Actor Jeff Bridges slammed lawmakers for using the feeding of children as a weapon during the government shutdown Thursday on Jake Tapper's CNN show "The Lead."

"The Big Lebowski" star is an activist primarily known for his work to end childhood hunger and combat plastic pollution. He is a notable member of the Plastic Pollution Coalition and the national spokesperson for Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign since 2010.

"It's so bizarre here in the wealthiest country in the world. We have enough food, we have enough money, we have enough programs to end childhood hunger. To use feeding kids as a weapon going back and forth doesn't make any sense," he said.

An estimated 7.3 million households with children will lose their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on Saturday. Other federal nutrition programs that serve children are also being affected, such as the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program and Head Start, which provides early education and development for children.

Bridges is outraged and speaking out No Kid Hungry's national spokesman.

"Billy (Shore, the founder of Share Our Strength) and I have been traveling all over the country talking to governors and mayors in the states themselves, Republicans, Democrats and independents all agree, we should feed our kids," he told Tapper.

"There's no reason not to do that. And to have the feds getting in the way of this thing, talk about bizarre," he added.

A woman who voted for President Donald Trump three times is now leading the challenge to his sweeping tariffs, saying Trump has exceeded his authority, according to The New York Times.

Sara Albrecht heads the Liberty Justice Center, a right-leaning legal organization representing an "ideologically diverse" coalition of businesses that has sued over the legality of Trump's tarriff policy.

"The role of her group, the Liberty Justice Center, underscores just how much the tariff issue has divided conservatives," the Times reports.

In 2018, the group brought a case to the Supreme Court that resulted in the justices’ ruling "that public sector workers could not be required to pay collective bargaining fees. The case was a major blow to labor unions that had raised millions from the fees," according to the Times.

The group has filed close to 140 lawsuits since 2011, and "the group has also fought policies that prohibit schools from sharing information with parents about their child’s gender identity," the Times explains.

Albrecht told the Times that her group had already been "exploring filing cases that challenged what it considered executive branch overreach" in February when Trump first invoked an emergency statute from the 1970s to unilaterally impose the taxes on imported goods.

Liberty Justice Center then joined forces with a law professor to recruit five small businesses as plaintiffs in the case, which will be heard by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

“We knew the businesses were going to have to represent all of America’s small businesses,” Albrecht told the Times, “and we really needed an easy story to tell.”

The businesses include a wine importer, educational electronic kit manufacturer, a women’s biking apparel business, a plastic pipe maker and a specialty fishing tackle company.

Arguing the case are two prominent attorneys, one conservative and one liberal—Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge nominated by President George W. Bush and Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general during President Barack Obama’s terms.

“I thought the Republicans were against tariffs. It never really occurred to me that this would be an issue that I would be fighting a Republican president on," said Jeffrey M. Schwab, the group’s senior counsel.

Albrecht added that it's not as much about Trump as it is about the rule of law.

“It’s about the presidency, not about the president, and it’s about the Constitution,” she said. “We’ve made it about the separation of powers, and that applies to everybody, whether you voted for him or not.”

I first heard the expression “strategic incompetence” in El Salvador in December 1993. Along with my partner and two friends, I’d been recruited to do some electoral training there. We were working with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, a coalition of leftist parties that had led a long-running guerrilla war against a series of US-backed autocratic governments. I’d visited El Salvador once before, during the 1989 elections, when armed troops were overseeing the voting. I remembered watching as people deposited their ballots into transparent plastic bags, their choices clearly visible to the world—and to the soldiers. (Not exactly what you’d call a “free and fair” election.)

A new round of national elections was scheduled for early 1994, and, for the first time, instead of boycotting it, the FMLN was running its own candidates. This was a risky choice. By the time we arrived to teach their members something about door-to-door canvassing, several FMLN candidates had already been assassinated.

It took us a few days to fully grasp just how profound a cultural shift such an election was for people whose project and lives had previously depended on clandestine organizing. For years, their members had kept contact among themselves to a minimum for security reasons. They also routinely limited contacts with other Salvadorans to those in whom they had the highest confidence. We knew we’d experienced a breakthrough when one of their comandantes said, “Oh, I see. Even my mother should be part of this campaign.”

