Latest news with #V.A.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘Unsung heroes': Charlotte veteran support organization recognizes caregivers, their commitment
The Independence Fund works to support veterans in their time of need. But on Friday, the organization worked to support and honor those who care for U.S. veterans. Dozens of caregivers came from all over the country to be honored at the Beyond the Call event at Duke Mansion. Michelle Muzzy is a caregiver for her husband Cory. She told Channel 9's Gina Esposito that he lost his eyesight and legs in a training accident at Fort Bragg in 2014. 'He's a beast. He is as independent as he can be,' she said. 'Being blind has its challenges. So I do like everything, and he has like, two home tasks, like taking out the trash, he can do, and changing over the laundry for me.' READ: Charlotte's lone pro runner in Meck Mile ready for hometown race Beyond the Call aimed to honor people like Muzzy and raise money for the caregiver fund. Deputy Director of Veteran Programs at the Independence Fund, Veronica Douglas, said the group is currently supporting more than 2,100 caregivers. 'They are sort of the unsung heroes of the veteran community, right?' Douglas said. 'They didn't sign up to go to war. They didn't sign up for any of this, and yet they find themselves with a lifelong commitment to take care of someone.' READ: Veteran dedicates decades to help other veterans in Charlotte area Muzzy said she has been to the group's retreats and even received a golf cart from it. 'Without them, I think that I'd be very lonely,' she said. 'We would have to pay out of our own pockets to get the things that we need.' And Muzzy said, for her, this has been a lifesaver. 'They fill in the gaps for everything that you can't get through the V.A.,' she said. The Independence Fund has another caregiver event approaching later in May. To learn more about the organization, click here. To apply, click here. WATCH: Charlotte's lone pro runner in Meck Mile ready for hometown race
New York Times
30-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
She Devoted Her Life to Serving the U.S. Then DOGE Targeted Her.
It had been six days since Joy Marver was locked out of her office at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, five days since she checked herself into a hospital for emergency psychiatric care, and two days since she sent a letter to her supervisors: 'Please, I'm so confused. Can you help me understand?' Now, she followed her wife into the storage room of their house outside Minneapolis, searching for answers no one would give her. A half-dozen bins held the remnants of 22 years spent in service to the U.S. government — first as a sergeant first class in Iraq, then as a disabled veteran and finally as a V.A. support specialist in logistics. She had devoted her career to a system that had always made sense to her, but now nobody seemed to know whether she had officially been laid off, or for how long, or why. 'Are you sure you never got an email?' asked her wife, Miki Jo Carlson, 49. 'How would I know?' asked Marver, 45. 'They deleted my account.' 'Maybe it's because you were still probationary?' 'My boss said I was exempt,' Marver said. 'I was supposed to be essential.' In the last few months, more than 30,000 people across the country were fired by President Trump's new initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency, a historic reduction of the federal work force that has been all the more disruptive because of its chaotic execution. Entire agency divisions have been cut without explanation or mistakenly fired and then rehired, resulting in several lawsuits and mass confusion among civil workers. After a court ruled last week that many of the firings were illegal, the government began reinstating workers, even as the Trump administration appealed the decision and promised more layoffs. The V.A. alone said it planned to cut about 80,000 more jobs this year — including tens of thousands of veterans — and for Marver the shock of losing her job was eclipsed by the disorientation of being repeatedly dismissed and belittled by the government she served. She had watched on TV as Trump's billionaire adviser Elon Musk took the stage at a political conference wielding a chain saw to the beat of rock music, slicing apart the air with what he called the 'chain saw for bureaucracy.' She had listened to Trump's aides and allies deride federal employees for being 'lazy,' 'parasitic,' 'unaccountable' and 'essentially wasting' taxpayer money in their 'fake jobs.' In Marver's case, that job had meant helping to retrain soldiers for the civilian work force and coordinating veteran burials while earning a salary of $53,000 a year. 'Here's the note I got a little while after I was hired,' Marver told Carlson, pulling a form letter from the government. 'You represent the best of who we are as Americans,' it read. 'You could have chosen to do anything with your talents, but you chose public service.' 'Kind of boilerplate, but it's nice,' Carlson said. 'I would be OK right now with boring and predictable,' Marver said, as she tucked the letter back into a file. She dug through the bins, pulling out military awards for 'exceptional achievement' and 'tactical proficiency,' and pushing aside a large steel hunk of a rocket. It had exploded on her base in Iraq during an attack in 2020, leaving her with a concussion, damaged eyesight and a traumatic brain injury. She'd come home flattened, depressed and ill-equipped to hold a corporate job, but working alongside other veterans at the V.A. had done more to restore her sense of purpose than any of the five medications she was prescribed for post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks and anxiety. She reached into another bin and pulled out an employee of the month certificate and then her last performance evaluation, from October. She read the reviews out loud to Carlson, looking for clues that might hint at a reason for her dismissal. 