It was the exposure to toxic burn pits in Baghdad that likely caused Scott Olson’s cancer, he said.
The Army veteran was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma after spending 15 months in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. When Olson returned to the U.S., he sought care from the Department of Veterans Affairs in Seattle, relying on it through stem cell transplants, two hip replacements and other treatments and surgeries.
“It’s kind of hard to hold down a job while you’re going through all that,” Olson, now 47, said in an interview.
Two months ago, he was relieved to get hired by the VA, where he supported homeless veterans at a community center in Georgetown. There, he helped people connect with housing, health care and career development resources — work that “gave (him) purpose,” he said.
Then last week, he was suddenly fired, as part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass cuts of thousands of federal workers nationwide. He was stunned as he read the email and realized the “notice of termination” referred to his own job.
“I had fought through war, through cancer and through every challenge life had thrown at me only to be cast aside by the very system I had believed in,” Olson said this week in a virtual news conference held by Sen. Patty Murray’s office.
The firings have hit agencies from the National Park Service to the Federal Aviation Administration, and the VA has not been spared, despite Trump’s campaign promises to prioritize veterans. Over the past several weeks, the department that provides health care for retired military members has fired more than 2,400 probationary employees, many of whom, like Olson, are veterans themselves.
More cuts appear to be on their way. On Wednesday, trade publication Government Executive reported the VA is planning to reduce its workforce by 80,000 people later this year, according to an internal agency memo. The memo calls for the department’s workforce to drop from 482,000 to 399,957 workers.
“At first, I was hoping this would be a quick turnaround, that the VA would say a mistake was made,” Olson said Wednesday afternoon. “But now that they’re talking about 80,000 jobs being cut, I’m worried that there won’t be a job to even go back to.”
There are five VA hospitals throughout Washington, in Seattle, Tacoma, Walla Walla, Spokane and Vancouver, as well as more than a dozen outpatient clinics. In Western Washington, the VA provides care for about 160,000 veterans.
As of late last year, there were around 56,000 federal workers in Washington, but it’s not clear how many worked at the VA or how many have been fired so far across all agencies.
Last week, Emma Spaulding, a VA public affairs specialist, confirmed that a “small number of probationary staff” were dismissed in the Puget Sound area.
“This decision will have no negative effect on Veteran health care, benefits or other services and will allow VA to focus more effectively on its core mission of serving Veterans, families, caregivers and survivors,” Spaulding said.
The agency did not immediately respond to another request for comment Wednesday, after news broke of further planned staff reductions.
Nationwide, veterans make up about 30% of the federal workforce, and more than 25% of VA staffers, according to Murray’s office.
The firings will likely force veterans to wait longer to see health care providers, have their disability claims adjudicated and talk to someone at the Veterans Crisis Line, while their families could wait longer to have burial and funeral expense reimbursement requests processed, Murray’s office said.
In addition, the VA also cut ties with about 500 researchers — looking at areas such as mental health, opioid withdrawal and toxic burn pit exposure — who will not have their contracts renewed, Murray’s office said.
Christian Helfrich had been at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle for 20 years, working as a health systems researcher who studied how the VA can deliver better care to the more than 9 million veterans it serves nationwide. He was fired Feb. 12.
The VA hospital in Seattle has one of about 20 centers nationwide that research how the VA can improve care. Helfrich was one of seven people laid off from the Seattle research center last month, he said.
Helfrich, who holds a doctorate in health services, studied the gap between what clinical studies have shown are the best methods of care and the care the VA actually delivers. He and his team worked to close that gap, to find strategies to get VA doctors and nurses to adopt new, proven techniques that yield better results for patients.
There are, for instance, a number of studies showing better outcomes for heart procedures when a catheter is inserted through an artery in the wrist, rather than through the femoral artery in the thigh.
But, Helfrich said, doing it through the wrist is a technically more challenging maneuver. It can be really difficult, Helfrich said, to get medical professionals to change their long-held strategies even in the face of new evidence that there is a better way. He did a lot of work with VA cardiologists and nurses to see what it would take to get more procedures to use the wrist method.
“Most of what we do is trying to make the system a little better, cumulatively over time,” Helfrich said.
A systemic review, published last year, found that veterans consistently get the same or better quality care from the VA than they do from other sources or than the general public gets.
“The kind of work we do in this center is one of the reasons why the quality of care is better,” Helfrich said. The consequences of laying off researchers like him will be felt “not next week or next month, but in five years and 10 years.”
News of continued firings has caused overwhelming anxiety and confusion among workers, several current and former VA staffers told The Seattle Times.
Patient care has not yet changed, said one social worker who works in mental health at the Seattle VA hospital, and who requested anonymity because she feared for her job. But workers have stopped putting things in writing, shunning messaging and email for fear that anything they put in writing could be used against them.
“There’s a sense that there will be some sort of loyalty test,” she said. “Everybody is kind of looking sideways at everyone else. You walk into the break room and people stop talking. It’s just super weird and kind of creepy.”
Murray condemned the cuts and attacked Trump and billionaire Elon Musk in a statement Wednesday that detailed the wide range of effects that Department of Government Efficiency plans will likely have on veterans.
“Make no mistake: this will only empower Elon to privatize VA by breaking it first,” she wrote in the statement. “The consequences of Trump and Elon’s sheer recklessness will reverberate for generations — in more veterans sick and unable to get their benefits, more veterans out of a job, and fewer men and women willing to sign up to serve a nation that shows it will not keep their promises to them.”
The issue has joined the growing list of Trump administration orders that state Attorney General Nick Brown is legally challenging. On Wednesday, Brown joined a lawsuit filed against the federal government in San Francisco, over what he calls an “all-out assault on public service.”
A federal judge in that case issued a temporary restraining order last week, ordering the Office of Personnel Management to rescind its firing directives to some employees.
Olson, who now lives in Kent, is still processing news of his firing, and is not yet sure if he’ll be affected by the lawsuit.
“I got my foot in the door,” Olson said of his VA job. “This was the start of what was going to be a great career. Now I’m trying to file for unemployment. I feel like I’m right back to where I started a few months ago.”
Seattle Times reporter Hannah Furfaro contributed to this report.
