Ex-naval officer reveals the driving force behind Trump’s anti-veteran administration

President Donald Trump gestures to a Marine sentry as he exits Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., May 25, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

President Donald Trump is going all in on efforts to attack military veterans and their career prospects, one naval veteran warned in a piece for Rolling Stone, seeking to go around Congress to undermine "veterans’ hiring preferences in the federal government."

Michael Embrich is a Navy veteran who served during Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, later serving as policy advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs and as a congressional staffer. On Monday, he published a piece for Rolling Stone dissecting Trump's efforts to destroy a program that has given veterans a leg-up when seeking jobs in the federal government.

"After World War I, veterans organized on Capitol Hill to protest being shafted by the federal government for pay earned serving in wars of the past," Embrich explained. "In response, President Franklin Roosevelt and members of Congress moved to make sure veterans never would have to go through that again, enacting the Veterans Preference Act of 1944 (VPA). Since then, the VPA has been strengthened, giving veterans with disabilities and seniority stronger hiring preferences and added protections during reduction-in-force (RIF) actions. The Veterans Recruitment Appointment (VRA) created even greater incentives for both veterans to seek federal employment and for the government to hire them."

How, Embrich warned, "Trump wants to end all of that." A new proposal from the Office of Personnel Management, led by Project 2025 mastermind Russell Vought, seeks to replace the VPA and VRA policies with “'merit'-based hiring, firing, and rehiring practices."

"Under the OPM’s new proposal, layoffs would be determined primarily by performance ratings rather than service," Embrich added. "Veterans would receive a small boost, but no longer the meaningful protection they once had. In practical terms, that means a veteran with 20 years of service could be laid off ahead of a newer, non-veteran employee or one with slightly higher performance scores. Years of experience, institutional knowledge, and service to the country would be reduced to a tie-breaker. This would help the federal government elevate political hires over career people, veteran or not."

The U.S. government, Embrich noted, is the country's biggest employer of military veterans, who make up around 25 percent of the federal workforce. Under these new rules from the OPM, laid-off veterans would not even have to be rehired after a reduction-in-force period ends, which "For a veteran with 10, 15, or 20 years of service or more, and a debilitating condition... could mean a life sentence of poverty."

"The VPA has lifted a whole generation of veterans, myself included, out of poverty and helped make them productive taxpaying citizens," Embrich concluded. "The federal deficit has soared to over a trillion dollars. Saving money is not the reason for these cruel and senseless rule changes. The only logical explanation is that Trump couldn’t care less about the vulnerable, and will never pass up an opportunity to crush them in order to enrich himself and his cronies."

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