'Joy puts the mission first — team player, responsible, continually displays professionalism. She is a great employee.' She scanned down to her performance rating and saw that her boss had not circled 'satisfactory,' or 'fully successful,' or even 'excellent,' but had instead chosen 'outstanding!' — the best possible result. 'I did everything they wanted me to do,' Marver said. She flipped over the sheet and read it again, searching for some hidden flaw. 'You're not going to find anything that makes it add up,' Carlson said. 'This was never about you.' But Marver kept digging through the paperwork, already knowing what came next: a 'Fork in the Road' email from Musk offering mass buyouts, a sample letter of resignation provided to all federal employees, and another email demanding that Marver and her colleagues send a list of five things they had accomplished that week. Some of her co-workers had refused to answer in protest, but Marver believed in following orders. She wrote that the Minneapolis V.A. was requiring its remote employees to return to the office, and that she was responsible for preparing the building. She was reviewing floor plans, moving hundreds of chairs and assembling desks in the hallway. Then, on Feb. 14, the first wave of her co-workers had been fired, and she was in charge of collecting their badges. Her managers had reassured her that her job was safe. She was vital to the mission, they said. She kept digging in the box until she found a few family photographs that she had taken off her desk that last morning, after she couldn't log into her computer. A confused supervisor had suggested she grab her personal items before leaving the building, just in case. Marver had gone back to her truck and texted Carlson, already plagued by the question that had consumed her ever since. 'What just happened?' Marver asked. 'It's like being erased out of thin air.' She kept American flags all over the house — raised above the front porch, framed on her bedroom wall, draped over the gun safe and tattooed on her right bicep underneath the word 'Loyalty.' She had just turned 21 when she enlisted in the National Guard a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, and she had served under Republicans and Democrats for two decades without paying much attention to politics. Her job was to follow orders wherever they led — driving a Humvee that exploded when it hit a roadside bomb in Iraq, scrambling underneath her bed during rocket attacks, defending herself and others with a riot shield in downtown Minneapolis during the violent protests in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. Her military career spanned three active-duty tours and more than 800 days in war zones, and each year she was graded by her superiors based on a list of Army tenets she understood to be reciprocal: Loyalty. Duty. Respect. Honor. Integrity. Her final tour had been the most damaging, when she was stationed at Camp Taji outside Baghdad in March 2020 during a series of incoming rocket attacks that killed several soldiers. One day, she heard more than 30 explosions on the base and started running through clouds of black smoke and into a bunker just as a rocket landed nearby. She felt the shock waves rip through her, clouding her vision and rattling her rib cage. She checked her arms, her shoulders, her legs. Her body remained intact. She stumbled into the middle of the bunker and told her soldiers she was fine, but then she started vomiting, blacking out and slurring her words. A few hours later, she was diagnosed with a concussion and a traumatic brain injury, and doctors had been taking measure of her wounds ever since. She was rated 10 percent disabled for eyesight, 10 percent for hearing loss, 20 percent for back pain, 30 percent for persistent migraines and 70 percent for depression, PTSD, insomnia, anxiety and memory loss. 'I think I'm going to have another panic attack,' she said one day, about a week after her firing from the V.A. It was almost 2 p.m., and she was still in her pajamas. 'Have you taken your medicine yet?' Carlson asked. 'I've been trying not to,' Marver said. 'Take it,' Carlson said. 'Kick up the dose. Rockets.' It was the word they used as shorthand for all the accommodations Marver's new life required after she returned from Iraq. Her chronic fatigue and recurring nightmares? Rockets. Her sudden avoidance of crowds? Rockets. They had moved out of a noisy apartment building in downtown Minneapolis and into a suburb south of the city. They bought a house with soundproof walls, a canoe and a view of a lake, but Marver still jolted awake and paced the bedroom at night. Carlson felt as if she were married to a new person, so she had started keeping a handwritten list of all the ways in which Marver was diminished by her last tour. 'Memory before Iraq: Great, meticulous.' After: 'Forgets appointments, leaves lights on, misses entire strips when mowing the grass.' 'Personality before Iraq: Does funny dances and makes up silly songs — great social skills.' After: 'Sense of humor gone and very introverted. Avoids big crowds or new places. She lost her spark. The difference is night and day.' 