A Renewed Assault

This June 6, five thousand protesters gathered on the Mall in Washington, DC, under the banner of Unite for Veterans /Unite for America.  The event was sponsored by the Union Veterans Council of the national AFL-CIO and the Chamberlain Network, a nonprofit group that hopes the rally will “encourage the administration to make the right decisions for veterans.”

Former service members, including some who belong to AFGE, NNU, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), and other unions, heard speeches from past and present vets in Congress like Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and former Republican House member Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who became a major Trump critic during his first term.

Thousands of people also participated in actions at 225 other locations around the country, including in vet-heavy red states like Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, and Kentucky. Some “watch parties,” organized for real-time viewing of the DC event, were held in local union halls to highlight the labor/vet overlap. The grassroots political organization Indivisible was an important local partner as well.

The live stream from DC was enlivened by the Dropkick Murphys, the group of Celtic punk rockers from Boston who Union Vets Council leader Will Attig regularly listened to as an eighteen-year-old Marine in Iraq. The pro-labor band got wild applause after performing a new release well suited to the occasion. Its chorus, as belted out by lead singer Ken Casey, asked: “Who’ll stand with us? / Don’t tell us everything is fine / Who’ll stand with us? / Because this treatment is a crime.”

Everything Is Fine?

In the run-up to this D-Day, Trump’s current VA Secretary Doug Collins — like Robert Wilkie before him — has indeed been telling nine million VHA patients that everything is fine, despite his planned elimination of more than 80,000 VA jobs later this year.

According to Collins, a former Republican House member from Georgia, President Trump “is making it even easier for veterans to get their health care when and where it’s most convenient for them” by letting them choose between in-house doctors and faster referrals to a nationwide network of 1.7 million private sector providers. Collins’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 clearly favors the latter; it calls for a 50 percent increase in VHA spending on outside care (which already totals $30 billion a year) and an unprecedented 17 percent reduction in direct-care funding.

Since this budgetary math would force cuts to VHA staff, services, and facilities, one purpose of the D-Day rally in DC was to sound the alarm about Trump’s renewed privatization push. A speaker who did that very movingly was forty-three-year-old Matt Stevenson, a primary care physician at the VA Medical Center in Palo Alto. Making clear he was speaking in a personal capacity, Stevenson lauded his employer as “a mission-driven, patient-centered, cost-effective, integrated American healthcare system . . . which delivers higher-quality care at lower cost than any other system in the country.”

According to Stevenson, under a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)–led assault since January, his coworkers around the country have “been disparaged and demoralized . . . bullied and intimidated” amid “worrisome signs of an attempt to dismantle and privatize the VA.” He argued that “those who would take this public treasure — built over generations, by many hands, working long nights in dark hospitals — and sell it off in the name of choice or modernization or efficiency or political gain” can be stopped if VA defenders “come together around a shared vision.”

Caregivers Quitting

One of the things that inspired some veterans to attend events was learning that their doctors, nurses, or therapists were quitting due to deteriorating workplace conditions under Collins.

David Magnus, a Navy veteran from Pittsburgh, told the Guardian that he traveled to DC because his trusted provider revealed her decision to leave the VHA during a recent mental health appointment. Outside a Veterans Memorial Building in San Rafael in Northern California, Katie Weber-Linhar, a disabled Army veteran, lamented the recent resignation of a popular therapist who treated many vets at an outpatient clinic in Ukiah, in rural Mendocino County.

Weber-Linhar now helps a retired VHA physician hold a weekly protest, attended by patients, family members, and local union members, at a VA outpatient clinic in Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County. She and other VA defenders did not get the memo from DC rally planners that stressed that “Unite for Veterans” was not intended to be “an anti-Trump event or a partisan protest.” Handmade placards in Santa Rosa included one dissing DOGE as a bunch of “Douchebag Oligarchs Grabbing Everything” and others identifying the sign-holder as a “Veteran Against Trump” and critic of “Trump’s America” because of its “Cages for Kids, Cuts for Vets.”  Ernie Bergman, a cancer survivor and seventy-seven-year-old leader of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) in Marin County, criticized “this current government” for trying to take money away from medical research and innovative treatment “that saved my life.”

VSOs Were MIA

Iraq combat veteran Kristofer Goldsmith, a former staffer for the Vietnam Veterans of America turned podcaster and founder of Task Force Butler, said he was thrilled that “people at the protest in Washington were not the usual suspects. I had people come up to me who had flown in from every part of the country who had never been at a protest before but who wanted to be part of something historic.”

Goldsmith noted, however, that some groups were notable for their official absence — representatives of the “Big Six” Veterans Service Organizations (VSOs). Just a few months ago, Goldsmith was much encouraged when the national commander of one of these VSOs, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), urged his 1.4 million members to “march forth” and “stop the bleeding” at the VA. As a life member of the VFW but past critic of overly cautious and conservative VSO behavior, Goldsmith viewed this development as “nothing short of extraordinary.”

On D-Day, however, the VFW, American Legion, and other major vet groups were MIA. According to Goldsmith, there were VSO members at the DC rally “in a personal capacity,” but there was no official staff or representation of the Big Six. In Goldsmith’s view, if the big VSOs “were making enough noise and standing up to the cuts in a way that reflects the urgency of the moment, they would have been on the stage with us.”

Key rally organizer Will Attig, who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan before joining a Plumbers and Pipefitters (UA) local in Illinois, said that organizers were working with the VSOs “behind the scenes.” Hopefully these efforts will convince major VSOs to end what one concerned representative described as their deafening silence on the Trump/DOGE/Collins assault on veterans, their dedicated caregivers, and their hard-earned benefits.

The Next Step

The question, of course, is, “What next?” Attig, among other organizers and attendees, emphasized that this event will be only one of many. It was a “very exciting event that shows what can happen when veterans come together around their issues.”

James Jones, a Gulf War veteran from Boone, North Carolina, who is also a federal employee with the National Park Service, a member of AFGE and of the newly formed Federal Unionists Network (FUN), could not agree more. In a post D-Day interview with us, Jones said he traveled from North Carolina to the event because he wants legislators to understand how important the VA has been to veterans like himself.

“I lost friends during the Gulf War, and I’ve dealt with health issues because of exposure to . . . you name it,” Jones said. “Airborne toxins, oil well fire smoke, burn pits, depleted uranium residue. I’ve been a VA patient since 1993, and the VA has been beneficial to me because they understand PTSD, military trauma, and everything else.”

Jones said he hopes that veterans will keep up the pressure. “We have to call our elected representatives, keep going to rallies, and join these groups that are fighting for veterans. Secretary Collins is trying to convince people that the VA is a bloated agency. It’s not; they’re thousands of positions short. The government needs to keep the promise it made to veterans — we served our country, and now they’re breaking their promise to take care of us. We can’t accept that.”