Veterans Day: Those who have served will be ill-served by Trump and Project 2025

Today, November 11, we in the Divided States of America observed Veterans Day, a holiday known in other parts of the world as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day. By any name, the original purpose of the holiday was to commemorate the end of World War I, which turned out not to be the "war to end all wars" as it had been billed back in the day, but whose end was nonetheless a cause for celebration. The US has since expanded the holiday to pay tribute, at least via lip service, impassioned patriotic memes, and mattress sales, not only to those who fought in the first World War but to all who have served our country throughout its history.

But because of what happened on November 5, on this November 11 the words, "Thank you for your service" are ringing even more hollow than usual.

As someone who is married to a US Navy veteran and is keenly interested in the laws and policies that most directly affect veterans, I am deeply saddened by the ways our vets are almost certainly going to get the shaft from the incoming regime. To put it succinctly: #NeverWasMyPresident King Donold John Trump, aka Cadet Bone Spurs -- who has consistently disrespected veterans despite the fact that so many of them continue to support him -- is no friend of the men and women who have served.

In my Election Day post I wrote about a conversation I'd had the Friday before the election with three senior-aged male veterans on a VA shuttle bus. All three were all in for Trump and had already early-voted for him, their main issues apparently being border security, meat prices, and the Green New Deal. In the interests of keeping the peace with my new friends, I kept my own political opinions to myself, but what I so badly wanted to say was, "If Trump wins... just wait until you see your VA benefits decimated."

Well... Donold won. I really would love to be proven wrong about what he and his well-funded, well-organized thug cartels are going to do to our veterans as well as to our active military, but I'm afraid it's gonna be bad.

There is a big movement by the thugs to outsource and privatize much if not all of VA healthcare, and to cut costs by slashing many of the benefits that vets now enjoy. The big bugaboo is Project 2025, of which Trump has spent the past year feigning ignorance and which, if implemented, would greatly reduce or completely end many veterans' hard-earned benefits. In a July 2024 opinion piece on Task & Purpose, Russell B. Lemle and Jasper Craven wrote:

Project 2025 proposes several alarming recommendations that could significantly reduce veterans’ access to healthcare. One would realign healthcare benefits to cover only “service-connected conditions,” – i.e., medical or mental health problems that were acquired or exacerbated by military service. Currently, once veterans prove they have a service-related condition, they can receive care for that problem as well as other conditions that they may develop. For example, a veteran whose leg was amputated in the military would not only have lifetime care for that problem, but also for the high blood pressure or cancer that they develop, in civilian life.

The Heritage blueprint argues for the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to eliminate some clinical services that “don’t align with service-connected conditions.” If this strategy to authorize care based on service-connected disabilities is taken to its logical extension, other care, like for an amputee’s hypertension in the example above, would no longer be furnished. There are five million veterans who have a service-connected designation, and they all potentially stand to lose access for the bulk of their healthcare needs. Two million veterans without a service-connected designation could potentially be disenrolled from VA healthcare entirely. Such a draconian concept accords with the Koch-backed group Concerned Veterans for America, whose Veterans Independence Act proposes “tightening eligibility requirements for new enrollees at a certain date in order to reorient the VA back towards its mission of providing care for service-connected disabled veterans.” It is also a goal espoused in the Heritage Foundation’s Budget Blueprint for Fiscal Year 2023. 

Ahead of the election, numerous other sources repeated the warnings about Project 2025, among these being the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which in an October 23, 2024 piece noted:

The Veterans Administration (VA) health system is also targeted by Project 2025. It plans to eliminate VA hospitals and health clinics and replace them with privatized outpatient clinics. This would have an especially considerable impact on Veterans living in rural areas. Project 2025 even calls for the privatization of TRICARE, the active duty service members (ADSMs) health system, threatening to drive up health care costs for millions of servicemembers and their families.

And in an August 29, 2024 article in the Pennsylvania Independent, Will Fritz wrote:

The [2025] playbook’s chapter on the Department of Veterans Affairs calls for ensuring “political control of the VA” on day one by replacing civil servants with political appointees. It says the next Republican administration in the White House should rescind VA directives that mandate the provision of abortion services, which it calls “a medical procedure unrelated to military service that the VA lacks the legal authority and clinical proficiency to perform.”

It proposes rescinding any clinical policy directives “that are contrary to principles of conservative governance,” beginning with abortion services as well as gender-affirming care, though its authors don’t specify exactly what those principles are.

