President Donald Trump's federal hiring freeze could shut out veterans for thousands of open jobs – including in the Veterans Administration – and make a preference given to vets in federal hiring meaningless, officials complain.
"There's no preference if there's no job," Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for personnel in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, told Military.com.
According to Military.com, veterans make up about 30 percent of the more than 2.8 million employees in the federal workforce – many of them at the Defense Department.
And the Department of Veterans Affairs is currently advertising to fill more than 2,000 job openings on the federal hiring website, USA Today reported.
A senior adviser, Peter Kauffmann, for the liberal VoteVets said in a statement if the hiring freeze is applied to the VA, it would be the "ultimate insult to our men and women who serve to deny them the additional doctors, nurses, therapists, and administrators that are sorely needed at the VA," USA Today reported.
"If his [order] leads to preventable deaths, that will be on Donald Trump's hands, and we will hold him personally accountable," he said.
Joe Davis, spokesman for the 1.7 million member Veterans of Foreign Wars, told Military.com the freeze could hurt vets – but his organization wants to see "specifics" before taking a stand on the issue.
"There was no meat to" to the executive order issued Monday, he told the outlet. "We want to see how this plays out" before assessing its impact.
Still, Davis noted Trump pledged during his campaign to overhaul the Veterans Affairs Department to eliminate wait times and improve care for veterans – and to do that, he said, "obviously, you need personnel."
Huffington Post labor reporter Dave Jamieson tweeted an unnamed VA employee is calling the hiring freeze a "joke."
"We interviewed people on Friday for a job that we now can't offer," Jamieson quoted the staffer saying.