Collins Delivers Remarks at the Women Veterans Community Support Forum, Mar. 28, 2025
March 28, 2025 · U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs · 0:11:42
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
VA Secretary Doug Collins delivered remarks at the Women Veteran Community Support Forum hosted by the VA’s Center for Women Veterans on March 28, 2025, in the Department of Veterans Affairs’ upload of the address (published April 24, 2025). Collins opened with the inter-service rivalry of the room — calling out each branch in turn to cheers — before turning to the forum’s subject: women veterans, whom he described as the fastest-growing population in many veterans’ organizations, moving from participants to leaders. He told the audience he had addressed VA employees in the same room some six or seven weeks earlier, at the start of his tenure, and had promised them a family approach to running the department.
Collins set out the two rules he said he does not bend on, as he stated them: he does not tolerate people who scare his veterans, and he does not tolerate people who scare his employees — the department, he said, will deal in truth and honesty and have what he called loving disagreements, because, in his framing, it is not about the VA itself but about the veterans it serves. The department’s description of the remarks frames them as a commitment to serving women veterans with dignity, respect, and urgency.
Why it matters
The forum address is Collins’s management philosophy stated to the constituency the VA itself calls its fastest-growing: the family metaphor he uses for the department, and his refusal — stated as a hard line — to let either veterans or employees be frightened by rumor while his reforms proceed. It is the rhetorical companion to the workforce message he delivered three weeks earlier.
Sources: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “VA Secretary Remarks at CWV Forum, March 28, 2025” (official upload, published Apr. 24, 2025, embedded above; remarks as delivered by Secretary Collins; forum framing per the department’s description).
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