More than 80% of researchers who investigate veteran cancers, burn pit exposures and mental health for the Department of Veterans Affairs fear their work is on the chopping block under new hiring freezes and budget cuts.
“They’re doing this with people’s lives,” said one VA researcher who lost their job this month. “There’s no, like, ‘OK, we’ll build a new spaceship and put it back on the launch pad.’ That damage is done. That really troubles me — the idea that we just apply that model to healthcare and it’s gonna work equally well
A federal hiring freeze, buyouts and layoffs directed by President Donald Trump across the federal government is also axing career researchers at VA centers across the U.S.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) blasted the cuts, citing ongoing projects by VA researchers on “cancer treatments, burn pit exposure, prosthetics, diabetic ulcers, and so much else.”
The hiring freeze could potentially impact 3,800 workers who have time-limited positions that may not be renewed because of the hiring freeze, according to the National Association of Veterans’ Research and Education Foundations, or NAVREF, a collective of organizations affiliated with VA medical centers.
Nearly 83% of the more than 4,600 people employed at the VA’s research office are on term appointments, according to the VA, and must be evaluated and rehired every three years. Some researchers have already been laid off and others will be in the coming months without any intervention.
One researcher said that they are VA employees but their job depends on regularly applying for research grants through the VA and other federal agencies, like the National Institutes of Health, all of which are seeing or expect huge cuts in research budgets.
“The term we use sort of colloquially is, we eat what we kill,” a former VA researcher said. “The idea with these term positions is that if we’re not able to successfully compete for grants, they’ll eliminate our positions.”
When announcing layoffs of 1,000 workers, including veterans who worked for the agency, VA officials cited $98 million in annual cost-savings to spend on veteran healthcare, benefits, and other services.
A NAVREF spokesperson said recent executive orders included the Veteran Health Administration, which was unusual since they had typically been exempted from government shutdowns or hiring freezes because the VHA runs hospitals and programs that directly impact patient care and safety.
The VA official told Task & Purpose that the department “continues to take multiple steps to ensure all mission-critical positions are exempt from the federal hiring freeze and layoffs.” The official said that leaders can request their employees be exempt from “probationary removal” and from the hiring freeze.
“We encourage any VA leaders with pressing hiring needs to use this process,” the official said, adding that hiring is ongoing for more than 300,000 essential positions in health care and other vital services that are exempted from the hiring freeze.
100 years of research on veteran health
The layoffs come just as the VA celebrates a century of medical research aimed at veterans.
The VA’s modern research program traces its origins to 1925, when the Veterans Bureau established its first research program and began publishing a monthly medical journal on common veteran health issues. The bureau was later replaced by the Veterans Administration in 1930 and, in 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill turning the Veterans Administration into a cabinet-level department.
Advocates and former researchers say that an existential crisis is coming for research that, in the last century, has provided life-saving care for America’s millions of veterans as well as led to ground-breaking medical and healthcare interventions that have benefited the general population like CT scans, cardiac pacemakers, and hypertension treatment.
In fiscal year 2024, Congress appropriated $984 million to the VA for 102 research sites nationwide and nearly 7,300 active projects, according to the VA. How much of that could soon disappear is unclear but researchers fear what a major cut would mean to both veterans and the rest of the U.S. healthcare system.
“It’s sort of in this inflection point around what the future looks like and what the next 100 years could look like,” said Rashi Venkataraman Romanoff, CEO of NAVREF, a group advocating on behalf of researchers affiliated with the VA. “The VA has been at the forefront of so many pivotal biomedical discoveries and inventions that have transformed how we think about healthcare.”
In January, NAVREF officials sent out a member survey to get a 90-day snapshot of the workforce impacts on VA research. If research positions continue to be eliminated, between 350 and 400 extramural studies involving veterans could be suspended or canceled in just the next couple of months. Additionally, $35 million of outside organization funding may be wasted and 10,000 veterans could be denied access to clinical trials, Romanoff said.
‘Cease to function’
At the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle, Washington, eight researchers were recently let go, prompting a fiery response from Sen. Murray who blamed Trump and Elon Musk for deciding to “fire these researchers on a whim.”
“I’m not going to stand by and let Trump and Elon destroy VA medical research,” Murray said.