It was one of those comandantes who taught me the term “strategic incompetence.” Not long before, many of their potential voters had been refugees, having only recently returned from camps in Guatemala. A number of them had lost whatever identification papers they once had and, in any case, it was all too normal for people in rural Central America to lack birth certificates. The most common proof of birth was a baptismal record at a parish church, and many of those churches had been bombed to dust during the US-backed air war against the FMLN.

So, to be able to vote, many Salvadorans had to apply to the government in the capital, San Salvador, for a cédula—an official credential. The process of getting one was invariably lengthy. Those who lived far from a municipal center had to make weekly treks on foot to post offices in towns to check whether their ID had arrived. All too often, the answer would be: no. As that comandante explained to me, this was an example of the autocratic government’s “strategic incompetence”—a systemic failure, in other words, that served the interests of those then in power by discouraging people from voting.

Round and Round We Go

I was reminded of that expression recently, when I accompanied a young immigrant to file his application for asylum in the United States. What should have been a 10-minute errand devolved into a multi-hour ordeal. I have no way of knowing whether the incompetence involved was strategic or simply run-of-the-mill stupidity, but I do know that it nearly cost him his chance to stay in this country.

My friend Joan and I, two old lady gringas, had spent the weekend with him working on the application, which was due the following Tuesday. We’d made the requisite copies, one for the judge in the case and the other for the lawyers of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), all located in a building in downtown San Francisco.

On Monday morning, we met there. We knew he’d have to pay a $100 filing fee and, not having a bank account, he came prepared with cash. With some trepidation—Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents occupied part of the same building and there was always the risk of an immigrant being snatched up—we passed through security and made it to the floor where the immigration judges, including the one overseeing his case, had their offices.

Trump 2.0 displays a familiar (if also stunning) amount of ordinary incompetence along with its will to power.

We entered a small waiting room with some chairs and a cashier’s window in one corner. The nice woman behind the glass informed us that, unfortunately, she couldn’t accept his $100. The only way to pay the fee was online. She pointed to the QR code on a poster beside the window. Paying online isn’t easy for someone without a bank account. Fortunately, the two gringas had credit cards. We assumed that the record of the payment would appear in his online file.

It soon became clear, however, that, while the fee has to be paid online, the application could only be accepted with a physical copy of a receipt for that payment. The three of us stared at each other, and at our three cell phones—none of which, of course, had printers attached. We’d have to find a place to print the receipt.

First up, a UPS shop. “Just email the file you want printed to this address,” the clerk said. We navigated to the immigration site, found his record, and clicked on the button to email a copy of the receipt. A few minutes later, the clerk told us, “I’m sorry; I can’t print that. All it sent was a link and we’re not allowed to click on links.” (A reasonable enough prohibition, since clicking on an unknown link is a great way to install a virus or ransomware on your system.)

Undaunted, we trudged over to FedEx to see if we’d do better there. What we found was a self-service copier-printer and some reasonably clear instructions. As it turned out, though, we couldn’t download a picture of the receipt to our phones. When we tried, all we got was the text of the link to the government site, not the receipt itself. (Whoever designed the site should have done a little more beta testing.)

In the end, we managed to solve the problem by taking a screenshot of the receipt and sending that to the printer. Victory!

Since the offices of the judges and the DHS office were in the same building, all we now had to do was leave one copy on each floor and we’d be done, right? Not quite. Although the judge’s copy could be handed in personally at the same window where we’d begun our saga, the DHS copy could only be mailed in. No matter that we would soon be standing in the very building to which it had to be mailed. Fortunately, we’d twigged to that part of the puzzle before we left the building in pursuit of a printer for the receipt. So, while we were at FedEx, we shelled out another $45 to make sure the copy for DHS lawyers (and the receipt) got there the next day.