“On reproductive health care, the project does seek to ban the use of public funds to facilitate reproductive health care and abortion for active service members, and that does strip away critical health care for millions of women and further pushing them away from serving in the military, potentially,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonpartisan legal services group that works to expose corruption in the executive branch.

And, as so many other sources have warned (but it can't be overstated), veterans with disabilities will be particularly hard hit.

The playbook argues that the next Republican administration in the White House should make plans to curtail veterans’ disability benefits.

The VA assigns veterans a disability rating for disabilities caused or aggravated by active duty service, ranging from 10% to 100% in increments of 10%. Veterans with a disability rating receive tax-free benefits.

Project 2025 suggests reducing those benefits. It states that the next Republican administration should speed up a review of disability rating criteria in order to save money while preserving benefits for future claims.

The legalese in the document belies the truth of the plan, according to Michael Embrich, a former policy advisor to the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs: “They would go through every veteran who’s been rated, who currently gets their veteran’s — what they call benefit compensation check every month, and they would say, Hey, we want to take a look and see if you still have tinnitus. And if they determine you don’t, they want to take your benefit away, which is kind of unheard of.”

Revising disability ratings for future claimants would mean many disabled veterans wouldn’t get benefits at all, and the plan’s stated goal of “preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants” would allow them to cut benefits even for veterans who have already completed their service and are receiving benefits that they have rightfully earned and rely on, Embrich said.

In August of 2024, to commemorate the anniversary of the signing into law of the Biden administration's popular PACT Act, Democrats.org presented a list of sources offering insight into just how bad Trump 2.0 and Project 2025 would be for veterans and active-duty military. Among those sources was a July 4, 2024 piece in Raw Story that warned:

Among other recommendations, the [Project 2025] plan proposes eliminating concurrent eligibility for both service-related disability benefits and military retirement benefits, which [Brooks D.] Tucker [Trump's chief of staff for Trump's second VA secretary Robert Wilkie] says would reduce mandatory outlays by at least $160 billion through 2032, and revising the disability rating awards that determine eligibility for benefits and determine monthly disability compensation to reap "significant cost savings."

The plan also proposes to end enrollment in VA medical care for veterans in two low-priority groups to save an estimated $69 billion through 2032 and narrow eligibility for veterans disability by excluding disabilities that cannot be related to military service, which would save an estimated $37.6 billion during that same period.

Even worse (and as also noted in the APWU piece cited above, though the quote below is from the Raw Story piece):

Tucker recommends the expansion of Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOC) rather that maintaining or upgrading "obsolete" or "unaffordable" VA health care campuses that currently provide inpatient services, emergency care and other health services in one location.

The Michael DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, where my husband receives his healthcare, is one such campus that provides all of those services in one location, and it has been a blessing for us, especially since we don't have a working vehicle right now and can't just zip back and forth all over the state from specialist to specialist in order for him to get the care he needs. Under the thumbs of the reich-wing cost cutters, however, the DeBakey Center and others like it across the country might very well go the way of the republican party's regard for the Constitution. And that would be an egregious disservice not only for my husband but for hundreds of thousands of others who served our country honorably and deserve the best care possible.

I'd be remiss if I were to gloss over the fact that when Trump was president the first time, some good things actually were done for veterans, although Trump falsely took credit for some actions that were not in fact his doing. But Biden arguably did more for our vets, and no doubt Kamala Harris would have continued and perhaps expanded on that trend. (Here's the rundown on what both Trump and Biden did for veterans.)

I'm afraid that those three male vets I talked with, and many thousands of others who voted for Trump, are in for a rude awakening. Frankly I don't see how any veteran or active military service member could support the man who called those who made the ultimate sacrifice in World War I "suckers" and "losers," and who once described his sexual escapades in his youth as his "own personal Vietnam." But I guess his military and vet supporters either rationalize that all of this is fake news, or that it's simply not important because he is going to fix inflation and the border and he's going to make America great for them. That's their choice, of course. It's just too bad that when they made their choice for president, they were voting squarely against their own best interests.

In recent months I have been making frequent trips to the DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston where, as I indicated above, my veteran husband receives his healthcare. There is a wall in the front lobby area with a framed photo of the Commander in Chief. It's going to be a grievous insult, not only to my husband but to every veteran who walks those endless halls, to see Trump’s smirking orange mug on that wall.

Before you leave...
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