Trump Plans Mass Firing at Veterans Affairs

The Department of Government Efficiency’s slashing of the federal workforce is disproportionately hurting veterans, and the damage is only going to get worse.

According to a March 4 memo first obtained by Government Executive, the Department of Veterans Affairs is planning to lay off as many as 83,000 employees. The Trump administration wants the department to get its workforce back to 2019 levels, when the VA employed 399,957 people and before millions of veterans became eligible for greater care. More than one in four VA employees are veterans.

The “aggressive” cuts will “resize and tailor the workforce to the mission and revised structure,” VA chief of staff Christopher Syrek wrote in the memo, which was sent to employees on Tuesday.

The department is expected to deliver its plans to “increase workforce efficiency” to the Office of Personnel Management by April 14.

Employment at the VA increased significantly under Biden with the passing of the 2022 PACT Act, which expanded health care benefits for veterans exposed to toxins and was the result of years’ worth of advocacy from various veteran organizations.

DOGE couldn’t care less. The pseudo-agency’s plan to fire 17 percent of the VA’s workforce is just the latest move in its assault on veterans and, more broadly, the federal government. Last month, DOGE laid off 2,400 VA employees and more than 6,000 veterans from other federal agencies.

DOGE also sought to terminate 875 affected contracts at the VA, which would significantly harm veterans’ access to health care services. The cuts have been temporarily suspended, but will likely resurface.

Florida’s attorney general has launched an “active criminal investigation” into manosphere bigot Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who arrived in the country just last week at Donald Trump’s behest.

The brothers returned to the U.S. from Romania, where they still face rape and human trafficking charges, after the Trump administration sought the return of their passports, opposing a court order requiring them to remain in the European nation while the investigation continued.

Now that the dual British-American citizens have returned stateside, they’ve found themselves the subject of yet another criminal investigation for alleged sex crimes.

“These guys have themselves publicly admitted to participating in what very much appears to be soliciting, trafficking, preying upon women around the world,” Attorney General James Uthmeier said Tuesday.

“Many of these victims are coming forward, some of them minors—people can spin or defend however they want, but in Florida, this type of behavior is viewed as atrocious. We’re not going to accept it,” Uthmeier said. “They chose to come here and set their feet down in this state, and we’re going to pursue every tool we have within our legal authority to hold them accountable.”

Uthemeier announced the investigation in a post on X Tuesday, saying his office had conducted a “preliminary inquiry” into the brothers. “Based on a thorough review of the evidence, I’ve directed the Office of Statewide Prosecution to execute search warrants and issue subpoenas in the now-active criminal investigation into the Tate brothers,” he wrote.

Andrew Tate posted on X dozens of times between Tuesday and Wednesday, claiming his innocence and attacking Uthmeier and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who appointed the attorney general.

“This isn’t the America I know. This is a sad sad day for America,” Tate wrote in one post Tuesday, describing the investigation as “absolute communism.”

Last week, Andrew Tate denied all wrongdoing. “We’ve no criminal record anywhere on the planet ever,” he said.

That claim is still pending, however, as the brothers remain under investigation in Romania. Last year, a Romanian court ruled that after those court proceedings finished, the brothers could then be extradited to the U.K. to face additional charges of sex crimes.

Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer and professional misogynist, is a central figure in the manosphere of contemptible internet chauvinists, a group of right-wing shills Trump utilized in his run for the presidency—and now intends to thank in kind.

Elon Musk may be getting another handout from the federal government. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that the tech mogul’s satellite internet company, Starlink, could soon make up to $20 billion thanks to a Commerce Department overhaul of a Biden-era program to expand broadband internet access to rural areas. 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has told staff that he wants to make grants under the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program “technology neutral,” which would give states the ability to allocate more funds to satellite internet providers like Starlink instead of companies using fiber-optic cable technology to connect rural areas.

Musk and Starlink could draw much more funding under the new rules. Under the program’s existing restrictions, states can only fund alternatives to fiber, such as satellite, in places where laying fiber cables isn’t cost-effective or feasible. Starlink was expected to haul in around $4.1 billion under the existing rules but could rake in anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion if Lutnick’s changes are accepted. 