Back at the immigration building, the judge’s copy of the application and receipt were accepted and stamped, along with our friend’s own copy, and we watched as the clerk entered the information into a great database in the sky.

We were relieved. Failure at any point in the process would have left our friend vulnerable to immediate deportation to a country where, not so long ago, he’d been beaten and threatened with death by paramilitary forces.

Then came the only good part of the whole exercise. As soon as your asylum application has been accepted, your “clock” starts running on the six months that must pass before you can apply for a permit to work legally in the United States. (Who knows, of course, whether it actually takes six months, thanks to strategic incompetence or just to ordinary bureaucracy?) Our companion scanned another QR code, and there it was in beautiful black and white pixels, his “clock,” indicating how many days he had to wait before he could apply for a work permit.

What we didn’t know then was that a set of new fees for asylum and work permit applications was buried in President Donald Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill. The $100 our friend paid is now an annual fee, although, according to one immigration legal service, “the immigration court system has not provided information about how to pay the annual fee and has not provided information about how the process will work.” No one had bothered to tell us that. Perhaps they didn’t know. More strategic incompetence, I guess.

“Jokers to the Right of Us…”

As the Scottish folk group Stealers Wheel sang back in the 1970s, we’ve got all too many jokers to the right of us—and not just at the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, which runs the asylum process and the immigration courts. Those who remember the first Trump administration will undoubtedly not be shocked to learn that, even with dedicated autocrats like Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russell Vought and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller on board, Trump 2.0 displays a familiar (if also stunning) amount of ordinary incompetence along with its will to power.

Take, for example, the series of events now affectionately known as “Signalgate.” That little scandal arose when Mike Waltz, then Trump’s national security adviser, demonstrated his unfamiliarity with basic security practices by adding the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine and the moderator of PBS’ “Washington Week” to a group chat he was organizing. That would have been embarrassing enough, even if the conversation, which stretched across several days, had been any old group chat. But it wasn’t. In fact, it concerned a highly classified US military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. In it, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth revealed details of imminent attacks on the Houthis and CIA Director John Ratcliffe used the name of an active undercover agent, while Vice President JD Vance and Hegseth displayed their usual contempt for this country’s European allies. (That, of course, was hardly a great revelation to anyone who’d been paying attention.) If Donald Trump’s government were capable of embarrassment, it would have blushed.

Waltz took the fall and was exiled to the United Nations, where he now serves as US ambassador. Marco Rubio took over as national security adviser, adding another title to his portfolio. He also serves both as secretary of state and national archivist (in charge of the National Archives and Records Administration). I guess it’s hard to find good help these days! Until recently, Rubio also ran what was left of the destroyed US Agency for International Development, but he’s now handed that job to Project 2025 architect and OMB Director Russell Vought.

Strategic Incompetence Meets an Incompetent Strategy

There’s a consensus among many in the media that Pete Hegseth is a fine example of the Peter Principle (a management theory suggesting that, in any hierarchical organization, an individual will be promoted until he or she reaches his or her true level of incompetence and then remain there). Installed in January 2025, by April, Hegseth had already run through a whole series of top-level advisers, who quit or were fired, one after another.

In September, he would commandeer an embarrassing assembly of top generals and admirals to harangue them about masculinity, lethality, and beards. And that was before President Trump stepped to the same podium and indicated that the military should—and would—be turning its attention to “an invasion within.”

Even I can see that redirecting the power of the biggest military on Earth toward small boats in the Caribbean and the citizens of this country—particularly ones in cities with Democratic mayors—represents gross, if not grotesque incompetence.

