Veterans Furious at Elon Musk

Veterans shafted by cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are speaking out — and they don’t have much nice to say to the unelected billionaire-in-chief.

Released within a few days of each other, new campaigns from VoteVets, a progressive political action committee, and the 93-year-old charity Disabled American Veterans (DAV) take Musk and his Republican boosters to task for firing tons of vets in pursuit of seemingly endless austerity.

As Military.com reports, the DAV’s “Protect Veterans” campaign has published videos from irked veterans whose roles were eliminated under Musk’s DOGE hatchet job. Many were blindsided by their abrupt terminations, which sound very much like the way the billionaire laid people off at Twitter when he first bought it back in 2022.

Army veteran and federal emergency management worker Katherine Hathaway, for instance, said in her video statement that she had just been deployed to the US border with Mexico when she found out she was being fired.

Her fellow DAV member Andrea Bell, who was fired from the General Services Administration earlier this year, made a plea directly to Musk and president Donald Trump.

“I hope that whoever is doing it — the president, DOGE, Elon Musk or whoever — I hope they really sit down and [are] like, ‘Hey, we are really affecting these veterans here,'” he said. “You know, financial-wise and mental health-wise.”

While the DAV’s campaign hasn’t proposed any specific calls to action beyond raising awareness, VoteVets is, as The Bulwark reports, taking a much more direct approach by working to unseat insecure GOP Congress members who have aligned with Musk.

“It feels like veterans are being personally attacked by Elon Musk,” said one of the fired veterans, who was not identified, during a filmed roundtable discussion for a VoteVets ad seeking to lobby Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-VA). “I did not put my life on the line for some tech bro billionaire from South Africa to come in here and try to destroy our country.”

As The Bulwark notes, Kiggans and the four other GOP Congress members targeted by VoteVets won their districts by single-digit margins during the last elections, making them prime targets for unseating. Along with encouraging like-minded viewers to call their representatives, the organization is also planning to put up stationary and mobile billboards in the districts that those five Republicans represent.

Though these two groups likely have ideological differences, both are dedicated to supporting and advocating for vets — a group that the GOP has historically courted (and counted on) as a key voter bloc.

“Hearing from those who sustained illnesses and injuries in honorable service to our nation, only to later be arbitrarily fired via email by the same federal government they’ve devoted their lives to serve, is a gut punch,” said Daniel Contreras, DAV’s national commander, in a press release. “Our nation’s disabled veterans and their families deserve better.”

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