'Relationship before Iraq: Happy/normal.' After: 'No intimacy. I am now more of a caretaker than a wife.' Only in the last week had Carlson begun to wonder whether all that caretaking was sustainable on her own. She worked six days a week as a bartender, while Marver found both confidence and community in her job at the V.A. Marver worked alongside other veterans who understood her wounds and forgave her occasional memory lapses. Now she was home alone for much of the day. She mostly stayed in bed, ate microwaved meals and watched the news on TV to see what Trump and Musk were planning next. Marver wasn't opposed to thoughtful government cuts. During her time in the military, she had complained about the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on new weapons and aircraft that never panned out. She had managed her own tight supply budget of $21 million on her base in Iraq and won praise in her annual reviews for fiscal responsibility and loss prevention. 'There are smart ways to go about this,' she told Carlson. 'There's plenty to cut. They don't have to go in with a firing squad.' 'This isn't helping you,' Carlson said. She grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. 'You need to eat. Go outside. Get some air. Go for a walk.' 'I can't keep piecing myself back together,' Marver said. 'Rockets,' Carlson said. 'We need to ask for some help.' The next afternoon, they drove out of the suburbs and back into Minneapolis to see Marver's psychiatrist at the V.A. The hospital was across the street from the administrative building where Marver used to work, and she pulled up to her old entry gate and tried to look inside. 'It's a black box,' she said. She was still waiting for an email from human resources with an official reason for her firing. She had tried to ask her co-workers, but some said they were afraid to talk to her over the phone. They worried that their calls were being monitored or that they could be disciplined for sharing information or offering their support. 'I'm getting the same panicky feeling I had that morning,' Marver said. 'Relax,' Carlson said. 'Breathe.' 'I couldn't control any of my thoughts,' Marver said. She pulled back onto the road, but now her mind was stuck inside the confusion of that last morning at work, when she was locked out of her computer as her colleagues began arriving for work. Her manager said that there had been a mistake, and that he would sort it out. She waited at her desk until another manager came back and said he was sorry, but her name no longer existed in the system. He asked for her badge and walked her outside. She sat in the cab of her truck in the parking lot, staring at the wheel. She didn't want to go home. She was tired of disappointing Carlson with bad news — tired of being the problem. She started the engine and drove out of the parking lot. She stopped at a traffic light that led onto a bridge. She knew a half-dozen veterans who had died by suicide, including two of her closest friends in Iraq, and she sat at the red light and considered it for the first time. If she proceeded onto the bridge, if she swung the wheel to the right, if she pressed down on the accelerator and drove over the guardrail. The light turned green. Her hands were shaking. She didn't move. Someone honked from behind, and for a moment it jarred her back. She drove straight over the bridge, parked at the V.A. hospital and followed signs to the psychiatry department. Now she was arriving there again, for a follow-up appointment. She held Carlson's hand in the waiting room until a psychiatrist came to greet them. 'You might have saved my life that day,' Marver told her psychiatrist. 'I felt this voice telling me: 'Do it. Just get it over with.' It came on so fast. It scared the shit out of me.' 'I'm so glad you had the courage to get help,' she told Marver. 'How are you doing now?' 'I'm stable, but it's dark,' Marver said. 'I can't turn off the news. Nothing that's happening makes sense. They keep getting rid of things without even knowing what they're cutting.' She said she was worried about layoffs affecting the doctors she relied on at the V.A.: the specialist who treated her T.B.I., the neurologist who managed her migraines, the therapist with whom she relived the rocket attacks, and the psychiatrist who rushed out of a meeting to see Marver as soon as she crossed the bridge, consoling and hugging her until she finally stopped shaking. The V.A. had been scrambling to hire psychiatrists for years to make up for what it called a 'severe staffing shortage' as veteran suicide rates rose to epidemic levels, but now a few new ones had been fired by DOGE because they were still probationary employees. Each V.A. psychiatrist was already responsible for 500 patients, and lately those patients had begun reporting increased rates of anxiety and stress because many of them were also employed by the federal government. 'Nobody wants to serve this country more than veterans,' Marver said. 'It's personal for us.' 'That's why I love working here,' her doctor said. 'I need a purpose,' Marver said. 'I still want some way to serve.' 'Then keep looking.' She changed back into her pajamas. She took medication for a migraine. She went back to bed and slept through the afternoon, until Carlson came home from work. 'Rockets,' Carlson said. 