Secretary Collins,

You told the Senate you’d be the “biggest cheerleader” for VA employees. You said you respected us, union or not. You said it was all about the veterans. Those words earned you bipartisan support. But from where we sit on the frontlines, they ring hollow.

Since you took over the VA, your actions have directly contradicted the promises you made to Congress and to us. You said you’d champion VA employees, but instead, you’ve helped lead one of the most aggressive attacks on federal workers’ rights in modern history. That’s not leadership. It’s a betrayal of the values you claimed to uphold. You can’t say you respect VA workers while stripping away the rights that allow us to advocate for ourselves and for the veterans we serve.

Over 120,000 of us are veterans. We served this country to protect basic rights and now those rights are being stripped from us simply for exercising them. That’s not democracy. That’s retaliation. Americans don’t lose their rights because the President disagrees with how they use them. Yet that’s exactly what this administration has done.

And to justify these actions, the administration has claimed that our rights threaten national security. That’s not just offensive, it’s outrageous. Many of us have worn the uniform. We’ve risked our lives to defend this country. To now be told that standing up for basic workplace rights makes us a threat is a slap in the face to every VA worker and every veteran we serve.

The administration’s attacks on DEIA programs and proposed changes to federal hiring rules are no different. They’re designed to silence voices, dismantle fairness, and reward cronyism over qualifications. In reality, those programs and the merit-based civil service system, ensured qualified people had a fair shot by confronting bias and systemic racism. Dismantling them, along with the new OPM rules, guts fairness and replaces it with a loyalty test. That’s not what the VA is supposed to stand for and as the people who serve veterans every day, we know how dangerous that shift really is.

The current budget request to Congress for the VA includes a 55% increase in Community Care funding bringing it to $34 billion at a time when you are seeking to eliminate 30,000 positions from our already inadequate staffing levels. Additionally, there are reports that a DOGE staffer with no understanding of the VA or health care services was allowed to use an AI tool to eliminate contracts in the VA, many of which support the essential services we provide. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has suspended operations of its Wage Committee, which is required to annually approve raises for many blue collar employees at the VA, depriving about 60,000 federal employees of their 2025 pay increases.

These decisions make it harder for us to do our jobs caring for veterans.

We show up every day with one goal: caring for those who served. But now we operate under surveillance and suspicion, worried we’ll be targeted not for failing to do our jobs, but for failing to fall in line. It feels less like a democracy and more like the authoritarian regimes many of us, and the veterans we care for, once fought against. That fear and pressure aren’t just demoralizing, they are a threat to the quality of care.

If you truly want to put veterans first, then stand with the people who serve them and take the following actions: That means restoring our rights, ensuring safe staffing, paying us fairly, and rejecting any move toward privatization or so-called “community care” that guts the VA. Go back to the promises you made. Live up to the values this country and this workforce actually stand for.

• Restore the union and collective bargaining rights of every VA employee
• Implement the 2025 pay increase owed to VA employees
• Prioritize investments in the core functions of the VA through proper staffing and fair pay, not further privatization
• Restore DEIA programs and hiring rules that address systemic racism
• Ensure every employee feels safe, valued, and free to exercise their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and association