CNN WIRE &#8212; Veterans are being hit hard by Trump administration firings

By Brianna Keilar, CNN

(CNN) — When the Department of Government Efficiency swings an axe, it’s bound to hit a veteran who voted for President Donald Trump.

Veterans make up thirty percent of the federal workforce and more than sixty percent of veterans said Trump was their candidate, according to a Pew Research survey conducted two months before the 2024 election.

One veteran in Kansas who voted for Trump describes terminations that have upended the lives of many employees in his agency as a sudden military drawdown, poorly executed:

“I’m sorry to put it like this: it was like the pull out of Afghanistan,” he said.

He doesn’t want me to identify him by name. He’s concerned it will negatively impact him.

He still supports Trump and shrinking the federal government, but not how the administration is going about it.

“They got in there, they thought ‘we need to shake things up.’ The system is rigged,” he insisted, “but with that being said, nobody stopped to take a minute, sit back. It was a rash decision.”

So far, the Trump administration has based firings mostly on whether an employee is probationary, a status conferred on new federal employees but also on some who have been recently promoted or those who have moved between jobs even within the same agency.

There has been little accounting for military service and, in at least one case, whether they’re actively deployed as a member of the National Guard or Reserve.

At one agency – not the Department of Defense, to be clear – I learned officials fired a probationary employee on leave from his civilian federal job for a military deployment, according to a source familiar with the circumstances of the employee.

Agency officials took the action despite a longstanding federal law that specifically prohibits employers from terminating members of the Guard and Reserve from their civilian day jobs while their units are activated.

‘At this position … I have found my peace’

The Kansas veteran, like so many other vets, was sold on working for the federal government by none other than the federal government.

Administration after administration – including Trump in his first term – have championed veteran hiring, not just at the Pentagon, but at agencies across the government, in positions around the country, doing work that affects Americans in flyover states.

“I realize a lot of people from the east coast and Washington DC and from the west coast don’t get out here much,” the veteran says, “but when you’re driving through Missouri, Kansas … Illinois, sometimes Kentucky, Tennessee, you see fields on both sides of the road and there’s terraces out there, there’s waterways out there: those are infrastructure to help keep eroding soils from turning into essentially dirt farms … that blow … whatever direction the wind is blowing.”

He found a job – a job he loved – at the Natural Resources Conservation Services, an agency within the Department of Agriculture that was created as a direct result of the Dust Bowl in 1935, back when it was known as the Soil Conservation Service.

The agency protects farmlands and grasslands, manages watersheds, smaller dams and assists areas recovering from natural disasters.

After fighting in the war in Afghanistan, helping rural communities, farmers and ranchers allowed the Kansas veteran to serve in a different way.

It also provided him something unexpected and priceless: a way to process his experience in the military. (a way to calm what his military service had stirred up – a way to quiet what his military service had made so loud).

“At this position for the NRCS I have found my peace,” he said.

“You go from one extreme to another. You go from war and terror to barbecuing with your family in the backyard. It’s hard to do that,” he explained.

“This job was a way…”

He paused.

“You know, in the military, being combat arms, you see death, destruction and dismay. This was life, rejuvenation and construction. It was the complete opposite of what us combat arms guys come from.”

On Wednesday morning, the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that has the power to review and reverse federal employee firings, ordered the nearly 6,000 probationary workers fired by USDA reinstated for 45 days pending an investigation of the legality of their firings.

Presumably the order covers this veteran, but as of the publishing of this story he hadn’t heard from his former employer that he had his job back.

And the move provides little certainty to these workers. The standing of the chair of the Merit Board, Cathy Harris, is tenuous. Trump recently fired her. A judge quickly stayed her firing, but the administration is expected to appeal the decision all the way to the Supreme Court, which has favored expanding presidential power.

‘We love our veterans’

Last Friday in the Oval Office, a pool reporter asked Trump if he was tracking how many veterans have been fired so far.

“Yes we are, and we take good care of our veterans,” he said. “And we’re watching that very carefully. And we hope it’s going to be as small a number as possible. But we are having great success in slimming down our government … We love our veterans. We’re going to take good care of them.”

If the Trump administration is tracking the number of veterans it has fired, they have not disclosed it, and a number of sources familiar with the information used in the initial firings say veteran status was not considered.

Veterans have been left to plead their cases on an ad hoc basis, without much success.

The Kansas veteran called the state offices of his member of congress.

He also called the office of Jerry Moran, Kansas’s senior senator, a Republican who has served almost three decades in congress and chairs the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.

“They were like ‘we’ll let him know and if he gets back to you he gets back to you. We’re sorry, he’s a busy man,’” the veteran recalled a young staff member telling him.

The Kansas veteran was hoping for a chance to ask his congressman for help in person, but recent confrontations at town halls have gone viral on social media, prompting many GOP lawmakers to abandon talking to their constituents in person.

“These skype calls: there’s a lot of these senators and congressmen holding these town halls through conference calls,” lamented the veteran. “You have constituents who voted for you, and you can’t look them in the eye? Why not?”

Democrats have loudly criticized the administration for firing veterans, introduced a bill to reinstate their jobs and invited axed vets as guests at Trump’s address to the joint session of congress.

But they’re in the minority. They don’t have the votes to pass legislation and they don’t have the ear of the president.

While some Republican lawmakers hide from the problems the government overhaul is causing the military and veteran communities, others are working to quietly address the issues.

In February, several successfully lobbied the White House behind the scenes to carve out an exemption for military spouses in Trump’s executive order requiring all federal employees to return to work in person, though agencies are still not uniformly honoring those exemptions.

Some GOP lawmakers have quietly lobbied the administration to rehire sacked veterans on a case-by-case basis, but many veterans worry about raising their hands to make their identity known.

‘These firings – that’s the erosion’

In ranching, there are consequences if you let cattle graze a pasture all the way down to the roots, or “grease it down to dirt,” as the veteran explained it.

“There’s a common rule for grass,” he said. “‘Take half, leave half.’ If you take more than half of that grass off that pasture … that kills the grass. If you don’t have those root fibers in that soil to hold that soil together, you’re going to start eroding.”

And in farming, there’s also a right way and a wrong way to avoid erosion. Drop the tine of the plow too deep, past the fertile topsoil, past the subsoil beneath that, into the compacted hardpan earth below, and you can turn a field into moondust that washes away with the rain or blows away with the wind.

“If you’ve ever taken a blow-dryer to baby powder on the counter, that’s exactly what it’s doing,” the veteran said. “That’s the type of erosion that we’re trying to prevent.”

He’s talking about sustainable farming practices but it’s also his metaphor for what’s happening to jobs like his.

“These firings – that’s the erosion,” he said, describing the job cuts in terms of soil conservation.

“They built this big trench and there’s nothing to slow down the water, to slow down their reactions to what they’ve done, there’s no infrastructure there … to hold that water back, to hold it down to a trickle and not a flood.”

The Kansas veteran doesn’t regret voting for Trump, but he is unhappy with the people Trump has chosen to execute his vision for a smaller government.

He thinks they’re disconnected from how their decisions are affecting veterans and people in rural communities like his, taking jobs from veterans and the services they provide farmers and ranchers as well as freezing USDA funding for much needed and already approved projects, including those that address active soil erosion.

“My message to the president is I’ve got faith in you and I understand what you’re doing but I need you to step back from the situation for a minute and look at the …repercussions,” the veteran says.

“You can have all these yes men around you but you also need some nos.”