Those changes could be announced this week, albeit without many details, according to unnamed sources cited by the Journal. Implementing the overhaul could take longer, as some states may decide to change the allocation of funding they’ve already received. But Musk could easily grease the wheels or complicate matters if he devotes any X posts to the issue. 

The tech mogul and fascism enthusiast has benefited immensely from the Trump administration, only adding to his government-subsidized wealth as the world’s richest man. If these changes to rural broadband funding go through, not only will Musk get richer but his power in the federal government will increase and extend to rural America. 

Elon Musk told some of his biggest investors Wednesday that he’s looking to fully take over the federal government.

In a meeting with Morgan Stanley, the tech billionaire reportedly likened his influence over the federal government to a “corporate takeover.”

“To understand the federal government, it is like a corporate takeover at scale, but one where the company is actually in much worse shape than any commercial company could ever be,” Musk said at the conference, reported CNN’s Hadas Gold.

Musk then went on to say that “logically we should prioritize anything that can reasonably be privatized,” including public services such as the postal service and Amtrak.

Last month, officials with the United States Postal Service flagged that the Trump administration was looking to dissolve the organization’s governing board and place it under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick. Experts believe doing so would likely violate federal law.

The USPS is practically as old as the country, and oversees the myriad shipping demands of the American public, supporting trillions of dollars in commerce.

It also “generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations,” according to USPS’s website.

Still, that hasn’t prevented America’s public mail system from becoming a favorite target of the president. In 2020, Trump argued that the postal service should be dismantled to prevent voting by mail.

Meanwhile, Musk’s role in hacking and slashing federal spending has come under increased legal scrutiny, forcing the Trump administration to announce last week that it was Amy Gleason, a low-profile, first-term Trump official with experience in health care tech, rather than the high-profile billionaire who was leading the Department of Government Efficiency. Meanwhile, Musk has been officially titled a “senior adviser” to Trump.

That title offers him “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” the administration claimed, and leaves Musk with no formal responsibilities to run DOGE as either an employee or an administrator, but as a mere employee of the White House.

However, a Freudian slip by the president during his joint session address Tuesday confirmed what DOGE employees and Justice Department attorneys had seemed to understand: that DOGE is actually “headed up by Elon Musk.”

In early February, Morgan Stanley positioned itself to offload upward of $5.5 billion of its outstanding debt in X. Musk had tapped the bank to help him acquire the social media platform for $44 billion in 2022, but the investment has since lost the bulk of its value. In 2023, Musk admitted that the site had lost 90 percent of its value under his stewardship.

China is ready to fight back in Donald Trump’s trade war, or any war for that matter.

On Tuesday, Trump spurred global financial chaos by imposing 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, and doubling tariffs on Chinese goods from 10 to 20 percent.

“If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” the Chinese Embassy wrote, in a post on X, following the announcement.

Trump claims the tariffs will force China to stop the flow of fentanyl to the United States, but China has already retaliated with its own tariffs—kicking off a trade war guaranteed to hurt American consumers.

“Chinese officials have failed to take the actions necessary to stem the flow of precursor chemicals to known criminal cartels and shut down money laundering by transnational criminal organizations,” a fact sheet accompanying Trump’s tariff announcement reads.

Beijing immediately took retaliatory action against the United States, imposing 15 percent tariffs on U.S. agricultural imports. Canada too has imposed 25 percent retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports, joining China and Mexico in their hostility toward Trump.

A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, Lin Jian, condemned the president’s decision at a press conference Wednesday and urged the U.S. to “return to the right track of dialogue and cooperation.”

“If the U.S. truly wants to solve the fentanyl issue, then the right thing to do is to consult with China on the basis of equality, mutual respect, and mutual benefit to address each other’s concerns,” Jian said. “If the U.S. has other agenda in mind, and if harming China’s interests is what the U.S. wants, we’re ready to fight till the end.”

Democratic Representative Al Green’s protest during Donald Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night went too far for his Republican colleagues, who are now calling for his censure. 

The far-right House Freedom Caucus posted on X Wednesday that it plans to introduce “a censure resolution against Rep. Al Green today.” Other Republicans not in the caucus, including Representatives Troy Nehls and Dan Newhouse, have also indicated that they plan to introduce a resolution to censure Green. 

