My brother is in a VA hospital in Florida.
He’s in bad shape.
For his privacy’s sake, I won’t describe what.
Will Trump kill the VA?
The best evidence of what he would do with a Republican Congress and Supreme Court is what he did last time he was President and had a Republican Congress and Supreme Court.
He held the funds steady but didn’t, otherwise, do much:
Once there was a Democratic Congress, he bumped things back to where they would have been and never seemed particularly upset by that.
That seems unlikely. For all that Trump thinks of military veterans (i.e they’re “suckers”) and treats military families with utter contempt, they form a significant part of his dedicated base, and as much as many of them may hate “socialism”, killing the Veteran’s Administration would drive them to a frenzy because even if the care is mediocre it is affordable and accessible. He (or rather, the Congress) might try to ‘privatize’ it but it is hard to imagine even the dumbest private equity investor thinking they can squeeze blood out of that turnip.
Stranger
Why not? If you read here, he’s going to deport, intern, and slaughter millions of people. What’s one agency in the face of that?
I’ll also note that, to the extent that the early Trump presidency seemed to have much of a desire to rein in spending, it probably came from Paul Ryan more than Trump.
Even now, I believe that most of the “cut spending” chatter has come from Elon Musk, not Trump.
Mostly because it is just isn’t worth the squeeze. It doesn’t serve immigrants, it’s not a threat to his executive authority like the Department of Justice, he can’t get any demographic behind it, and it’ll piss off a good chunk of his base to no end. Trump’s targets are going to be Justice, Education, the EPA, much of Commerce (especially NOAA), NIH and especially NIAID, Department of the Interior, the IRS (naturally), the FCC, and probably NASA because it has a poor “return on investment”. That’s a big bucket even for a veteran KFC eater like Trump, and getting down to the VA probably isn’t even on the cards.
Stranger
Makes sense. I just find it funny that in all the discussion of death camps and public executions of Democrats and trans people that there’s something so small potatoes that we say, nah, he won’t do that.
Didn’t he have three people running the VA that didn’t know a thing about the whole process? Didn’t that sort of screw things up for at least a while? Why won’t the same thing occur–especially since it’s not on his immediate radar? Get another batch of faithful Mar-a-Lago fans and reward them with a nice job like that.
That’s a bit different. There’s a difference between deliberately killing a department, and running it so incompetently that it may as well be dead.
Mostly in the level of effort and consensus needed to accomplish the two different end states.