In December 1957, after losing a tightly contested gubernatorial election, Massachusetts lieutenant governor Sumner Gage Whittier took over what is now known as the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). A former naval officer, journalist, and junior executive in his family’s pneumatic-tube business, Whittier, a Republican appointed by President Eisenhower, modernized the agency. He overhauled its pension programs and installed a state-of-the-art computer—a massive slab of hardware that processed 125,000 transactions per day and covered more than 6,200 square feet of space in the agency’s Philadelphia division.

But Whittier is perhaps best remembered for the two bronze plaques he mounted to the agency’s headquarters in Washington D.C. The eighteen-by-twenty-inch plaques were inscribed with a passage from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, delivered shortly before his assassination and the end of the Civil War. “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan” became the agency’s unofficial motto, and over subsequent decades, versions of it have been written into the agency’s mission statement. Since its founding, the VA has been administered by men and women like Whittier, unheralded minor characters who worked tirelessly to help the equally unheralded veterans who sacrificed for their country.

Honoring the agency’s commitment has become increasingly difficult under the second Trump administration, which is scaling back many of the VA’s most essential services through DOGE-mandated budget cuts, mass layoffs, and, as The Guardian recently reported, legally questionable restrictions on veterans’ care. Federal law guarantees services to all eligible veterans, but the VA has removed protected categories from its bylaws, potentially enabling its doctors to discriminate against veterans based on their political beliefs, marital status, and nations of origin. The changes were made to comply with an executive order stripping government protections from transgender people.

The new rules, which have already gone into effect at a number of VA medical centers and outpatient clinics, also apply to nurse practitioners, social workers, psychologists, and a host of other therapy-related professions. “[They] seem to open the door to discrimination on the basis of anything that is not legally protected,” a former top health-care official at the VA said. [Editor's update: The VA and the White House have both rejected the Guardian's reporting as false, without disputing its central claim about changes to the VA's bylaw. The VA's press secretary, Pete Kasperowicz, describes these changes as a "formality" and insists that they will have no practical effect on who receives care. The Guardian has updated its article to make note of this assurance, as we do here.]

The changes in the VA's bylaw come as VA secretary Doug Collins tries to meet the Trump administration’s goal of reducing the agency’s workforce by 15 percent, or approximately eighty thousand employees—tens of thousands of whom are veterans themselves. While Collins insists the agency’s cuts will spare frontline health-care professionals and essential workers, veterans are rightly concerned that services will be degraded or eliminated altogether. In addition to providing health care to more than nine million veterans, the VA also provides veterans with short- and long-term housing options, life insurance, pensions, and tuition assistance, among other benefits.

In May, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the ranking member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, criticized the Trump administration for its handling of the agency. “[Veterans] were promised health care, they were promised benefits, and now this Administration is breaking those promises,” he said. “These first hundred days have been disgraceful and shameful, cruel and dumb, deeply un-American.”

At his confirmation hearing, Secretary Collins said the men and women who served “earned the benefits of being in our great veterans’ system.” This no doubt applies to all veterans, regardless of whether they are targets of the Trump administration’s culture war. The agency should continue to administer care to the service members who have borne the battle on behalf of a nation that promised to care for them with—as Lincoln also famously said in his second inaugural—“malice toward none” and “charity to all.”