During a 73-minute rehash of his greatest hits (Stolen election! Autopen! Where’s my peace prize?), he repeatedly implied to a stony-faced audience of military commanders that their focus would now be the country’s internal enemies. “I told Pete [Hegseth],” he said, “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Directing the military against a supposed enemy within (be it “radical left lunatics” or the elusive Antifa) undoubtedly worries the top brass, and not just because it violates a centuries-old prohibition against using the US armed forces to police our own citizens. It also points to a deeper incompetence at the top of the Department of Defense. As Hegseth struggles to produce a National Defense Strategy, or NDS, document (a key task for any secretary of defense), the brass is clearly growing ever more worried. As the Washington Post reported, Hegseth’s version of “the Pentagon’s primary guide for how it prioritizes resources and positions US forces around the world” emphasizes military action within the Americas and, more worrying still, within the United States itself. Hegseth’s approach would appear to downplay what top military commanders consider the most serious threats: the growth of Russian power in Europe and of Chinese influence in the Pacific. Not surprisingly, in the age of Trump, strategic incompetence leads to incompetent strategies. As a source high in the Pentagon told the Post, “I don’t know if Hegseth even understands the magnitude of the NDS.”

(A disclaimer here: I hold no brief for this country’s post-World-War-II empire building, with its bloody record of torture, destabilization, and death. But even I can see that redirecting the power of the biggest military on Earth toward small boats in the Caribbean and the citizens of this country—particularly ones in cities with Democratic mayors—represents gross, if not grotesque incompetence.)

Revolving Doors

Just one more recent example of bumbling incompetence at the federal level: Trump and OMB Director Russell Vought (“he of PROJECT 2025 Fame,” as Trump posted on social media) have used the present government shutdown to fire a whole host of federal employees from what Trump calls “Democrat Agencies.” Among them were more than 1,000 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As a Trump functionary explained, “HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”

In the immortal word of El Salvador’s dictator Nayib Bukele, “Oopsie.” Here’s just a partial list of firings Trump and Vought then “raced to rescind,” according to the New York Times:

The top two leaders of the federal measles response team, those working to contain Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the team that assembles the C.D.C.’s vaunted scientific journal, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Those employees were among “hundreds” then hastily rehired, according to the Guardian, which reported that Trump officials attributed the firings to “a coding error.” We may never know whether the original action was due to strategic incompetence or just garden-variety stupidity.

Meanwhile, back at the immigration court system, where 3.4 million cases languish pending adjudication, the Trump administration has introduced yet another layer of strategic incompetence. They are now importing 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration court judges, despite their complete lack of qualifications, experience, or indeed, competency in the field.

It seems that what I learned all those years ago in El Salvador is increasingly becoming the essence of Donald Trump’s America. We now live in a country that’s being run both with bad intent, and unintentionally badly.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte has often stressed that many MAGA try to curry favor with President Donald Trump not only by aggressively promoting his policies, but also, by altering their appearances and trying to look a certain way. "Mar-a-Lago face," according to Marcotte, includes heavy, caked-on makeup, a lot of bronzer, a fake tan, full lips, and in some cases, plastic surgery. MAGA women often express their devotion to Trump with both their physical appearances and their combative defenses of his policies.

More analysis of the role far-right women are playing in Trump's second presidency is coming from journalist Virginia Heffernan, who co-hosts the podcast "What Rough Beast" with colleague Stephen Metcalf.

In an article published by The New Republic on August 4, Heffernan zeros in on four MAGA women in particular and their roles in pushing Trump's policies: U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

READ MORE: One state has always been a magnet for big-time sleazeballs — as the Epstein saga proves

"Good news for the Women's Marchers of 2017: The future did turn out to be female," Heffernan argues. "Less good news: The females now in power are far-right and bloodthirsty. Having appointed more women to Cabinet-level positions than any other Republican president, Donald Trump now has a quartet of harpies fronting the (Trump) Administration's most vicious bloodsports. Like middle-aged Manson girls, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Linda McMahon, and Kristi Noem take orders from a supremely nasty felon. But they have vile streaks all their own. The vileness blends their private and public actions in a filthy smoothie."

Heffernan stresses that Bondi, Gabbard, McMahon and Noem repeatedly show the extremes they're willing to embrace in service of Trump.

"On the main stage," the journalist/podcaster observes, "Attorney General Pam Bondi has proven a singularly dutiful and hollow-eyed Trump soldier. For Manson Family obsessives, she’s probably closest to Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme…. Gabbard, the newly minted gun fetishist who now speaks in Q drops, is concocting sham treason charges against Obama…. McMahon has been willfully destroying American education, imperiling the country’s future in plain sight."