The effort will likely have the support of House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said Tuesday night that Green’s actions were “absolutely shameful. He should be censured.”

“It’s a spectacle that was not necessary. He’s made history in a terrible way, and I hope he enjoys it,” Johnson told The Hill.

Green says he plans to accept the consequences, saying that he shouted at the president “because Medicaid is so important to my constituents.”  

“If I broke the rules, then I have to be prepared to suffer the consequences. You don’t break the rules and then demand that you be treated as though nothing ever happened,” the Houston-area congressman told Axios. 

Green’s fellow Democrats in the House are backing up their colleague, with a leading House member and a centrist from the party telling Axios that they don’t expect anyone from the party to vote for the censure. Green isn’t backing down either, having already said earlier this month that he plans to introduce articles of impeachment against Trump. 

“Let them bring their sanctions. Bring them on,” Green said.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede hit back at Donald Trump’s outlandish threat to acquire the Danish territory “one way or the other.”

In his address to Congress Tuesday night, Trump gave conflicting messages to the citizens of Greenland. While he claimed to “strongly support” Greenlanders’ “right to determine [their] own future,” and promised to keep them safe and make them rich, the president also restated that the United States would succeed in acquiring the territory.

“We need it really for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” Trump said.

The president said that his administration was “working with everybody involved to try to get it.”

Despite what Trump claimed Tuesday, it seems that neither the leaders of Greenland nor Denmark are actually playing ball with his wild imperialist threat. Egede shut down Trump’s comments in a post on Facebook Wednesday, written in Greenlandic and Danish.

“Kalaallit Nunaat is ours,” Egede wrote, using the Greenlandic term meaning “Land of the People,” or the “Land of the Greenlanders.”

“We don’t want to be Americans, nor Danes; we are Kalaallit. The Americans and their leader must understand that. We are not for sale and cannot simply be taken. Our future will be decided by us in Greenland,” Egede wrote in the post.

Meanwhile, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said that Trump’s reference to Greenlanders’ right to self determination was the most important part of the speech—especially with the parliamentary elections approaching next week. He stressed that it was important for the election to proceed “without any kind of international intervention.”

But Trump’s outrageous threats to acquire Greenland have become a hot-button issue on the island, and while his attempts at outreach have ranged from frivolous to ineffectual, his rhetoric about making the territory the “fifty-second state” has already electrified the independence movement there.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen insisted that Greenland was not for sale in a television interview after Trump’s address. Last month, Trump made a startling phone call to Frederiksen and was reportedly “aggressive and confrontational,” threatening tariffs against the country unless it does exactly what he wants—flying in the face of his false promises about self-determination.

Despite the fact that leadership hardly seems interested in handing over control of the mineral-rich territory to the U.S, that hasn’t stopped Republicans from letting their imaginations run away with them. Last month, Republican Representative Buddy Carter of Georgia filed a bill to rename Greenland “Red, White, and Blueland.”

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham scoffed at Republicans’ plan to steer clear of in-person town halls after being confronted by angry protesters.

At a private meeting Tuesday, Representative Richard Hudson, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, advised House Republicans to hold virtual town hall meetings or Facebook live events instead so they could moderate feedback from the audience—a feeble attempt to avoid anybody who disagrees with them.

“I thought that was lame. Look, the Tea Party showed up at the Democrat town halls, and we complained that we were thrown out,” Ingraham said on air Tuesday evening. “So now you’re going to say don’t show up—I say let them show up. Let’s see exactly who these people are. When you engage them in conversation … they can’t back up what they are saying with real arguments.”

In recent weeks, Republican town halls have been bombarded by angry constituents, Democratic and Republican alike, who are frustrated with Trump and Elon Musk’s chaos-inducing assault on the government.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who supports the halting of in-person town halls, tried to claim that the protesters were being paid by Democrats.

“Now I’m not saying everyone in these town halls that you’ve seen on television were not from the local area, but look, there are people who do this as a profession,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday. “They’re professional protesters. So why would we give them a forum to do that right now?”

The strategy has been slammed by Democrats, and now by Fox News. Ingraham’s take? Let them argue, paid or not.

