Donald Trump has long insisted that no one cares about America’s veterans more than him. He continued to do so while delivering a Veterans Day address from Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday, claiming his first administration fired “thousands” of government employees — “sick people” and “thieves” — who didn’t take care of veterans, only to see them rehired by Joe Biden.
“We got rid of them,” the president said of his new administration. Trump also praised Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect who is overseeing the administration’s cost-cutting spree. “What a good job he’s doing, cutting, cutting, cutting,” Trump said.
The speech came as the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was struggling through the longest government shutdown in modern history — during which the Republican Party has wasted no time advancing Project 2025 and stripping veterans of their earned disability payments. Trump’s VA is also cutting 30,000 employees — many of them service-disabled veterans — after initially planning to cut 80,000 of the “sick people,” as Trump calls them, who are somehow defrauding the system. The cuts come as the department is already hemorrhaging medical professionals, and as the Trump administration has imposed strict hiring limits that prevent replacing those who leave.
Along with gutting federal agencies like the VA, Project 2025 calls for narrowing the list of medical conditions eligible for disability compensation,...
If legal proceedings arise between an employee and employer, there may be a strong temptation to present the facts in a more favorable light than they actually are. If an employee makes false clai...