(COLORADO SPRINGS) — Veterans and their family members in Colorado Springs are coming together to demand that the government uphold its promise to provide quality health care benefits to those who have served.

On Wednesday, March 5, several people gathered outside a Veterans Affairs (VA) community outpatient clinic to protest recent VA cuts. This is the second protest in Colorado Springs over the past few weeks. On Friday, around 50 people gathered outside Congressman Jeff Crank’s office in Colorado Springs to protest the entire department of DOGE.

The VA plans to lay off 80,000 jobs from the agency providing health care for retired military members. The Associated Press reports the VA’s Chief of Staff told top-level officials at the agency that they need to cut enough employees to return to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000.

That would require terminating tens of thousands of employees. A memo from the Chief of Staff also instructs top-level staff to prepare for an agency-wide “reorganization” in August. It calls for agency officials to work with the DOGE to, “move out aggressively, while taking a pragmatic and disciplined approach” to the Trump administration’s goals.

“They send us to bad places, they have us doing bad things and then for the five decades we’re still alive afterwards we need help,” said Frederick Pamp, a Vietnam veteran.

The cuts come as the VA last year experienced its highest-ever service levels, with more than nine million veterans enrolled for benefits across the country.

“I think the President’s been pretty clear that he wants to do this in a way that it doesn’t affect service, whether it’s veterans or its at the Forest Service, or anywhere else, he wants to do this in a way that isn’t impacting services,” said Rep. Jeff Crank, Congressman for Colorado’s 5th Congressional District said. “I will never support cutting benefits to veterans. Secretary Doug Collins, the Secretary of the VA, said that this will be done to improve efficiency and not going to impact health care or benefits and I’m going to hold him to that.”

Local Vietnam veteran Pamp is concerned if additional cuts are announced, funding for programs like the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act, or PACT Act, will be affected, on top of the other services the VA provides.

“80,000 more employees are going to get canned so they can get down to the staffing levels of 2019, and the problem with that is they passed the burn pit law, giving us more medical help in 2022,” Pamp explained. “We’ve got that much more stuff to do and we got that many fewer people and we’re already understaffed.”

It’s something the Legislative Director of the VFW Department of Colorado is also keeping a close eye on.

“The most important thing we want the VA to be able to do is expand on the presumption of the toxins out there that we’re exposed to, by the time we deploy and also when we’re at home station,” Steve Kjonaas explained. “For instance, there’s a lot more agent orange out there that people during the Vietnam War were exposed to, but now people who were not even old enough to go to Vietnam, are exposed to.”

As veterans wait to find out how these cuts could affect the PACT Act, the Legislative Director told FOX21 News the VFW Department of Colorado wants more communication from the VA.

“We’d like to see other releases or we’d like to see the VA Secretary come out and say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or what’s going to go on, or exactly when that’s going to happen if it will,” Kjonaas said.

Newly appointed Secretary of the VA, Doug Collins, took to X on Wednesday to do just that.

“VA will continue to hire for more than 300,000 mission critical positions to ensure health care and benefits for VA beneficiaries are not impacted,” Collins said.

The Legislative Director for the VFW Department of Colorado told FOX21 News he doesn’t know how many VA employees across Southern Colorado have been let go, but it’s something he’s working on gathering.

If you have been let go by the VA or know someone who has, we want to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected] or call our station directly at (719) 596-2100. You can remain anonymous.