One of the largest veterans groups in the country is breaking with many of its peers to support the sweeping reforms the Trump administration is making at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

While many prominent organizations, such as Veterans of Foreign Wars, have criticized VA Secretary Doug Collins for wielding a “chainsaw” approach when it comes to cleaning up the federal agency, particularly after he attempted to cut thousands of government workers, Mission Roll Call CEO Jim Whaley characterized such attacks as “ridiculous.” 

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“I think that’s important to understand that if we continue down the path we are and just add people and add money to it, it’s not going to improve because it hasn’t improved for many years,” he said during a recent interview with the Washington Examiner. 

“Clearly, there needs to be adjustments, because the [veterans’] suicide rate hasn’t dropped in 25 years, so you need to change that. The transitions from veterans to the civilian community has not improved. Homeless, homelessness numbers have not improved,” he continued. “So you have to change something, doing the same thing just doesn’t work, and throwing money and people at it doesn’t work either it needs to be.”

Whaley is a 20-year Army veteran whose nonprofit group boasts around 1.6 million veteran members. He argued that the VA, just like any other organization has to modernize, and “change over a period of time.”

“Sometimes programs run their course and you need to start a new program to meet the needs and cut other programs. And so you can’t just constantly add money and people and hope the problems is going to be fixed,” he said. “And the fact of the matter is the VA is grown very quickly, and the number of veterans it serves is going down, because the number of veterans in the country is going down.” 

His words come in defense of Collins, who has faced criticism after announcing the VA cut nearly $2 billion in contracts no longer deemed necessary, including training, executive support, Microsoft PowerPoint tutorials, and meeting minutes. Collins was also condemned by veterans groups such as VFW this spring after he announced plans to cut roughly 15% of the VA’s staff.

Although Collins confirmed late last month that his goal was to cut up to 80,000 workers, there have been no successful mass layoffs thus far. In February, Collins led two rounds of layoffs that targeted an estimated 2,400 probationary employees, or federal workers who have been on the job for less than a year and have yet to gain civil service protection. However, the following month, a federal judge in California ordered White House officials to reinstate those workers. So far, over 14,000 VA employees in healthcare positions have opted for several government-wide separation incentives, including the deferred resignation program, which allows them to resign from their positions while receiving paid administrative leave until September 30.

Over 300,000 “mission-critical positions” have been deemed essential and are exempt from the cuts.  But other positions, “like interior designers and other things DEI,” Collins says, are bloating the agency. Increasing staffing levels, which surged during the Biden era, shouldn’t be equated with better service for veterans, he argues. In fiscal year 2023 alone, the Veterans Health Administration reached its highest hiring rate in 15 years after taking on 61,000 employees. Yet, even amid personnel investments and almost $3 billion spent on direct care and preventative measures over roughly the past five years, Collins says the veterans’ suicide rates have failed to see significant improvements.

“We have approximately 470,000 employees. That’s larger than the active-duty Army,” the VA secretary said at the Tucson VA Medical Center last month. “But over the last 10 years, we’ve been struggling. … Certain parts of our system — our hospitals, our disability claims and even our cemeteries — have had issues that we’re not working on as we should,” he said. “So maybe there’s a better question to be asked: With the money and resources we have, could it be spent better?”

“Nowhere else in the world would we accept that kind of spending and not see a different result,” he added. “We’ve gotta think differently about how we’re going to do this.”

Whaley suggested that a lot of “negative coverage” on Collins’ push for reform has displaced the real story. In reality, the White House looked at raising the VA’s budget by 17% for the incoming fiscal year, he said. 

“I think many times people are just going through the headline, ‘Veterans Against Cuts,’ and that when you really look at the numbers, that’s not the case. And the headline here is that the VA and the administration are investing in the VA, a 17% increase. That’s the largest increase that the VA ever would have had, but yet the headline is still cutting 80,000 people,” he said.

Other Veterans Service Organizations have a different take.

