Dave Crocker is a former Navy sailor who spent two years aboard the USS Tirante, a fast-attack submarine that torpedoed Japanese warships in World War II.
And Bob Bruno repaired electronics for an air-defense artillery system that was designed to shoot down enemy aircraft in combat.
After leaving the military, both men volunteered to serve their country in a novel way. They joined an army of citizen scientists who advise the Department of Veterans Affairs — which oversees the nation’s largest integrated health system — on how to improve medical care for the 9.1 million veterans enrolled. As research consultants for the VA, they have helped design screening tools for lung cancer, new telehealth initiatives, and strategies for combating social isolation.
“It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience, knowing that I am giving back to my fellow veterans,” said Bruno, 69, of Arlington, who served in the Army and Massachusetts Air National Guard in the 1980s.
Now, both veterans have watched with alarm as the Trump administration has taken an ax to the VA, imperiling the agency’s status as a national powerhouse of scientific innovation. Sweeping layoffs and a federal hiring freeze threaten to eviscerate hundreds of research studies and clinical trials conducted through the VA’s Office of Research and Development — an incubator for such pioneering health advances as the implantable cardiac pacemaker, the CT scan, and the nicotine patch.
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Already, the Trump administration’s cuts have disrupted years of research into suicide prevention, post-traumatic stress disorder, and spinal cord injuries among veterans, according to veterans service organizations and unions representing VA workers.
At the VA medical center in Bedford, where both Crocker and Bruno volunteer, nearly all the researchers are employed on term agreements that typically renew every three years based on the availability of research funds. Since early February, scores of researchers reaching the end of their contracts have not been rehired under the federal hiring freeze, with job losses rolling in waves through VA research sites across the country, from New England to the Pacific Northwest.
Last week, the VA’s chief of research and development emailed employees saying that those with certain appointments set to expire would be given 90-day exemptions. However, the email did not say what would happen to the employees after the 90-day reprieve, leaving many workers uncertain.
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If the cuts continue, the Bedford center could lose more than half of its researchers within the next year and be unable to continue clinical studies that not only benefit former military service members but also the broader public, according to researchers and supervisors who work at the Bedford VA medical center.
In a separate move, the Trump administration disclosed last month that it plans to slash more than 80,000 jobs at the VA as part of an agency-wide reorganization, while assuring the public that the cuts would not jeopardize veterans' health care.
Some government watchdog groups say efforts to rein in surging costs and inefficiencies at the VA, the second-largest federal agency, are long overdue.
Under the Biden administration, staffing at the agency rose 18 percent to 458,212 employees from 388,971, while the agency’s budget swelled nearly 40 percent to $336.3 billion. The Biden-era surge in costs was driven by a wave of new enrollees in the VA’s sprawling health care system and more than 1.3 million claims from veterans exposed to toxins, who saw expanded benefits under a 2022 law known as the PACT Act. Despite the increased outlays, the agency continues to struggle with a massive backlog of disability claims and significant delays for medical appointments at its hospitals, according to the VA’s website.
The VA’s chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, told top-level officials at the agency this week that it had an objective to cut enough employees to return to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000.
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Pete Kasperowicz, the VA’s press secretary, said in an emailed statement that the agency had laid off 2,400 probationary employees in “non-mission-critical” positions, which represents less than half of 1 percent of the agency’s total workforce. More than 300,000 VA workers are in positions that are exempt from the federal hiring freeze and layoffs, he said. “So the notion that these layoffs are causing widespread issues across the department is not credible,” Kasperowicz said.
“Disappointingly, it seems government union bosses, the legacy media, and some in Congress don’t want us to reform anything,” Kasperowicz said. “They are working together to use rumor, innuendo, and disinformation to spread fear in the hopes that the department will just keep in place the status quo.”
The cost-cutting, combined with a barrage of menacing emails from the Trump administration — encouraging workers to leave and find “higher productivity jobs” in the private sector or ordering them to produce “5 bullet points” of what they accomplished in the past week — have led many to resign even before their contracts expire.
“We are hacking away at the foundation of one of the most innovative, knowledge-generating institutions in the world,” said Christian Helfrich, a former research investigator at the VA medical center in Seattle, who was terminated last month under the federal layoffs. “At some point, we’re going to damage that foundation so fundamentally that we cannot restore what was there.”
In late February, VA Secretary Douglas Collins took to social media to tout that he was scrapping 875 contracts, saving the VA nearly $2 billion. Researchers scrambled to download all their patient surveys amid reports that vital IT contracts were among those canceled and the data might vanish. After an outcry, the VA reversed course and paused the sweeping contract cancellations.
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Yet major research studies continue to be disrupted.
On March 7, researchers at Boston University’s National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder learned that its research contract with the VA had been abruptly canceled. Three days later, the contract was restored, according to university officials. Similarly, the VA canceled a contract last month with Minuteman Technology Services in Marblehead, which had spent the past five years researching methods for preventing veterans’ suicide in 22 states. The contract was restored two weeks later after US Representative Seth Moulton of Salem learned of the cancellation and began asking questions of the VA, his office said.
“It’s criminally reckless,” said Moulton, a Democrat and an Iraq War veteran, of the contract cancellations. “Those of us who are younger veterans are counting on this research to be able to address some of the unique concerns and new challenges that veterans face.”
The VA is unusual in that it regularly appeals to its own patients — past military service members — to participate and even design clinical research studies. At the Bedford VA center, veterans are engaged in a multiyear project, known as Whole Health, that seeks to empower veterans to take control of their medical decisions.
“The goal is to shift veterans' mental focus away from taking orders from above,” said Crocker, 80, the Navy veteran, who has helped design some of the materials for the project.
The center is also engaged in studies on Alzheimer’s disease, chronic pain, schizophrenia, substance abuse, and a host of other ailments that disproportionately affect veterans.
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Many veterans worry that the turmoil will harm the health care they receive. Coast Guard veteran Joe Bykowski, 46, who frequents the VA medical center in Northampton, said he is already seeing the effect of the cuts on nurses and other staff and fears the waits for care will get worse.
“Everybody’s petrified of losing their jobs,” he said. “I’ve heard it described as a sniper in a tower picking off people and nobody knows who’s next.”
After weeks of silence, the nation’s leading veterans' advocacy groups have started to mobilize against the workforce reductions. Both the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, two politically influential groups that together boast about 3 million members, have publicly condemned the job cuts in congressional testimony and have called on the Trump administration to reinstate those fired.
On a Saturday afternoon, a fierce wind was whipping the regimental flags outside the Beachmont VFW Post 6712 in Revere when the parking lot began to fill with vehicles. More than 100 veterans — including those who served in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — had come to see the VFW’s national commander and Vietnam War veteran, Alfred Lipphardt, deliver a rousing call to action.
“We have to speak out for ourselves,” Lipphardt told the crowd. “This new administration, they say leave no comrade behind. By God, they better stick with it.”
As the crowd dispersed, Grady Durden, a 74-year-old veteran from Roxbury who served 42 years in the Army, recounted all his injuries that were repaired by VA doctors. There was the left arm that was nearly blown off during a gunfight in Vietnam. A right knee that was replaced.
“We’ve got to push back,” he said, “because any country that turns its back on its veterans has lost its way.”
Chris Serres can be reached at chris.serres@globe.com. Follow him @ChrisSerres. Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston.