Trump cuts to VA services has area vets feeling abandoned

Alicia Saunders admits that screaming in the shower sometimes helps.

She’s joking, but only a little.

Saunders isn’t quite sure what else to do with her anger over the first whirlwind weeks of the Trump administration, especially when it comes to his decision to cut 80,000 workers from the Veterans Administration payroll, twenty percent of whom are veterans themselves.

“I mean, same stuff, different day, right?” says Saunders, an honorably discharged Navy Aviation Support Equipment Technician. “I mean, we’ve always been treated like numbers. I like to say, we’re the government’s broken toys. The second we get our DD214s (the honorable discharge papers) we’re no longer useful so they just continue to toss us off. 

“This is just another show of them shoving us under the rug and hiding us until it’s time for them to bring us back out to gain their votes. Then they shove us back away.”

If she sounds bitter, she is. But she’s not embittered. Saunders actually seems to treat life a bit like a loose garment, taking things as they come and presenting an almost merry countenance. A happy warrior if you will.

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t care. In fact, she cares a lot. Enough to run for the state assembly last fall in a bright red district against incumbent Shae Sortwell, motivated by, among other things, gay and trans rights. One of Saunders’ own children is non-binary.

Despite having little chance of breaking through in such a Republican stronghold, Saunders ran an energetic upbeat campaign before losing – as is so common these days in our polarized nation – by about the demographic margin of the district.

Ben Murray, who also served in the Navy for nearly 12 years, wears his bitterness a bit more prominently. Murray also ran a long-shot campaign for assembly last year, also in a rural district. He’s not interested in hiding his disdain for the current administration.

“I am ashamed of my country,” Murray says. “The way the MAGA faithful act is a disgrace to those who served to protect our freedoms.”

‘They’ve signed their lives away’

Despite citing bone spurs as an escape from military duty, despite once calling veterans “losers and suckers,” despite once disparaging the family of a Gold Star hero, despite mocking war hero John McCain and now, despite significantly and wantonly cutting further already insufficient veteran services, Donald Trump enjoys the support of a majority of military personnel. 

Saunders matter-of-factly explains this as a “culture thing.”

“A lot of it is, they just don’t have time to follow this,” Saunders says. “I mean, what do most of these people have time for? Eat, maybe sleep, go to work, right. And you know the military works hard. And they play hard too. They’ve signed their lives away and so they’re going to make the best of it. So I mean, what, do I have time for watching the news?”

Then, too, is the media they do consume when they do tune in to the news. They hear all the time, she says, that Republicans support the troops, Republicans have the troops backs, Republicans know what’s best for the troops.  

Saunders is willing to extend her Trump-supporting brethren grace for another reason, too. The military, she says, is like a family. They may spat and squabble over politics but when it’s all said and done, they’re all part of the same mission and there is a bond.

Saunders grew up Republican, voted for George W. Bush and John McCain before abandoning the party to become a Libertarian. At one point she was a Tea Party Republican until, she says, it became full MAGA. So Saunders is no flaming ideologue. Her political beliefs are based, not on party, but on conscience. 

She was a bit disappointed in the Democrats when they held all the power from 2021 to 2023, believing they might have done more for active duty personnel and vets. But, she maintains, it’s always been the case that the military has been taken for granted. One person she feels completely supported by is Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

“I mean, her record speaks for itself,” she says. “She consistently votes in favor of veterans. And under President Biden the PACT Act was passed so I give him credit for that. And his own son died from cancer because of toxic fume exposure so it’s something that’s near and dear to his heart obviously.”

Vets already underserved in Northeast Wisconsin 

The Trump administration’s decision to cut 80,000 staff from the VA – by no means the only administration action that, in Sauders’ eyes, amounts to an abandonment of the nation’s responsibilities to its vets – revolves to a large extent around the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 2022. 

