Duckworth Discusses Protecting Veterans Act

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Combat Veteran and U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)—a member of the U.S. Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee (SVAC)—joined CNN’s Jake Tapper to underscore the urgent need to pass her Protecting Veteran Jobs Act, legislation she introduced yesterday alongside Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) that would reinstate Veterans who were fired from their jobs as part of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s indiscriminate purge of federal employees. Veterans make up more than 30 percent of the federal workforce and it is estimated that Trump and Musk have already fired more than 6,000 of those men and women who have served in uniform. Video of the full interview can be found on the Senator’s YouTube.

Key Quotes:

• “My legislation would allow Veterans to get their jobs back…There are Veterans on the other side of the aisle, and I certainly have never heard a single one of my Republican colleagues say that they don’t support Veterans. If anything, they boast about supporting Veterans—so now is a chance for them to do so. They can stand up and support our Veterans who serve our country in federal service.”

• “Veterans have been made a promise by the American people that we will care for them once they serve our nation. We just passed the PACT Act a couple years ago to fund programs that help Veterans who suffered from toxic substances like burn pits…We finally, in a bipartisan way, passed funding to hire more people to take care of these Veterans, and those new people [at the VA] are all probationary employees because they've been hired within the last two years. They’re the ones who are most likely being laid off—so now Veterans are going to find themselves waiting longer for care…I don't want us to go back to the bad old days where Veterans, like the Vietnam Veterans, were dying waiting for their claims to be processed. But that's where we're headed under the Trump Administration right now.”

• “We had Veterans who worked on the Veterans Crisis Line who were laid off and had to be reinstated. I was able to get two of those folks reinstated myself…They also laid off the people who were in charge of our nuclear arsenal, for crying out loud. It shows that they don't know what they're doing. They're taking a chainsaw to the federal workforce, and it's putting Americans in danger. It's putting our Veterans in danger. And frankly, there are better ways to reduce federal spending.”

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