“Let’s go … First Amendment, baby.”

The White House has ordered a pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv, according to Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe. The move is expected to devastate Ukraine’s ability to target Russian forces in its ongoing fight with the dictator-led superpower.

The decision to leave Ukraine in the dark is all part of a larger U.S. withdrawal organized by Donald Trump in the wake of his disastrous meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. During the meeting Friday, Trump and Vice President JD Vance refused to let Zelenskiy speak, allowed a conservative reporter to mock Zelenskiy’s wartime attire, and effectively leveraged the critical meeting for measly political gain by defending Russian President Vladimir Putin at the cost of denigrating former American officials. In doing so, they challenged America’s strongest alliances while ceding the world stage to America’s adversaries.

The fallout has continued into this week: On Monday, Trump suspended military aid to the war-battered nation, in defiance of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the U.S. agreed to defend Ukraine’s borders, along with the U.K., in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of nuclear weapons.

A senior White House official who spoke with The Wall Street Journal claimed that the interruption would continue until the president is “satisfied” that Zelenskiy is working toward an end of the war.

Speaking with Fox Business on Wednesday, Ratcliffe purported that intelligence sharing could resume in the near future, thanks to a kowtowing letter penned by Zelenskiy, in which the Ukrainian leader wrote that he was ready to “work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts,” despite being practically thrown out of the White House last week.

“I think on the military front and the intelligence front, the pause that allowed that to happen, I think will go away, and I think we’ll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine as we have to push back on the aggression that’s there,” Ratcliffe said. “But to put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward again, President Trump is going to hold everyone accountable to drive peace around the world.”

Trump was reported to have discussed the restrictions during an impromptu meeting with several members of his Cabinet Monday, including Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, and special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, the last of whom met with Russian officials last month regarding a potential peace deal.

During a White House press conference earlier Monday, Trump repeatedly ducked reporters’ questions as to whether his administration’s actions had aligned U.S. policy with Moscow. Rather than saying “no,” Trump went on a breathy rant claiming that the war never would have happened if he was in office at the onset of the conflict.

“I wanna see it end fast. I don’t want to see this go on for years and years. Now, President Zelenskiy supposedly made a statement today in AP—I’m not a big fan of AP, so maybe it was an incorrect statement—but he said he thinks the war is gonna go on for a long time, uh, and he better not be right about that, that’s all I’m saying,” Trump said.

But negotiations have been remarkably lopsided. American officials have effectively folded Ukraine’s hand for them in peace negotiations, rescinding a 2008 promise to add the Eastern European nation to NATO, as well as the potential to return Ukraine to its prewar borders.

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia last month, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership.

Several of Trump’s former advisers have criticized Trump’s approach to ending the war, including two of his first-term national security advisers, H.R. McMaster and John Bolton.

“Vladimir Putin couldn’t be happier,” McMaster told 60 Minutes on Sunday, sizing up the events of Trump’s explosive meeting with Zelenskiy “Because what he sees is all of the pressure on Zelenskiy, all of the pressure on Ukraine, and no pressure on him.”

McMaster then went on to describe Putin as a “master manipulator” who had successfully worked Trump to Russia’s advantage.

Bolton, meanwhile, has described the administration’s peace deal as Russian propaganda that was practically “written in the Kremlin.”

The MAGA faithful were not happy with how Democrats in Congress reacted to Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday night.

Democrats protested Trump in different ways, whether it was Representative Melanie Stansbury holding up a protest sign as Trump walked into the chamber (which was quickly snatched away), Representative Al Green shouting at the president that he does not have a mandate to cut Medicaid, before being kicked out, or others leaving the chamber mid-speech, wearing T-shirts reading, “No kings live here” and “RESIST.” This was too much for Trump’s devotees.

White House staffers were quick to show their support for Trump on X.

Others in conservative media also attacked Democrats.

It seems that Republicans have short memories. In the past, the GOP has shouted at Democratic presidents during their addresses to Congress, including Representative Joe Wilson shouting “You lie” at President Obama in 2009 or multiple Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, repeatedly interrupting President Biden in 2023. Since the GOP kowtows to Trump, they think everyone else should, as well.