The PACT Act, which Sen. Ron Johnson only reluctantly came around to voting for the first time, addresses health benefits for veterans exposed to toxins, including from burn pits and Agent Orange, among others. The bill, in essence, makes it much easier for exposed vets to access health care for a deadly illness in a timely manner and without all the frustrating red tape.

To accommodate the greater demands on the system, the PACT Act authorized the hiring of tens of thousands of more VA administrators. These are the people the Trump administration, along with his unelected sidekick, Elon Musk, have cut loose, citing bloat, but with no apparent support for the assertion. Their claim – that this will somehow lead to greater efficiency somehow – would seem to defy logic.

Murray served on fast attack submarines, aboard a Ticonderoga Class Cruiser, and performed threat analysis at Buckley Air Force Base. He says Northeast Wisconsin is already an underserved area for veterans.

“It appears the first cuts to the VA pertain to transportation services to and from medical appointments,” he says, incredulously. “That needs to be said twice, and slowly. The first thing President Trump takes from disabled veterans is their ability to get to the doctor. And when I spoke to my doctor about the 80,000 jobs cut, his jaw dropped.”

Ironically, Murray isn’t terribly concerned about how those cuts will impact his area in northern rural Wisconsin but only because the services are already so sparse they can’t possibly cut them any further.

Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut attempted to attach an amendment on the GOP’s budget bill that would extend PACT benefits but it failed, with Ron Johnson and 51 other Republicans voting it down.

“I called Johnson every day and then he voted against it,” Saunders says. “That fired me up.”

Saunders was herself, as a Naval Support Equipment Technician during the Iraq War, often drenched in jet fuel.

‘We have enemies in our government’

Despite coming from a long military background, Saunders hadn’t intended to follow suit, having also come from a deeply conservative evangelical Christian home.

Then 9/11 happened.

“I was raised to be a housewife and a mom,” she says. “But it was already a source of pride for me when you can trace our family’s military history way back. I might even be a Daughter of the American Revolution. After 9/11 I think I was in the recruiter’s office by October.”

This is, in other words, a deeply patriotic American. She’s pretty sure Trump and Musk don’t know nor care what it means to gut the VA when it’s already considered understaffed, when veterans already wait so long for services they understandably feel they’ve earned. 

“I mean, I hear (vets) still blaming Biden,” she says with an eyeroll. “And some will think, well, they’re just getting rid of administrative jobs we don’t need. Like, who needs another secretary? I don’t think the seriousness has really hit them yet. When the appointments start going away it might. So instead of waiting six months for a psychiatric appointment you’ll be waiting two years.”

That’s a big concern for Saunders, too. On average twenty-two veterans a day kill themselves and she doesn’t see how that won’t increase with longer appointment lags and with the administration’s new policy that doctors see more patients per day, moving them through, as Suanders sees it, like cattle. Cuts to Medicaid are an additional significant worry, she says, noting that without it, not only will Veterans who rely on it go without insurance, hospitals will begin to close.

Murray’s contempt for the administration isn’t limited to the cuts to veterans’ benefits but rather is all-encompassing.

“Make no mistake,” he asserts. “President Trump is making the US the bad guys on the world stage. Abandoning NATO shows that he is completely ignorant of the fact that the only time in history when Article V (the article obliges NATO members to come to the defense of any fellow member that is attacked) was after 9/11. When we were attacked NATO was there, no questions asked.”

And while Murray was a strident critic of President Biden’s policy toward Gaza, saying he “facilitated genocide,” he calls Trump’s stated desire to colonize GAZA “ramping genocide into overdrive.”

As for Saunders, she hasn’t allowed cynicism to overtake her, nor even gain a foothold. She says she has no regrets about joining the military despite the treatment she and her fellow veterans have received. She’s still patriotic, a word she considers for some time when asked how she’d define it. 

“You know, it’s different for every person,” she says. “But I think it should come first with supporting the Constitution and defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

“And I take that seriously. And I do feel like we have some enemies here in our government that are actively tearing our country apart. And it’s hurting me.”