'You can't stay like this forever. Get up. Get mad. Get back in the fight.' A former colleague had invited Marver to speak at a town hall in southern Minnesota alongside a few other fired federal workers, and at the last minute, Marver agreed to go. She waited in line for her five-minute slot and then stared out at the crowd of about 100 people, trying to find the right words. 'Sorry,' she said into the microphone. 'This is hard for me.' She hadn't spoken in public since she left the military. She scanned the audience for Carlson, who raised her fist in support. 'OK,' Marver said. 'Let's try this.' She told the story of her firing, the ensuing confusion and her crisis at the hospital. 'Is this how we treat our veterans?' she asked. The audience clapped as Marver handed the microphone to the next speaker, but on the ride home she could still feel the adrenaline and anger rising into her chest. She stopped on the front porch and reached up for the flag. She smoothed out the fabric and rehung it upside down. 'You're sure about that?' Carlson asked. 'Until this country starts making sense again,' Marver said. She kept watching the news and checking her email for a reasonable explanation, but every update only left her more confused. More than a week after she was fired, Marver received a 'Termination Letter' from human resources: 'Your performance has not met the burden to demonstrate further employment,' it read. She received another message a week later: 'The V.A. is rescinding the termination,' it read. 'You will be on administrative leave. You are not to return to duty at this time.' And then, 24 days after she was fired, she got another email with a subject line marked urgent: 'Return to Duty Instructions.' The message told her to report back to work Monday morning. 'Are you kidding me?' Marver said. She searched for more information online and saw that a federal judge had ordered the government to rehire some probationary employees, ruling that their mass firing was based on 'sham' reasoning. The Trump administration had agreed to comply with the order even as it filed an appeal and asked for emergency relief from the Supreme Court. 'Who knows what they'll tell me tomorrow,' Marver said, when she showed the email to Carlson. 'Why even go back there again?' Carlson asked. 'Because I can keep helping veterans,' Marver said. She lay awake for most of the night and then got into her car Monday morning. She drove back over the bridge and parked in front of her building. One of her supervisors met her outside and said she would need to spend most of the day 'reorienting.' The government had to give her back pay for the last 24 days, a new ID badge, new passwords and a new computer monitor. 'All in the name of government efficiency,' Marver said. 'Does it feel like déjà vu?' one of her co-workers asked, as he handed her a new ID. Marver looked at her picture and thought for a moment about the roller coaster of the last month. She had always prided herself on following orders — on adhering to the rules of a system. But now the system was being dismantled, and the orders no longer made sense. 'Actually, no,' she said. 'This time feels different.'
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Health
- New York Times
‘A Gross Dishonor': Cuts to Veterans' Mental Health Care
Losses in Nature A.I. and Humans Image A demonstration outside a V.A. medical center in Detroit last month. Credit... Paul Sancya/Associated Press To the Editor: Re 'V.A. Workers See Chaos in Services for Mental Care' (front page, March 24): I am a Vietnam veteran. I served with the 1st Cavalry Division as a sanitary inspector and shoe-leather epidemiologist. I spent more than 1,000 hours flying to bases between Saigon and the Cambodian border. We carried the wounded and dead on stretchers to aid stations or graves registration. After returning home in 1971, I went back to school and buried the war. In 1990, Operation Desert Shield opened up a can of trauma for me and many vets. I could not accept that I, who had not carried a gun, was traumatized by my service. Over the next 30 years I went to family therapy, couples therapy and individual therapy. But it was only after Covid that I signed up for health care at Veterans Affairs. The trauma therapy there exceeded any I had done before. I believe all the V.A. health services today are nonpareil. About six percent of the nation's population are veterans, and surveys have found that more than half of Americans have a close relative who has served in the military. Yet I do not hear or see my senators nor, with some exceptions, my representatives, objecting publicly and loudly to what President Trump and his appointees are doing to our veterans' services. If they want to be re-elected, they should get some backbone and speak out for the V.A. and all veterans. This is not a political issue but one affecting the health of the nation. Their deafening silence is a gross dishonor. Let's put some substance behind 'thank you for your service.' James C. Wright Gladwyne, Pa. To the Editor The suicide rate among veterans is staggering — a more than double that of the civilian population. How, then, can a Republican administration that pins gun violence on the inaccessibility of mental health care justify what's happening at Veterans Affairs facilities around the country? Between DOGE cutting jobs and driving clinical professionals to quit by fundamentally altering their positions, what's happening is unconscionable. And more lives will be lost as a result. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
19-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
‘Will I Lose My Job?' Federal Workers Flock to Reddit for Answers.
