A former Army staff sergeant and disabled veteran who was fired last month from the Department of Veterans Affairs will be in the audience Tuesday night as President Donald Trump gives his first address to Congress.
David Pasquino will be among other veterans at the State of the Union hoping to put a face to the thousands of federal workers, including many veterans, fired in recent weeks by the administration.
Pasquino served nearly 18 years in the infantry and worked as an HR specialist at the VA for 11 months before his position was culled in the Trump Administration’s rapid purge of probationary federal employees. Veterans make up 30% of the federal government workforce and are believed to have been disproportionately impacted by the layoffs.
Pasquino was 39 days away from being promoted to the next federal pay grade and was hoping to count his years at the VA towards an early retirement after 30 years of federal service.
“I felt like I was a number on a spreadsheet and I wasn’t an actual person and the thing that really bothered me about the whole thing is that it wasn’t done correctly,” Pasquino told Task & Purpose. “This is going to have to affect not just on the federal workers that were terminated but also on the American people and the services and things that they’ve come to rely on.”
Being caught up in unforeseen cuts was not new to Pasquino. He said he was pushed out of the Army in 2016 during the Obama Administration’s force reduction. Instead of being able to retire after 20 years in the military as he’d planned, Pasquino was forced to separate early.
“It wasn’t for bad luck, sometimes I wouldn’t have any at all,” Pasquino said.
Pasquino will accompany Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), lead Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, at President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night. He will be one of dozens of other veterans attending the speech as guests of Democrats in Congress. Takano told Task & Purpose that Democrats are bringing veterans as a reminder of “the human face of these firings.”
“We, in law, have actually made preferences for those veterans a feature,” Takano said. “Those who answered the call to work at the VA are very special people. They’re often doing this with less compensation than they could command in the private sector. This kind of disruption really came out of the blue.”
The White House has said that the firings are part of the administration’s attempt to slim down the federal government “bloat” that has grown in recent years. A White House spokesperson told the New York Times that Democrats bringing veterans as guests to Tuesday’s speech were “exploiting the American people for political points.”
17 years, 10 months, and 18 days of service
Pasquino enlisted in May 1998, one month shy of 19 years old, and shipped to basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. He served in Germany and South Korea, deployed to Macedonia and Kosovo from 2000 to 2001, became a drill sergeant, and completed two tours in Iraq.
In 2005, Pasquino deployed to an area close to 30 miles south of Baghdad, known as the “Triangle of death,” where American troops encountered countless improvised explosive devices, suicide bombers, and insurgency attacks. He went back to Baghdad for another tour from 2009 to 2010.
Pasquino was in the middle of a master gunner course for the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicles when he got word that he would be part of the Obama administration’s ordered cuts to military billets.
“Unfortunately, I was one of the casualties of that reduction in force,” Pasquino said.
“I was chosen along with a bunch of other sergeants first class and staff sergeants. I had friends of mine that were in Afghanistan in a combat zone and while they were there they got their notification that 30 days after they got back from deployment they had to separate.”
Pasquino tried to appeal the decision, but that final plea failed. After 17 years, 10 months and 18 days of service, he separated from the Army.
“My plan was, I wanted to retire and then do something else to serve,” Pasquino said, adding that he then “fell into an HR role” which he loved. He worked at Paychecks, Lowe’s Home Improvement, and a private telecommunications construction company in South Florida.
In March 2024, Pasquino was recruited by the VA to recruit IT employees for the agency’s information technology office which was handling the electronic health record transformation — an effort to create a holistic picture of a veteran’s medical history throughout their military careers. Interruptions to the project and the VA’s lack of a clear path forward is costing taxpayers between $16 and $50 billion, according to a federal watchdog report.
Takano said that the decision to make broad cuts to VA administrative staff like Pasquino was ignorant of the role that they play in these large multi-billion dollar projects.
“This is already taking too long. We’re talking about the beginning of the last Trump administration, we started the electronic records system. Elon Musk is supposedly a big IT guy. I don’t think he did the due diligence to understand what the heck was going on,” Takano said. “They didn’t really figure out what the consequences of firing David would mean.”
Pasquino said at least 10 other HR employees were also recently fired. When their office was stood up, the VA had a two-year backlog of personnel actions which they helped reduce. The recent HR hires also helped cut down the VA’s average time-to-hire from 130 to 62 days, Pasquino said, adding that it will go back up without enough staff.
“They’re going to be asking the people that are still there to do the same amount of work that we were doing before with a third of the people and it’s just not possible,” he said.
Pasquino and the 2,400 other VA employees let go in recent weeks are among thousands of other federal workers now thrust into the civilian job market.
“If I had the chance to go back to federal service I would but I don’t know that that’s going to be possible,” he said. “I don’t know if I would even. I would be scared to.”
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