The Trump administration announced its planning to fire thousands more employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs as part of the White House effort to dramatically downsize the federal workforce.

A quarter of the VA's workforce comprises veterans themselves, and that's prompting questions about how the cuts might affect the quality and timeliness of the services the VA provides.

Doug Collins is the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs and joins us now.

Thanks for being with us. Welcome to the News Hour.

I'm glad to be here.

So earlier this evening, you confirmed that the VA will terminate an additional 70,000-plus

staffers, and you say that these cuts will help

the VA fulfill its core mission. How exactly, how is it possible to reduce staffing and resources

without negatively impacting the quality and timeliness of care?

Well, the first off is I didn't announce that we're actually going through it at this moment.

I said we're beginning the process to look at a reduction in force that will resemble about

15% of the force and that's what we've begun to do and what we've done all along is actually

take a look at our core functions, making sure that the veteran is first.

And it is sort of an interesting to me that we say that there's no way this can

affect quality of care or others when really what we're seeing right now we've experienced

over the last few years is Washington DC's pendency to just throw money and people at problems.

Over the last four years, there's been $130,000, $130 billion added to the budget at the VA and plus 80,000 employees, but at the same time

backlogs of benefits have went up.

Healthcare wait times have actually went up and when this was all a different position

just four years ago.

So the question is, is not what the, you know, where we're looking at to make sure that we're

getting efficient is following what the president has called for, but also making sure that we're delivering it in the best way.

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