On March 4, a Trump appointee at the Department of Veterans Affairs circulated a memo to senior leadership. The agency, it said, would 'move out aggressively' to improve efficiency, with an 'initial objective' of cutting the work force to 2019 levels. The next morning, someone posted a copy of this 'reduction in force' memo to a Reddit group called VeteransAffairs, an online community of 19,000 members. The copy was difficult to follow, a sequence of photos taken of the memo on a screen, but the message was clear enough: Some 80,000 jobs would be cut. Questions and comments poured in, some bewildered, some frantic. The agency had half a million employees at hospitals, clinics, call lines and regional benefit offices that served veterans across the country. Who would be fired? Was this the end of the V.A.'s medical research? How would this affect wait times for medical appointments? No one had solid answers, just informed speculation. Livelihoods and veterans' well-being were at stake, so the vibe was somber. But there was still room for dark humor. 'We gotta pay for Greenland somehow,' one person joked. Reddit, a bare-bones social media site organized around more than 100,000 niche communities called subreddits, has long catered to people with quirky shared interests, whether Bitcoin, fly-fishing or photos of Keanu Reeves being awesome. It is unlike other social media platforms. Instagram and TikTok offer videos and influencers; Reddit is text-heavy and aggressively unsuited to building star power. Facebook and LinkedIn require real names; anonymity reigns on Reddit, minimizing egos and consequences. The Atlantic recently deemed Reddit possibly 'the best platform on a junky web.' As other social media sites have fallen prey to A.I. slop and incessant pleas to 'like and subscribe,' Reddit has become one of the last places on the internet with authentically human information, community and advice. For government workers, it has been a lifeline in recent months. With the Trump administration's rapid downsizing of the federal bureaucracy, subreddits where government workers previously posted the occasional tale about a Zoom meeting mishap or health plan question have become crowded forums for fears, anxieties and tidbits of intra-agency observation. On one subreddit, FedNews, government employees have been relaying updates about layoffs, a new $1 limit on government credit cards and 'what did you accomplish last week' emails. It has drawn an influx of millions of visitors since January, according to internal statistics shared by the subreddit's creator. 'These individual subreddits let people find niches that work really well for them,' said Sarah Gilbert, a researcher at Cornell University who focuses on online communities. 'That's happening on FedNews, where people are using that space to come together and talk to other people who are experiencing similar trauma.' A participant on FedNews recently wrote a post saying a supervisor had told employees to stop 'leaking' information on Reddit. 'DON'T STOP, the people deserve to know,' added the author, who, like almost all Reddit users, employed a pseudonymous online handle. (The Department of Veterans Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.) Not using your real name makes it easier to share information or vent frustrations without further imperiling one's career prospects. But anonymity can also breed misinformation, misbehavior and vitriol. That's where people like David Carson come in. Mr. Carson, 53, an Army veteran and former employee of the V.A. who lives in Mount Pleasant, Tenn., is one of Reddit's more than 60,000 moderators. These volunteers do a tremendous amount of content moderation work that other social media giants contract out. The work of unpaid moderators like Mr. Carson has made it possible for Reddit to shine in this moment of political tumult. 'Reddit is a community run by people like me focused on people like me,' Mr. Carson said. The Front Page of the Internet Reddit is 20 years old, which makes it ancient in internet years. It started out as a place to share interesting information and has remained essentially that ever since. Anyone can create a subreddit, becoming its first moderator. Anyone can visit or join it, unless it's made private. 'Each community on Reddit has its own topic, its own rules, its own moderators and, in many cases, its own in-jokes and culture,' said Galen Weld, a doctoral student at the University of Washington who has conducted research on Reddit, as well as done consulting work for the company. What people want to share can sometimes be distasteful. Reddit earned notoriety in the past for communities devoted to revenge porn, videos of people's deaths and other toxic content. But the site has tamed its worst impulses (and most devious moderators) by disbanding subreddits that consistently violate rules the company established in 2015 against harassment and inappropriate behavior. Reddit, which went public last year, is now one of the most visited sites on the internet, with more than 100 million daily active users and $1.3 billion in revenue, according to the company's most recent financial filing. It may seem chaotic to a first-time visitor, sent there by a