Dianne Singleton served in the U.S. Air Force and later became a federal government employee tasked with administering benefits to veterans, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to let President Trump take away the rights she fought for.
Singleton was one of about 20 protestors gathered outside the Houston Veterans Administration Regional Benefit Office on Almeda Road on Monday morning.
“We’re fighting right now,” she said. “We are filing lawsuit after lawsuit. If [Trump] passed an executive order at 9:05 on a Saturday night, by 9:15, there’s a team on a Zoom call of legal folks for [American Federation of Government Employees]. If you take away funding from any organization, you’re going to kill it. You make the Girl Scouts stop selling cookies, you make the church stop taking an offering for the building fund, the lights are going to get cut off. It’s going to crumble.
“It won’t cripple us,” she added. “It just made us stronger. We’re saying hands off the union, hands off the federal employees. Let us work. Let us do our jobs.”
Trump has denounced unions like the AFGE as hostile to his agenda and cited national security concerns in removing about 1 million civil servants from the reach of organized labor, eliminating the unions’ power to represent those workers at the bargaining table or in court, The New York Times reported in March. An accompanying lawsuit filed by the Trump administration in a Texas federal court last month seeks permission for the president to rescind collective bargaining agreements, citing national security interests and saying the agreements “hamstrung” executive authority.
Additionally, the President’s Voluntary Early Retirement Authority and Deferred Resignation Program were put in place to cut much-needed government workers by offering a small stipend that will run out in a few months, Singleton said. Removing government workers from their jobs means veterans aren’t getting the healthcare, benefits and services they need, she said.
“They’re saying we need to cut the fat and we’ll pay you until September,” she said. “How is that not waste when you’re paying for something that nobody’s producing? We still have the same if not more workload. It’s systematically set up to fail.”
Members of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1454, of which Singleton is the president, said federal workers have been “disrespected, demeaned and degraded by Elon Musk and the Trump administration” since the president’s inauguration on January 20. Trump’s attack on federal government workers is unprecedented, unethical and unnecessary, Singleton said.
Federal workers are fed up with the wasted time of having to work in an office building instead of telecommuting and Musk’s requirement that they must send five bullet points each day of what they’ve accomplished, said Singleton, who works at the VA regional office.
“Some of these folks had to get here at 6:30 a.m. just to get a parking spot,” she said. Reporters who attempted to attend Monday’s rally were told they could not park at the VA offices and were asked to leave by security guards.
“We’re not being productive here,” Singleton said. “By the time we sign in and get to our cubicle, that could have been two or three claims for a veteran. That’s two or three veterans who didn’t get service today. Bringing us back to work is not conducive to processing or helping our veterans.”
Grace Hee, a member of the Harris County Democratic Party, said she showed up to support her father, who is a veteran.
“I care for the veterans,” she said. “I’m hoping to get as many people as we can to support us in fighting for VA rights and veterans’ rights.”
Meredith Clarage, a retired chemist with the Environmental Protection Agency, also joined the protest in an effort to raise awareness about government budget cuts.
“We’ve got to stop the bleeding before it’s too late,” she said.
PBS reported in March that layoffs at the Department of Veterans Affairs and a Pentagon purge of archives that documented diversity in the military were hurting veterans.
“And with the Republican president determined to continue slashing the federal government, the burden will only grow on veterans, who make up roughly 30 percent of the federal workforce and often tap government benefits they earned with their military service,” according to the news story.
About a month later, Trump deemed PBS and NPR “fake news” and slashed public subsidies to the broadcasting institutions.
Houston veterans — even some who voted for Trump — say they’re in a crisis situation now that their healthcare and benefits are on the chopping block. Nearly one-third of VA employees are veterans themselves, and their work on behalf of all military veterans is under attack, AFGE officials said.
“It’s disheartening,” said Tiffanye Dunlap, legislative and political coordinator for the Houston AFGE chapter. “I have family members who are disabled veterans. If I’m not doing my job, that’s a disservice to the veterans.”
Singleton said the budget cuts related to government employee layoffs haven’t trickled down to the veterans yet but “it’s coming.”
“We see a lot of our veterans not being serviced in a timely manner because the caseloads for each Vocational Rehabilitation and Education counselor are so overwhelming,” she said. “Those programs pay for vets to go to school so they can be gainfully employed, but the workers are buried, they’re drowning, and the VA has no funding to hire new workers. Veterans Affairs has no money, so how are we effectively serving our veterans? We can’t.”
She said she hopes to light a fire and remind Americans of the important services offered by government employees.
“We’re here for all federal employees,” she said. “We’re not going to be afraid. We’re not going to let them privatize us and start laying us off at every whim. This is my first rally and it won’t be the last. Fear is driving a lot of this but we can’t be afraid. In a minute, he’s going to pass something that’s going to hit these veterans and it’s going to be trouble. If he thinks they were climbing the walls on January 6, he messes with these veterans’ benefits, it’s going to be over.”
