Ryan Sawyer says he doesn’t need to wait to see the impact of cutbacks in Veterans Affairs in Iowa.

It’s here.

“For instance, there’s only one person in Des Moines who can do enrollments, and that will be one person for the next year,” the director of Hamilton County Veterans Affairs said recently. “There was an offer out, but that was rescinded because somebody retired on the 19th of January, so just timing worked out. So now something that used to take me 20 minutes … I’ve got one that’s 10 days deep.”

President Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum January 20 that directed the national VA to return to in-person work, according to a media release from the VA.

“More than 20% of VA’s more than 479,000 employees currently have telework or remote work arrangements,” that release stated.

“This is a commonsense step toward treating all VA employees equally,” Acting VA Secretary Todd Hunter was quoted in the media release. “Most VA clinical staff don’t have the luxury of working remotely, and we believe the performance, collaboration and productivity of the department will improve if all VA employees are held to the same standard.”

Sawyer said, “I take about 35 calls a day, about 20% of them are, you know, people that are concerned about their federal benefits and services. For the most part, though, you know those will not be affected.

“There are subtle ways in which that is getting affected now,” he said, referring to the reduction in enrollment personnel.

The result is that he can’t tell some veterans when they will be able to access their doctor for healthcare.

There were an estimated 18,600 federal government employees in Iowa, according to the most recently available Bureau of Labor Statistics data from December 2024. A 2024 statistic showed that 4,700 of them were employed by the VA.