The heads of the Department of Veterans Affairs and a top federal government workers’ union sparred Monday over the shutdown’s impact on veterans. The administration said that a union official’s claim that the shutdown would lead to more veteran suicides was out of line, but the union refused to a apologize.
“I was surprised and disappointed to see one of the American Federation of Government Employees’ (AFGE) presidents pushing the ‘Veteran as victim’ myth, and going so far as to exploit the real tragedy of Veteran suicide to make political arguments about the partial government shutdown,” VA chief Robert Wilkie said in a letter Monday to AFGE President J. David Cox.
Wilkie was referring to a comment by Edward Canales, president of AFGE local 3584 in Dublin, Calif., to ABC on Wednesday. “If this shutdown does not stop, we are going to have fatalities,” he said. “We’re going to have suicides.”
The agency head called the notion that veterans can be easily pushed to the brink of mental breakdown or even suicide “a shopworn canard” that it was continually fighting because it did a disservice to veterans.
“I ask you to apologize publicly for your AFGE colleague’s reckless comments and to outline the steps you plan to take to ensure AFGE leaders demonstrate proper respect for our nation’s heroes,” Wilkie told Cox.
Cox was in no mood to apologize, according to a statement emailed to the Washington Examiner, which called the Trump administration one of the “worst on record” for veterans. The union chief said that many vets were also federal employees and were thus being denied paychecks due to the shutdown.
“Federal government employed veterans are hurting right now. Regardless of their continued service to our country the President and his cabinet have left them out in the cold, forcing them to work without pay and subjecting veterans and their families to the uncertainty of not knowing when or where their next paycheck will come from,” Cox said. “Financial pressures experienced by working people are apparently not something this administration either understands or cares about.”
The current federal government shutdown is now on its 23rd day, making it the longest in history. Those working for Veterans Affairs itself are unharmed. “The Department of Veterans Affairs is fully funded for fiscal year 2019” it says on its website. “All VA operations will continue unimpeded.”
The Veterans Affairs Department is one of the largest in the federal government, owing to the fact that it runs a network of hospitals across the nation. It has more than 374,000 full-time employees and is second only in size to the Pentagon. AFGE is one of five unions that represent its workforce.