search engine. Its homepage is a random collection of news articles, funny photos and unfamiliar shorthand like AIO ('Am I Overreacting?'). But the individual subreddits can feel intimate and welcoming. Each of these subreddits, whether about home repair, romantasy or Dungeons and Dragons maps, is unique, and each has distinct rules, decided by its moderators. Want to chat with people who have decided life is better without kids? Join ChildFree. Parents are welcome, but only if they regret their choices. Enjoy schadenfreude? Try LeopardsAteMyFace. That community has been sharing anecdotes about Trump voters who immediately suffered from his policy decisions, but it forbids stories about actual animal attacks. A New Rule: No Politics On the VeteransAffairs subreddit, there are two overriding rules: Stay on topic, and be respectful. That means no personal attacks and no politics. When the subreddit's creator tapped Mr. Carson to take over the channel a decade ago, politics were allowed. But in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Mr. Carson and his co-moderator instituted a ban on partisan political talk after commenters began getting too heated. 'People were pointing fingers and name-calling and being abrasive and insulting,' Mr. Carson said. 'We're trying to create a community that embraces people.' Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in combat, Mr. Carson receives disability benefits from the V.A. He also teaches English literature part time at a community college outside Nashville. He enjoys seeing his students' reaction when he shows up on the first day wearing motorcycle leathers and a 'goatee that comes down to my belly.' His schedule is flexible, allowing him time to moderate the VeteransAffairs subreddit. For many years, that amounted to an hour or two a day. But in recent months, the daily commitment ballooned to six or more hours, he said. 'Every spare minute, I have Reddit pulled up on my phone,' Mr. Carson said. 'If I'm in the car with my wife, I'm sitting in the passenger seat and moderating the subreddit. After my wife goes to bed, I'll sit down and watch TV, and while I'm watching TV, I'm moderating the subreddit.' The constant time spent on his phone was 'irritating,' said his wife, Stacey, who is also a veteran, 'until I realized exactly what he was doing.' To help with the surge in activity, Mr. Carson and his co-moderator, whose real name Mr. Carson doesn't know, recently recruited two new moderators: one a veteran and the other a clinical pharmacist employed by the V.A. On a recent weekday morning, Mr. Carson logged into Reddit and checked his moderator queue, which had a list of more than 1,000 posts and comments. He started reading each one, removing any not directly related to the Veterans Affairs Department. It's time-consuming. Some people write 'dissertations,' Mr. Carson said, and if the post includes a link, he clicks through to make sure the information is pertinent. 'Then you got to research the website to say, OK, is this website reliable?' he said. If the site has extreme partisan leanings or unclear provenance, he'll remove the post. 'The moderator's job is not just about preventing abuse or removing the bad behavior,' said Eshwar Chandrasekharan, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has studied Reddit. 'They also make it easy to find the good stuff.' Mr. Carson always starts with content flagged for review, either by the community's users or by an automated filtering tool. The tool, AutoModerator, looks for inappropriate language, problem users who have been flagged by other moderators and words that violate the subreddit's 'no politics' rule, including 'Musk,' 'Trump,' 'DOGE' and 'orange.' Mr. Carson himself has strong political feelings. Expressing them has gotten him into trouble in the past. He lost his job as a claims examiner at the V.A. in 2017 in part because of a Facebook post he had written with the hashtag #AssassinateTrump, according to an administrative judge's ruling. He was angry with the government at the time. The V.A. had transferred him from Tennessee to Colorado, and living apart from his wife and children for two years exacerbated his PTSD. Writing about his frustration with the agency on social media was cathartic, he said. But his colleagues found the posts threatening. Containing obscenities and ominous hypotheticals, they were a tenor of post he would quickly remove from his subreddit now. After he was fired, Mr. Carson moved back to Tennessee and continued moderating the subreddit, grateful to still be able to share his expertise. He had come to think of helping veterans with their benefits as more than a job. It was his purpose. 'We're trying to create a safe, helpful and respectful community,' Mr. Carson said. He is always on the lookout for mentions of suicidal thoughts — which he, too, has experienced — and prioritizes reaching out to those people to offer help. On this morning, AutoModerator had flagged a comment: It claimed that spyware had been installed on all computers tapped into by the Department of Government Efficiency, the group led by Elon Musk to cut the federal bureaucracy. Mr. Carson removed the comment. 'We allow conversations that focus on facts and provide evidence,' he said. 