Collins Testifies at the Senate Veterans' Affairs Oversight Hearing, May 6, 2025
May 6, 2025 · Forbes Breaking News · 2:19:58
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What happened
VA Secretary Doug Collins testified before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on May 6, 2025, in Forbes Breaking News’ full carry of the hearing — his first appearance before the committee since he was sworn in, as Chairman Jerry Moran noted in opening it. The hearing was the committee’s first full accounting of the reform program Collins had announced in March: a department-wide review aimed at returning VA employment toward 2019 levels, and a rolling cancellation of contracts the department judged non-mission-critical or duplicative.
Collins defended the record as he stated it: the department, he said, had cancelled contract work it should be doing in-house and had let go less than one-half of 1 percent of its employees, and he charged that false rumors — that the VA was firing doctors and nurses and forcing staff to work in closets and showers — had been spread about the changes, none of which, he said, have been backed up. Ranking Member Richard Blumenthal answered with the opposition’s ledger, as he stated it: not a single problem Collins had recited would be solved by slashing the VA workforce by 83,000 people, two-thirds of the roughly 80,000 workers added since 2019 being health-care workers; he pressed Collins for the specific positions already terminated and the costs of reinstating workers if courts found the terminations wrongful, and closed by telling the Secretary that nonsubstantive answers would not count as real responses and urging him to avoid non-disclosure agreements with employees.
Why it matters
The May 6 hearing fixed the terms of the Collins debate for the rest of his tenure: a Secretary measuring his start in contracts cancelled and a fraction of a percent of staff let go, against a ranking member measuring it against an 83,000-person workforce target the Secretary’s own March message had implied. Both numbers were put on the record here, by the men who own them.
Scoreboard watch
Scoreboard watch: the workforce dispute as stated on May 6, 2025 — Collins’s less-than-one-half-of-1-percent figure for employees let go, against Ranking Member Blumenthal’s 83,000-person reduction charge tied to the 2019 end-strength goal. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.
Sources: Forbes Breaking News, “FULL HEARING: VA Secretary Doug Collins Testifies Before Senate Veterans Affairs Committee” (full carry of the May 6, 2025 hearing, embedded above; testimony as delivered by Secretary Collins and members of the committee).
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