Heffernan continues, "And DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who believes habeas corpus means Trump can do whatever the hell he wants to immigrants, continues to vamp as the national avatar of constitutionally dubious raids, renditions, and detentions — in a $50,000 Rolex. As for their knack for striking Instagram poses — in concentration camps, on horseback and beaches, thumbs-upping with Trump, sometimes brandishing big guns — these women have been training their whole lives for MAGA shock theater. Bondi cut her teeth in blonded-and-bronzed Fox appearances; Gabbard on social media and in a flamboyant cult in which adherents evidently ate the leader's toenails; McMahon as a heel in what Roland Barthes called pro-wrestling's 'spectacle of suffering'; and Kristi Noem in a teen beauty pageant."

READ MORE: 'It was all lies': Outrage as Trump walks back major pro-family campaign promise

Like Marcotte, Heffernan points out that MAGA women are careful to look a certain way.

The original Manson girls wore prairie dresses, shifts, and bare faces. Bondi, Gabbard, and Noem go for the trademark Trump-girl glam. But their cheugy hair and smeary MAGA makeup would just be a reprise of the (Hope)Hicks/(Kimberly) Guilfoyle lewk from Season 1, if their images weren't now explicitly pressed into the service of so much disturbing political iconography…. Gabbard's Instagram shows her thirstily clad in ammo — carrying the kind of assault rifle she used to oppose — at the Tactical Games, where 'fitness meets firearms'…. MAGA makeup aside…. all of these women are wolfish."

Heffernan adds, "When did Republican women, aged 44 to 76, become so savage? So proudly deviant?"

READ MORE: Don't 'have any other choice': Outrage grows in the Midwest as political crisis spirals

Virginia Heffernan's full article for The New Republic is available at this link.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte has reported on a trend among MAGA women she calls "Mar-a-Lago face." This look includes very heavy, caked-on makeup, lots of bronzer, a fake tan, full lips, and, in some cases, plastic surgery — and Marcotte cited Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, activist Kimberly Gilfoyle, former Republican National Committee (RNC) Co-Chair Lara Trump (Eric Trump's wife), First Lady Melania Trump and far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer as examples of MAGA women who are embracing "Mar-a-Lago face" in order to please President Donald Trump.

But "Mar-a-Lago face," also described as "MAGA makeup," isn't the only look that women on the far right are embracing in order to please MAGA men. Now, it appears, thin is in.

In an conversation for the New York Times' opinion section published on July 30, journalists Meher Ahmad and Jessica Grose discuss the push for thinness and weigh loss among right-wing evangelical Christian fundamentalist influencers.

READ MORE: The one man who has the strength to finish off Donald Trump

"On the right," Ahmad observes, "there's been a focus on body size that's been bundled up not just with health and wellness, but with religion, morals and politics. And so, when everything is political and we're more divided than ever, should the size and shape of our bodies be any different?"

Ahmad asked Grose to weigh in on right-wing evangelicals' "obsession with thinness," she noted "wellness influencer" Alex Clark's comments at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit — where Clark called for "less burnout, more babies" and "less feminism, more femininity."

Grose told Ahmad, "So I think it's a reaction to the body positivity movement, which I would say peaked about 10 years ago. It was the idea that weight is not tied directly to health and that you can be healthy and not rail-thin. You would see models who were not model size on the runway. It was never predominant. There was maybe one, and brands were more bullied into making more size- inclusive lines."

Another influencer the Times journalists discussed was Liv Schmidt.

READ MORE: 'Do it!' Trump orders top Republican to bulldoze obstacle stopping far-right prosecutors

"I don't think she talks about politics too much," Grose said of Schmidt, "but she has appeared in conservative magazines like Evie, which is a magazine geared towards young conservative women. And then, folks like Ballerina Farm, who's a trad wife influencer."