VFW has emerged as one of the biggest critics of the Trump administration’s swashbuckling approach to slashing the bureaucracy. The largest and oldest veteran’s organization in the country, VFW boasts roughly 1.4 million members and carries deep weight in Washington’s military establishment. 

“Since the federal government is the single largest employer of veterans in the nation, it’s veterans who are being indiscriminately harmed in this bull-’DOGE’-ing of the federal workforce,” Al Lipphardt, the VFW’s national leader, said in February. 

He accused the Trump administration of carrying out an “indiscriminate firing of veterans in the government workforce,” urging the White House to take more of a “scalpel” approach to cutting the bureaucracy. 

Whaley suggested groups like VFW are out of touch with reality.

“There’s a number of VA organizations that came out immediately when the Secretary was talking about reorganization and was adamantly against it, you know, they made it sound like the end of the world was going to happen if you made an adjustment in budget or the number of people that work there, and that’s just ridiculous,” he said. 

“Continuing to do the things that don’t work just doesn’t make sense,” Whaley added. “The suicide rate has not gone down despite billions of dollars being put into it. So the Secretary has said, ‘We need to take a look at that. It’s not working. What do we need to do to adjust and fix this?’ So with that, I think there needs to be change, and there needs to be adjustments, and so I applaud that he’s looking to change things.” 

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has called VFW and other similar establishment VSO’s reluctance to embrace reforms “a typical swampy feedback loop.” 

“Traditional names, the VFW, the Legion, AMVETS, you name them, they’ve got big offices in Washington, DC, and they are invested in one thing, namely, a bigger VA budget,” he said during a November 2024 appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show. 

“They lose touch with the interest of their members, because it becomes about perpetuation,” Hegseth added. “In Washington, DC, they’re not actually trying to fight for reform or real overhaul at the VA. They have a seat at the table, and they like that seat.”

VFW director of public affairs Rob Couture rebuffed such claims in comments to the Washington Examiner. He called the idea that groups like the VFW derive special benefits from large VA budgets, “the furthest thing from the truth.” 

“Hegseth said that the VFW and other traditional VSOs are part of a veterans industrial complex like and that’s, I think that’s off,” he said. “That’s, I think often the misconception that’s out there is we’re somehow benefiting from it.”

“We do not charge to assist veterans with their VA claims. We do not charge them at all. It’s completely free to the veteran. 100% of the money, if there is anything compensation that is, you know, funded  on the veterans behalf, from the VA goes directly to the veteran,” Couture added. “We get grants to help support our service officers, so there’s more of them in different communities to help veterans with their VA filings. But we don’t receive anything from it, and also it is not a membership-based program, meaning that we help out veterans who are eligible for the VFW or VFW members and those who are not eligible for VFW, and recruiting them or asking them to join is not part of that VA claim.” 

Despite their criticism, establishment veterans groups like VFW have signaled a readiness to work with the Trump administration.

Lipphardt, VFW’s leader, accidentally ran into Hegseth at a Nashville event in late 2024 soon after the Shawn Ryan interview. The two men had a discussion there, Couture said, that led “to a good outcome.” 

“We are open to have that dialogue with Secretary Hegseth and hear his concerns and criticisms and help them kind of understand where we’re coming from, how we get to the certain points that we are,” Couture said. 

At the end of the day, Whaley said the burden is on the Trump administration to articulate arguments for reforms to veterans and disgruntled VSOs.  It’s a nuanced debate, the Mission Roll Call CEO said, that requires communicating clearly to a community that is far from monolithic in how they view the situation, according to his group’s polling data.

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“You know, 40% of veterans say they feel the cuts have impacted their well-being. So that number matters, right? You should take that number seriously,” he said. “But we also need to recognize that 52% felt no impact at all on the cuts that have been made. So that split tells us something very important…so I think the more the Veteran’s Administration can be transparent, the better off the community as a whole is going to be.” 

“You can’t modernize without change,” Whaley said. “And change is difficult.”