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The Veterans Affairs Department’s workforce will have a advocate in its next secretary, President Trump’s pick to lead the agency told lawmakers on Tuesday, though it can also expect a crackdown to hold bad actors accountable.
Former Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., defended VA’s mission and eschewed any effort to privatize the department during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, suggesting the nation’s largest health care network would always exist for veterans. He pledged to continue to utilize and grow private sector options for veterans, however, which has subsumed a growing portion of VA’s budget since the passage of the 2018 Mission Act in Trump’s first term.
“I believe you can have both, you can have a strong VA as it currently exists and you can have the community care aspect,” Collins said, referring to the program by which VA pays for veterans to receive private care.
The secretary-designate defended the largely governmentwide hiring freeze Trump put into place Monday, suggesting he would exempt benefits administrators but declining to go into further detail.
“We’ll take a look at the current levels of employees that we have and where they’re properly located,” Collins said. “We will work under the executive order he has given us.”
Collins added he was “still examining” its exact impact on VA, which drew criticisms from Democrats on committee. Collins sought to assuage those concerns by saying Trump was taking a “prudent step” to assess the department’s current resources and needs going forward rather than to make any long-lasting cuts. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the panel, said that response still raised questions.
“This is going to be a first test of your leadership, whether you fight for an exemption in the hiring freeze for the non-veterans benefits employees who are needed to care for veterans at medical facilities,” Blumenthal said.
Collins countered that Blumenthal was falsely assuming that a vacancy equated to an actual need for the department.
“There may be openings, but there was openings yesterday,” Collins said. “There was openings last week.”
Collins said he would seek to bring more employees into the office rather than allowing them to telework, though he noted he was bound by collective bargaining agreements that represent 80% of the VA workforce. He similarly pledged to follow labor contracts and all other legal processes when seeking to fire more department staff, though he said he would ultimately not be restricted in getting rid of malfeasant workers.
“Failing up is not an option,” Collins said. “I will work within any agreements, employee agreements, collective bargaining, but if you’re putting a veteran, health and safety at harm, I will make sure the department will get rid of you, and we are willing to do whatever it takes to do that.”
He said such an approach would both get rid of poor performers and allow the best workers to flourish.
“When you have employees that come to work every day doing it right, and they feel like they have to carry a co-worker along, after a while, they don’t want to carry the co-worker anymore,” Collins said.
He vowed to support his workers who are carrying out their duties responsibly.
“I will be the biggest cheerleader for every VA employee out there who is out there doing it right,” Collins said.
The secretary-designate noted Congress passed and Trump signed into law the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act specifically to make it easier for the department to fire employees. Collins’ predecessor, Denis McDonough, in 2023 ended the implementation of disciplinary provisions included in that law citing its repeated defeats in court, labor panels and elsewhere. The decision marked the second time in the last decade that Congress tried and failed to speed up firing at VA. In 2016, the department announced it would no longer use a 2014 law aimed at making it easier to fire career senior executives after it similarly suffered a series of legal setbacks.
VA committee leaders in both chambers are looking to pass new legislation that would reinstate and strengthen many of the provisions of the 2017 firing law. Lawmakers made clear in the bill that its reforms would supersede any agreement VA had negotiated with a union.
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