When Ahmad noted that "diet cultures" are overlapping with a "religious or moral tent," Grose responded, "So, there's long been a history of a Christian publishing universe. They've long tried to take things that are popular in the mainstream and put their own spin on it. I went back and read a book that was a best seller about 10 years ago, co-written by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren. The book is called 'The Daniel Plan,' and it features a blurb from Dr. Oz."

Grose continued, "So, it's sort of tied in with our current administration, and the book includes things like, 'Satan does not want you to live a healthy life because that honors God.' And 'Why should God heal you of an obesity-related illness if you have no intention of changing the choices that led to it?' So, there's a distinct idea that overeating or gluttony — which is one of the seven deadly sins — is immoral. And if your body size is not whatever society thinks is an appropriate body size, that is a sin."

READ MORE: Trump has only one way out of this mess

Read Meher Ahmad and Jessica Grose's full conversation at this New York Times link (subscription required).

US President Donald Trump is famous for calling our military veterans “suckers” and “losers,” so you won’t be surprised that the president is now breaking the nation’s promise to veterans and active service members by dismantling and privatizing the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the VA.

In 1865, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln called for the nation “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan." Today the motto of the VA reads, “To fulfill President Lincoln’s promise to care for those who have served in our nation’s military and for their families, caregivers, and survivors.”

The VA provides over 18 million veterans and their dependents and caregivers with a multitude of services—healthcare, a Veterans Crisis Line for urgent assistance, disability payments and rehab, education assistance, career counseling, support for veteran-owned businesses, home loans, life insurance and financial services, help for caregivers to the disabled, burial in national cemeteries, and more.

And, of course, the nation has promised those same VA benefits to the 2 million men and women currently serving in the armed forces (1.3 million on active duty and another 761,000 in the reserves) after they retire from service.

Dismantling the VA through privatization, staff cuts, and contract cancellations means future veterans will face a fragmented, profit-driven system that doesn’t understand military service and doesn’t know what veterans have been through.

The plan to privatize the VA was hatched during the first Trump administration. By 2024 a real plan was ready. Project 2025—the MAGA [“Make America Great Again”] blueprint for the authoritarian takeover of the United States—strongly favored private healthcare for veterans.

The VA’s own healthcare system includes 170 hospitals and nearly 1,200 clinics spread across the country. It is the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system. Since 2014, the VA has also had a private side, now known as “community care.” If a veteran lives too far from a VA healthcare facility or needs a service the VA can’t provide, they may be eligible for “community care” from a private local doctor or clinic, paid for by the VA.

The Trump administration is expanding privatized “community care.” The “VA Mission Act of 2018,” enacted during the first Trump administration, nearly doubled the VA’s budget for private “community care” from $15 billion in 2018 to $28.3 billion in 2023.

Trump’s 2025 VA budget proposal increases total VA spending, but 75% of the increase (or $14.4 billion) doesn’t go to the VA at all—it goes to private medical providers. This represents a 67% increase for privatized care.

Many see the growing private healthcare budget as a stealth way to eventually privatize the VA’s entire system. Every dollar devoted to private care is a dollar denied to the VA’s own doctors and nurses, ultimately undermining the entire VA system. Doctors and nurses see the handwriting on the wall and leave. Their likely replacements see an agency under siege and stay away.

So far in 2025, the VA lost 600 doctors and 1,900 nurses. During the first three months of the year, about 40% of doctors who were offered jobs declined—four times the rejection rate a year earlier.

In March 2025, a leaked memo revealed Trump’s plan to eliminate 83,000 jobs from the VA, as much as 15% of the agency’s workforce. In response, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called the plan “a gut punch… breathtaking… in its malevolence and cruelty.” After major pushback from veterans, the agency announced it would only need to cut 30,000 jobs because so many staff had agreed to leave voluntarily.

To make it easier to cut VA staff, on August 6 VA Secretary Doug Collins ended collective bargaining agreements for most of the VA’s 377,000 unionized employees, including nurses, doctors, benefits processors, food service workers, technicians, and janitorial staff. The VA is the first major federal agency to fully strip collective bargaining rights from its unionized workforce.

