US plans to fire 80,000 Veterans Affairs workers as part of Trump cuts, sparking backlash

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : During his first term as president, Trump in 2018 signed a law that expanded veterans' access to private sector healthcare paid for by the VA.
43% : Everett Kelley, head of the American Federation of Government Employees which represents 311,000 VA employees, said, "veterans and their families will suffer unnecessarily.
42% : The memo directed agency staff to work with tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to make the cuts.
31% : Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the job cuts marked an escalation of a "full-scale, no-holds-barred assault on veterans" by Trump and Musk that would put veterans' health benefits in "grave danger." A spokesperson for Jerry Moran, Republican chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
25% : A board that reviews the firings of federal employees has ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to temporarily reinstate thousands of workers who lost their jobs as part of the layoffs spearheaded by Trump and Musk.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.