‘preventative programs.’ We spend about 2.3 billion in treatments and, and others for folks who are struggling with PTSD and other things that keep them from taking their life by suicide,” Collins said.
Yet the right people are often not being reached, he said.
“They’ve never had contact with us, so we haven’t even had a chance to try and turn them on a different way,” Collins said. “So we’re looking at new alternative ways from new media podcasts. We’re gonna be partnering with sports organizations, film industry folks, music people, to try and figure out how we can reach those that may be reached on another platform.”
“And if they come to the VA, great, we wanna help direct them there, but we’re also gonna be able to get them to anyone that’s willing to sit down and take a look,” he continued, “and there’s a lot of great nonprofits, [Veterans Service Organizations] out there that can help.”
The department announced in April it would no longer cover gender reassignment surgeries for veterans, but the secretary expressed a firm commitment to ensuring that every veteran will continue to access benefits.
“If you are transgender and you have earned the benefit as a member, every other benefit is there for you,” Collins said. “We’re just not gonna be a part of the gender reassignments and the dysphoria that’s going on.”
When asked if improving the function of the VA played a role in rising military recruitment under Trump, Collins said he sees the Department of Defense and the VA as “fraternal twins.”
“We very much do have the same kind of a mission with the same people,” he said. “They do the kinetic mission. We do the aftercare mission, if you would, but it’s the same group.”
“When the parents and grandparents or aunts and uncles who served, they come out, they get a good experience in the VA, they can see that we’re fulfilling their promise to them,” he continued. “So when you have the younger generation coming up, they’re more apt to say, yeah, it’s good. Take the initiative, go into the military, because we’d gotten into a point here just in the recent history, where you’d have upwards of 40 or 50% of those who served would tell their children not to serve.”