Since 1865, veterans have been given preference for government jobs, though they must prove they are qualified to do the work. More than one-quarter of the VA’s 482,000 employees are veterans. (Project 2025’s plan to eliminate half of all government employees by 2026 and 75% by 2029 would cut jobs for about 300,000 veterans.)

In August 2025, the VA’s inspector general reported 4,434 health staffing shortages—a 50% increase from the previous year. In all, 94% of 139 VA health facilities reported severe shortages of medical officers and 79% reported shortages of nurses. As private-care funding is increasing, the VA itself is fraying.

In recent years, a mental health crisis among veterans has been growing worse and the Trump administration has responded by slashing the services designed to save lives. On average, 17 veterans commit suicide every day. Since 2007, the Veterans Crisis Line has handled more than 1.6 million calls and dispatched 351,000 emergency responders (about 100 per day) to help veterans in crisis, yet Trump and VA Secretary Collins have targeted suicide prevention programs for cuts. Furthermore, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2025 revealed that veterans receiving private “community care” are not satisfied with the quality of care they receive outside the VA and they have a 21% higher suicide rate.

Now the ”One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that Congress enacted July 4 is expected to eliminate Medicaid health insurance for some veterans. Medicaid currently provides care for 1.6 million veterans, including those with the most complex medical needs.

In addition, when veterans transition out of the military it often takes six months or longer to find steady work. During that time, they may rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly “food stamps”) to feed their families. The One Big Beautiful Bill denies SNAP benefits to able-bodied people who don’t have jobs, specifically including veterans. Trump says he “loves our veterans” and will take care of them—but the Big Beautiful Bill is how he thanks them for their service.

It gets worse. In 2022, Congress enacted the PACT Act to deliver healthcare to millions of veterans who were exposed to toxic chemicals during their years of service. Now Trump is undermining that law.

During the Vietnam War (1962-1971), about 3 million veterans were exposed to Agent Orange, a potent cancer-causing herbicide sprayed over vast areas to kill jungle vegetation. An estimated 300,000 Vietnam veterans have already died from exposure to Agent Orange (about five times as many as the 58,000 killed in combat).

Another major source of toxic exposures to veterans has been smoke and fumes from “burn pits.” Burn pits are big holes in the ground where, for decades, roughly 300 military installations (large and small, worldwide) have burned plastics, electronics, chemicals, munitions, medical waste, and human waste. Somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million veterans have been exposed to toxic fumes from burn pits. (Use of burn pits finally ended in 2021.)

In 2022, Congress enacted the PACT Act [“The Sergeant First Class (SFC) Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act”] to assess and care for veterans exposed to toxicants. The PACT Act created one of the largest expansions of VA benefits ever enacted. Until the Trump administration hit the brakes.

Many of the features of the PACT Act required specialized services provided under contract with private-sector suppliers, but the Trump administration in early 2025 canceled at least 650 of those contracts. Trump cancelled contracts that provided the necessary personnel and resources to conduct outreach to eligible veterans, screen applicants, and process claims—cutting the heart out of the PACT Act. Evidently not everyone in the Trump administration is proud of their efforts to undermine the PACT Act. US Senate investigators have accused VA Secretary Collins, of trying “to hide the truth from Congress” about staff cuts and contract cancellations related to PACT.

Dismantling the VA through privatization, staff cuts, and contract cancellations means future veterans will face a fragmented, profit-driven system that doesn’t understand military service and doesn’t know what veterans have been through. In truth, every cut, every step toward privatization, every canceled contract is a betrayal of the promise we have made to all those who serve: When you return, we will take care of you.

NOW READ: This 'chilling' Trump attack isn't a conspiracy theory

This piece has been updated with the information that the Trump VA ended collective bargaining for most of its unionized staff.

The beginning of August marks the latest deadline for US president Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff policy. This era of chaos and uncertainty began on April 2 and the situation remaims fluid. With the deadline for partners to secure a deal with Washington now passed, it’s a good time to take a broader view and consider if Trump’s trade gamble is paying off.