DOGE Just Fired a Veteran Advocate Who Served Four Tours by Email

My friend Adrian Walker is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His latest concerns the downstream effects of the current bureaucratic bloodletting in Washington. This is what you get when you turn “waste, fraud, and abuse” into conjuring words to make cruelty disappear.

Mike Slater survived four tours of duty as a US Army infantryman, risking his life in Iraq and Afghanistan. That wasn’t enough to spare him from the budget ax now being recklessly wielded at federal employees. He lost his job—helping war-scarred veterans in Central Massachusetts at the VA Veterans Center in Springfield—earlier this month.

Slater, 42, had taken his daughter to a dance class and was thumbing through news sites on his phone when he ran across a piece saying firings were coming to the Department of Veterans Affairs. He didn’t think that much of it. “I got home, I checked my VA cell phone at 7 p.m. and I had the email saying that I had been terminated,” Slater told me.

Four tours. Two each in both of the wars of choice launched by the previous Republican Worst President of All Time. Four tours. (As a bomb-disposal specialist!) And they fire him by email. These really are the mole people.

When he got home, the Springfield VA was where he went to get put back together. The Veterans Center he worked in was part of a network established decades ago at the behest of returning Vietnam veterans. It is funded by the VA, but its facilities are separate and community-based. To this day, it serves clients suffering from PTSD or other combat-related trauma, including sexual assault. The Springfield Vets Center serves an estimated 600 veterans like Slater. When Slater got home from war, it was exactly what he needed. “I really wasn’t in shape to work, so I started going to the VA itself for counseling,” he said.

Once he was back on his feet, Slater went to work helping other veterans who were going through what he’d been through upon his arrival back in the world. Because that is what soldiers do for other soldiers.

“I had an amazing counselor [at the VA], but she was a civilian. I had a really hard time connecting with her and talking to her, so she was like, ‘You know, I’d do this with you forever. But I just met this doctor and this outreach guy from the Vet Center, maybe you go down there and give it a shot and see what happens. So I went down to the Vet Center. I did all my group therapy at the Vet Center with other combat vets, while maintaining my individual counselor at the VA.”

Slater gradually transitioned into a career as a respected counselor for returning veterans in Central Massachusetts. He was director of veterans services for the town of South Hadley when he got the opportunity to work in the center that had turned his life around. Though the change in jobs involved a significant pay cut, he couldn’t resist the chance to help a larger pool of returning veterans, in a place he felt indebted to.

There are thousands of Mike Slaters out there. They are forest rangers and accountants and firefighters and analysts and a hundred other things that are required to run a large democratic republic. And if the Democratic Party doesn’t put every damn one of them in a television commercial to explain what they do in the national interest, then the entire Democratic Party should be loaded into a SpaceX rocket and shot off toward the Kuiper Belt. If, as it happens, the SpaceX rocket should explode and rain down in the South Atlantic, well, that would be okay, too.

James Carville, for example, should be the first passenger on the rocket. Seat 1A. Give him a window.