Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Minor

Increase VA hiring of veterans and military spouses

Not started

652 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“Focus more attention on hiring veterans and military spouses. The percentage of veterans employed at VA has been declining.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    VA hired fewer people of every kind. The department announced on 2025-07-07 that it was on pace to shed nearly 30,000 employees by the end of FY2025 — from roughly 484,000 on 2025-01-01 to 467,000 by 2025-06-01, with about 12,000 more expected to leave by 2025-09-30 — through the federal hiring freeze, deferred resignations, voluntary early retirement and attrition, which "eliminated the need" for a department-wide reduction in force of up to 15%. No VA initiative to raise the veteran or military-spouse share of its workforce was announced in the window, and no figure for that share was published: the Veteran and Military Spouse Talent Engagement Program continues unchanged from before 2025-01-20, and the FY2027 congressional submission reports veteran employment only in passing ("[a]pproximately" half of VBA's claims processors are veterans). The one in-window recruiting push found, for more than 300 Veteran Readiness and Employment counsellors and specialists on 2026-02-03, is not veteran- or spouse-targeted hiring. Recorded under §3b's "moved the other way" rule.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The nearest government-wide instrument is not VA hiring: Executive Order 14417 of 2026-08-03, “Establishing the President’s Military Spouse Commission”, was read in full at govinfo (FR-2026-08-06/html/2026-16125.htm). It creates an advisory commission chaired by the spouse of the Secretary of War to recommend policies on housing, employment, healthcare, education and deployment support. It names no agency’s hiring, imposes no duty on VA, and is carried here as a lead.
  • VA’s hiring-freeze exemptions announcement of 2025-01-23 (https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-declares-hiring-freeze-exemptions/, fetched 2026-09-01) exempts mission-critical clinical and public-safety positions; it protects care delivery, not veteran or military-spouse hiring.
  • A Federal Register phrase search for “military spouse” across VA documents since 2025-01-20 returns zero.
Action
expand
Object
VA hiring of veterans and military spouses
ID
1804