'But even then, it still has to be relevant to the V.A.' The spyware comment, he said, was a 'supposition.' 'You're Not Alone' When federal workers received an email last month telling them to list five things they had accomplished the previous week, someone posted a poll on the VeteransAffairs subreddit for V.A. colleagues: 'Did you reply to the email?' A majority of respondents said they hadn't. That kind of information is 'helpful and enlightening,' said Bruce, a V.A. employee in Salt Lake City who has been checking the subreddit every day. Bruce, who asked not to use his full name to protect his employment, said that there had been little official communication from his regional office, and that Reddit had helped to fill the information vacuum. 'It just gives you an idea of what other people at the V.A. are going through, that you're not alone,' said Bruce, who until now had thought of Reddit mainly as a place to go for sports news. People can post on Reddit 'and get this really quick individualized feedback from an actual human,' said Dr. Gilbert, the researcher at Cornell. On an internet awash with bots and A.I.-generated content, that distinguishes the site. But that could change. Last year, Reddit signed licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, allowing the site's content to be used to train artificial intelligence like ChatGPT. The authentically human writings from Reddit will help A.I. sound more human, Dr. Gilbert said, making it harder for Reddit and its moderators to weed out bots in the future. 'You might not end up getting the same kind of human, high-quality information that people are going to Reddit to find,' Dr. Gilbert said. Facilitating human connection and networking is why Mr. Carson spends so much time pruning the conversational hedges of his Reddit domain. 'People find us when they need us,' Mr. Carson said. 'Just now, people need us more than ever.'
New York Times
17-03-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Citing Trump's Order, V.A. Halts Most Transgender Care
The Department of Veterans Affairs is phasing out gender-affirming medical treatments for veterans, including hormone treatment for patients newly diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the V.A. announced on Monday. The V.A. will continue hormone treatment for veterans who currently receive it or were receiving it when they separated from the military. The rationale is that abrupt cessation can be harmful to patients' health. The policy change was made to comply with an executive order by President Trump, titled 'Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,' the V.A. said in a news release. That order states that the United States recognizes only two sexes, male and female, which 'are not changeable.' 'I mean no disrespect to anyone, but V.A. should not be focused on helping veterans attempt to change their sex,' said Doug Collins, the V.A. secretary. Transgender veterans will continue to be welcome at the V.A., he added, 'but if veterans want to attempt to change their sex, they can do so on their own dime.' The V.A. has been providing treatment for gender transition to veterans since 2011. It has never provided surgeries, but it has offered supportive services. In addition to hormone therapy, these have included mental health care, preoperative evaluations and letters supporting the need for procedures, as well as postoperative and long-term care. Fertility services, prosthetic devices like wigs, and voice coaching were also offered. Those services had been authorized under a V.A. directive on guiding health care for transgender and intersex veterans know as 1341(4), which has been rescinded. Many mental health providers at the V.A. have had concerns about their ability to continue providing adequate care to transgender patients after they were ordered to remove rainbow flags and lanyards, pamphlets describing services offered to L.G.B.T.Q.+ veterans, and wall posters that read 'All are welcome here' and 'We serve all who have served.' Mary Brinkmeyer, a psychologist who coordinated care for L.G.B.T.Q.+ veterans at the Hampton V.A. Medical Center in Virginia, refused to remove signs and fliers. She recently resigned, fearing that mental health care for transgender veterans would be compromised. 'Our code of ethics is, 'First do no harm,' and if you're caught between an institutional demand and your ethical code, you have to resolve it in favor of the ethics code,' Dr. Brinkmeyer said. The cessation of hormone treatment, along with the recent designation of V.A. bathrooms and inpatient rooms by biological sex, 'will have a real chilling effect on veterans' willingness to seek care for gender dysphoria,' she said. Studies indicate that gender dysphoria is much higher among veterans than among the general population and that the risk of suicide-related events is as much as 20 times higher among veterans with gender dysphoria than in the general Veterans Health Administration population. 'If veterans don't have other health insurance — and many transgender veterans are homeless or underemployed — will they not seek care if they're suicidal rather than go to the V.A.?' Dr. Brinkmeyer asked.
