In a scathing post on X (formerly Twitter), IAVA founder and executive director Paul Rieckhoff took Donald Trump to task for intentionally throwing America’s largest-healthcare system in chaos.
My sources are sharing memos that have gone out. Job offers to new employees that have a start date after Feb 8 are now being rescinded. This includes some folks who have already moved to new cities with their families. Doctors, nurses, counselors. Recruiting is also stopping and open job postings are being pulled from USAJOBS.
Hastily implementing a freeze on hiring and screwing over Veterans Affairs employees who already relocated for their new roles will greatly harm the agency, Rieckhoff added.
This is throwing a massive hand grenade into the largest healthcare system in America that serves millions of vets. It’s already hurting morale and retention—and will impact recruiting at VA forever. It’s reckless and stupid. And intentional. This is how you drive people out of VA and make sure they don’t want to work there. Which for many Trump people has always been the plan. If you want to shrink the workforce and privatize the VA, this is how you accelerate it.
Trump’s associates are taking a similar tack at DOJ, with offers to law-school graduates rescinded who would’ve served in key divisions that are now under full-on assault.
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
For a party that falsely claims the “family values” mantle, these moves will hurt those same families Republicans claim to defend. Take Chenoa O’Neil, a single mother of two children in Utah, who applied for a work-study job at Social Security Administration that would allow her to make additional money while in school.
“Her interviews went so well she was hired on the spot,” as NBC Washington reported. But all of her plans screeched to a halt because of Trump’s hiring freeze—which, as O’Neil mentioned, harms an agency that was already chronically understaffed.
Trump pulled the same antics in 2017, instituting government-wide hiring freeze that Rep. Anthony Brown called at the time “policy made for TV cameras.”
With Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 at the core of Donald’s operation, this administration is not in the business of solving government agencies’ dysfunction. In fact, the stated goal of that disgraced manifesto is to replace nonpartisan, civil servants with cronies who serve only one man: Donald Trump.
He’s ordered his mob to report any DEI coworkers—and have colleagues snitch on each other, as Rieckhoff mentioned in his thread—to Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which will put an instant target on the backs of lifelong civil servants.
For those of us looking in, it’s an abject failure of governmental management. But for that lot, it’s an opportunity to install loyalists who will do the bidding of a deranged felon hellbent on destroying the country he allegedly loves. Firing civil servants, as JD Vance loudly declared, was the plan all along.
I reached out to Paul Rieckhoff for further comment and will update this post as events warrant.
SOURCES
- Paul Rieckhoff on Twitter
- Glenn Thrush on Twitter
- NBC Washington
- The Hill
