Brooks Tucker, VA’s Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Legislative Affairs during first Trump administration.
WASHINGTON, DC — As President-elect Donald Trump gathers his Cabinet and prepares to take office for the second time, questions remain about how this new administration will attempt to transform government agencies, including VA.
Many are looking to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 for clues. The 900-page document was crafted by the conservative think tank as a blueprint for an incoming president to implement reforms that cut the federal government while reshaping it to align with conservative values. Its section on VA includes recommendations to curtail benefits for new veterans and shrink VA’s facility footprint, while paving the way for possible labor reforms in the department.
The Heritage Foundation rose to prominence during the early 1980s and provided key guidance during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. While Trump distanced himself from the organization and Project 2025 during his campaign, many of his closest advisers were key to crafting the document and, since winning the election, political pundits are using it as a guide as to what to expect during his second term.
The section of Project 2025 making recommendations for VA was written by Brooks Tucker, who served as VA’s assistant secretary for congressional and legislative affairs during the first Trump administration. He also served as Acting VA chief of staff from April 2020 to January 2021.
In his chapter on VA, Tucker accuses the agency under the Biden administration of straying from the department’s veteran-centric philosophy. He charges VA leaders with working to undermine the MISSION Act and its community-care provisions and of having a bias toward expanding the federal workforce, saying that the unionized employees “have not always been aligned with a focus on veteran-centric care.”
He writes that VA leadership is focused on social equity and inclusion within departmental policy that “will affect only a small minority of veterans who use the VA.” Tucker also targets VA’s recently enacted policy of providing access to abortions when the life or health of the veteran is endangered or in the case of rape or incest.
“In addition to continuing the grotesque culture of violence against the child in the womb, these sociopolitical initiatives and ideological indoctrinations distract from the department’s core missions,” he writes.
As for reforms that Tucker recommends, he begins by calling for the rescinding of all clinical policy directives “contrary to the principles of conservative governance” starting with abortion care and gender reassignment surgery.”
He also says that VA should review its physical facilities, identifying aging campuses that are no longer needed and putting more weight on community-based outpatient clinics. He recommends exploring pilot facilities where VA partners with strained local healthcare systems “to reduce costs by leveraging limited talent and resources.”
While finding ways to trim direct care, he also argues that VA providers should increase the number of patients they see each day to equal the number seen by DoD providers—approximately 19 patients per day. To help accomplish this, he suggests VA consider a pilot program to extend weekday appointment hours and offer Saturday appointments.
On the community-care side, Tucker recommends strengthening and codifying the requirements of the MISSION Act to “prevent VA from watering down the requirements in the future.”
Regarding personnel, Tucker says that the new administration should be prepared with candidates for politically appointed (PA) positions at VA and have them installed on day one. He also recommends that Congress and the Office of Personnel Management provide new authorities to non-career PA positions at VA.
“Given the attention that VA can generate for Congress and the media, [the White House] should understand the importance of finding talented political appointees to serve VA,” he writes.
Those appointees will take the lead in implementing labor reforms at the VA, he explains. That includes taking a close look at remote work, which Tucker suggests might be “undermining the cohesiveness and competencies of some staff functions.”
Many of Tucker’s personnel recommendations are similar to hiring efforts that VA has been implementing the last few years, including maximizing VA hiring and pay authorities in the RAISE and PACT Acts, and broadening pay and benefits in critical skill areas to be more competitive with the private sector.
If the incoming administration engages in any kind of significant reform in VA personnel, Tucker recommends being prepared well in advance for challenges by employee unions. That includes identifying career employees willing to accept and support changes.
“Those mid-level and senior-level managers exist,” Tucker writes, “but they will need to be identified early and shown trust and confidence.”
He recommends anticipating legal challenges by organized labor and keeping track of when labor contracts are scheduled to end, so that VA can be prepared to push for what it wants from a new contract.
On the benefits side, Tucker criticized the implementation of the PACT Act, writing, “Efforts to expand disability benefits to large populations without adequate planning have caused an erosion of veterans’ trust in the VA enterprise.”
He goes on to accuse VA of assigning disability ratings to health conditions that are “tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service.”
While he admits that efforts to cut benefits would be unpopular both in Congress and with veterans’ service organizations, he suggests an incoming administration explore how VA’s disability scheduling reviews could be accelerated to “target cost savings from revising disability ratings awards for future claimants while preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants.”
Taking “robust political control of the VA could bring about better solutions to the VBA’s workflow challenges,” he says.
As for who would spearhead any reforms at the department, last month Trump announced his intention to nominate former Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA). Collins served three terms in the House from 2013 to 2021 and was one of Trump’s staunchest defenders during his first impeachment trial. Collins served two years as a Navy chaplain during the 1980s. After 9/11, he joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve Command, where he presently serves as chaplain and holds the rank of colonel.