Task & Purpose interviewed two researchers who recently lost their jobs with the VA, which included work to bring down veteran opioid over-prescriptions and research on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They asked to remain anonymous in case their positions are reestablished. One researcher said the VA would be losing over 150 years of institutional knowledge from their office alone.
“The firings that occurred with this group of seven is disruptive, but people survived. Next month, it’s gonna be more disruptive. They’re already scrambling to fill positions or backfill roles,” he said. “If they’re still firing folks in April, it’s gonna quickly get exponential and at some point, I mean the research service is going to cease to function.”
One pulmonary researcher dually employed by the Veteran Health Foundation and at the VA Pittsburgh Health System wrote in a letter posted to LinkedIn by the CEO of the foundation that three new cancer studies were halted because of their VA status being rescinded. The pulmonary researcher said that shutting down studies across the VA could pose a risk to patient safety and deter veterans from wanting to participate in future research because of the abrupt closure.
“Some medications are dangerous to go off and require tapering over several weeks. Is this new drug one of them? Who will oversee this? A patient who is responding to experimental treatment may then relapse or even worsen. Also to consider are the ethics of having to deny an existing patient further treatment, which in some cases, might be literally life-saving if the treatment could be completed,” they wrote. “Additionally, patients lose confidence in the process of research, either by not understanding the reason for cessation or just not willing to chance their hopes of a cure/improvement being dashed again.”
‘Moving fast and break stuff‘
The researcher laid off this month also expressed frustration at the use of Musk’s private-sector philosophy of “move fast and break stuff” being applied to the VA and as a result, veteran research and care.
“That works great when you have totally unambiguous outcomes from breaking something. Sure, let’s try a new rocket design and it blows up mid-flight. We’ve got this unambiguous information and we can learn from that,” he said. “When they’re breaking stuff in the VA, the consequences for patients, there will be some consequences that are immediate, but some of these consequences are really difficult to understand and not gonna appear for years.”
Since the VA is invested in a veteran’s health for life, as opposed to a civilian receiving private healthcare and insurance which can change due to job or life circumstances, VA health systems research ends up impacting other health systems across the country, the second researcher said. Both were part of the VA’s campaign work on opiate over-prescription.
“It was the leader on that not just because of policy decisions at the top, but because researchers were there to evaluate and see what’s happening and see places where we needed to intervene,” she said. “A lot of this can’t be done elsewhere because we don’t have to worry about this sort of profit. That’s not our goal. We’re not gonna get rich off of this. We’re really just after: how do we get good care out there.”
Trump’s former VA secretary Dr. David Shulkin, who served for nearly a year and was the first non-veteran to lead the agency, told Task & Purpose that officials should get a better understanding of the projects that have been halted or slowed down before new policies are implemented.
“Research proposals take quite some time to put together and are based upon a lot of planning, so it would be prudent policy to understand what it means if research is going to be terminated or the investigators eliminated,” he said. “Sometimes when things are done quickly there can be unintended consequences.”
Impacts across VA
The two Washington researchers reached the end of their most recent three-year term agreement in mid-February and instead of being renewed, they were let go. Researchers in similar positions will face the same fate in the coming months.
The administration is “refusing to honor” the three-year term limits “by rolling them over as is standard and is instead immediately dismissing these researchers—who are in the middle of research on topics including mental health, alcohol and opioid withdrawal, cancer treatments, burn pit exposure, prosthetics, diabetic ulcers, and so much else,” Murray said.
The loss of these research positions is also being exacerbated by the loss of probationary federal employees who were fired or given buyout offers by the Trump Administration. Sen. Murray estimated that the mass probationary worker firings may have impacted tens of thousands of VA workers. Friends of VA Medical Care and Health Research, a membership organization of academics, medical experts and veteran associations, said in a release that the freeze and ongoing layoffs have impacted VA jobs that are “already experiencing critical shortages” including doctors, nurses, patient coordinators, scientists, and other medical personnel.
Within the hiring freeze guidance, cabinet secretaries are authorized to look at time-limited or “not to exceed” roles so Romanoff is hopeful there can be a turn around for these term-limited positions.
The researchers who spent the majority of their careers, more than 20 years with the VA, are also hoping that there’s a change in policy.
“I just want to get my job back. I love my team. I love what I do. It’s all very surreal,” the second researcher said. “Even though my skills could probably be used by the Amazons and Googles of the world, that’s not what I want at all.”
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