Greg Murphy DOGE Military North Carolina

One in Ten of Greg Murphy's Constituents Is a Veteran. Asked If VA Cuts Would Hurt Them, He Said: "No, I Can't Guarantee Anything."

Murphy sits on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee and represents Camp Lejeune. On CNN in March 2025 he defended the VA workforce cuts and promised "short-term pain." By September the VA had shed nearly 30,000 people.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 11, 2026

On March 3, 2025, CNN's Brianna Keilar asked Greg Murphy a simple question: could he guarantee that veterans' benefits and care would not be affected by the cuts the Trump administration was making at the Department of Veterans Affairs?

His answer, as The Hill reported, was four words long.

"No, I can't guarantee anything."

He then explained why that was acceptable:

"But the whole purpose, again, of restructuring is to make sure that that agency is efficient."

Murphy is not a random backbencher on this subject. He sits on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee. And he told Keilar exactly what his district looks like:

"Look, I care for our veterans. One out of 10 constituents of mine are veterans. It's a real issue in eastern North Carolina."

He's right about the district. North Carolina's 3rd takes in Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune and the Marine Corps Air Stations at Cherry Point and New River. It is one of the most military-dependent districts in the country.

So a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, representing Camp Lejeune, was asked whether the people who live around those bases would be hurt. He said he couldn't promise they wouldn't. And he said the cuts should go ahead.

"Short-term pain"

Keilar asked what he was hearing from constituents. Murphy acknowledged the calls were coming in:

"Sure, sure. I mean, we're hearing voters. A lot are calling our offices, of course. They're calling all Republican offices, voicing concerns."

And then:

"Is there going to be short-term pain? Is there going to be some issues? Absolutely, and this is what happens with restructuring. But we have to get government back to doing what it's supposed to be doing, and that's working for the people."

At the moment he said that, the VA had cut about 1,400 employees the previous Monday, after roughly 1,000 in February. VA Secretary Doug Collins had also announced the cancellation of up to 875 contracts, then paused that effort a day later after an outcry from veterans' groups.

Collins's position at the time was firmer than Murphy's. "These moves will not hurt VA health care, benefits or beneficiaries," he said. "In fact, Veterans are going to notice a change for the better."

The Secretary guaranteed it. The congressman on the oversight committee wouldn't.

What actually happened

On July 7, 2025, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it was on track to shed nearly 30,000 employees by the end of the fiscal year — about 17,000 gone between January and June, and another 12,000 expected by September 30. The department got there through a governmentwide hiring freeze, deferred resignations, early retirements and ordinary attrition.

Collins had originally floated cutting around 80,000. The 30,000 figure was the walk-back.

Thirty thousand people is not a restructuring. It is tens of thousands of workers gone in nine months, at an agency whose central problem — the one Murphy himself named in that CNN interview — is that veterans wait too long for appointments.

Here is what Murphy said the real failure was:

"But the real issue is also when somebody can't get benefits and they've put off their doctor's appointments for eight or 10 months when they can't get care. That is where an agency has failed."

He is describing a staffing problem. His answer was to cut staff.

This is not hypothetical anymore

What a shrunken VA looks like in practice is already on the record elsewhere. In March 2026 the VA announced it was closing the only clinic in McMinnville, Tennessee, because a contractor couldn't keep it staffed — leaving about 1,840 veterans facing a 45-minute drive each way. We wrote about what the congressman there did about it, which was to say he'd had no warning, and then to announce the clinic had been saved.

That is the model. Nobody votes to close a clinic. The staff just stop being there, and one day the doors don't open.

Murphy has a real advantage over most of his colleagues here: he is the only member of Congress who still practices medicine, and he knows what happens to a patient who can't get an appointment. He said so on television. Then he called the consequences short-term pain.

The parts he does show up for

To be fair to the record, Murphy does constituent work on veterans. He has hosted a North Carolina constituent to testify before the VA Committee, and he runs an annual Veterans History Project event in the district.

None of that is the same as oversight. Oversight is what a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee does when an administration announces it is removing tens of thousands of people from the agency he's supposed to be watching. On March 3, 2025, Murphy was handed the microphone and asked to hold the line for the one in ten of his own constituents he'd just described as veterans.

He said he couldn't guarantee anything, and moved on.