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When former state rep. Jon Santiago became the first secretary of Massachusetts’ newly created Executive Office of Veterans Services in 2023, he became the face of a mammoth trust-rebuilding exercise.
Mismanagement at the state’s two veterans’ homes during the pandemic led to more than 100 deaths in Holyoke and Chelsea, prompting the Legislature to pass oversight reform for the facilities. Last fall, the state passed a sweeping legislative package, the HERO Act, to boost support for Massachusetts vets.
But Santiago, like many other state leaders, has to keep one eye on the Bay State and the other on a federal government that is leaning into a slash-and-burn approach to cost cutting.
“There’s a lot of concern out there,” Santiago said, about funding cuts and especially waves of staff cuts across federal veterans’ services. The US Department of Veterans Affairs said it plans to reduce the VA workforce to 2019 levels, slashing some 83,000 employees.
This week on The Codcast, Santiago joined reporter Jennifer Smith to discuss the turbulence. As a veteran and a physician, who worked as an emergency room doctor during the height of the COVID-19 waves in Massachusetts, Santiago said his communities are nervously watching federal moves.
“Putting on my physician hat, clinicians and providers need a whole host of support services to get the job done,” Santiago said. “When you begin to take away those folks, those key positions, that can definitely impact the care that veterans are getting, and you’ve already been seeing that happening.”
The Trump administration cut thousands of probationary positions in February, part of what Santiago describes as a “chainsaw approach” to government efficiency. The probationary employees have been caught up in a legal back-and-forth, ordered reinstated by a Maryland judge.
Cutting staff in already understaffed VA facilities, less than three years after a massive expansion of veterans' services through the federal PACT Act, leaves a million new people nationally and 22,000 in Massachusetts receiving services in a precarious position, Santiago said.
Two years into the role, Santiago points to several initiatives as a sign that the state is taking the wellbeing of people who enlisted to serve their country seriously. A $20 million campaign to reduce veteran homelessness to “functional zero” – a federal term meaning a system where homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring – is making solid progress. About 200 veterans have been housed since the program funding was released around eight months ago, Santiago said.
Veterans' services, health care, and housing are deeply entangled, he noted. Since the beginning of the year, about 300 units of veteran-dedicated housing have entered the pipeline through the homelessness initiative, he said.
Since the podcast was recorded, the Trump administration announced that it will end a Biden-era mortgage-rescue program that has put 17,109 veterans and their families into new, low-interest-rate, affordable mortgages, according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
During the episode, Santiago discussed the threat of federal staffing shortages (5:30), why supporting underrepresented demographics of veterans remains a major priority (13:30), and work on the state’s two veterans’ homes with the possibility of a third (16:00).
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