Is Musk behind this?

US Department of Veterans Affairs plans to cut 80,000 jobs

Trump adviser Elon Musk has been tasked with reducing the US federal bureaucracy.(Bild: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

The Department of Veterans Affairs in the USA is planning to cut 80,000 jobs. This is according to an internal letter sent to employees on Tuesday. A total of almost 500,000 people are currently employed by the Department.

In future, the figure is to be just under 400,000, which corresponds to the 2019 level. The Chief of Staff of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Christopher Syrek, sent a memo to the agency's senior civil servants on Tuesday (local time) in which he informed them of the savings target. He instructed them to work with tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to make the cuts.

Musk and his team have been tasked with drastically reducing the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy. To date, some 25,000 US government employees have already been laid off. Leading Democrat Richard Blumenthal called the cuts an "all-out assault" on the workforce.

The US government's Department of Veterans Affairs is responsible for providing benefits to veterans and their families and survivors. It was founded in 1930 as a federal agency in Washington. The Department is the second largest in the USA. Its employees work in medical facilities, hospitals, government agencies and national cemeteries. In the healthcare sector, it is one of the largest employers in the United States.