A tale of two Kansas senators: Moran fights for veterans, Marshall runs away | Opinion
Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran has just done maybe the most Republican thing ever — standing up for veterans, and standing up to the Trump administration’s plan to cut tens of thousands of employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Supporting the men and women who have served our country militarily is one of the most sacred duties of the nation. It’s been an unshakable pillar of Kansas Republicanism for decades — from President Dwight Eisenhower to senators Bob Dole and Pat Roberts.
Eisenhower and Dole have passed and Roberts is retired. But Moran has picked up the banner and is carrying it into battle — on behalf of Kansans, and on behalf of reasonable Republicans everywhere.
He’s doing that as the current cabal in the White House — specifically Donald Trump, his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk and Musk’s boy-band rejects at the misnamed Department of Government Efficiency — have reenvisioned Republicanism as a slash-and-burn operation to tear the government apart via the summary and unjustified firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
Some departments have been closed down, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created to protect ordinary Americans from investment scams, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, created by John F. Kennedy to promote American values and democracy around the world through humanitarian aid and education.
The National Parks Service, U.S. Forest Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (climate research and weather forecasting) and the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Defense and Energy have also felt the wrath of DOGE, along with others.
VA targeted
Last week, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration and DOGE are turning their sights on the VA, with an eye toward cutting 80,000 jobs.
That would return the agency to its staffing level of five years ago, despite a record-setting workload delivering 127.5 million health care appointments to 9 million enrollees. That includes the 3.5 million veterans who, two years ago, were granted enhanced benefits for treatment of cancer and other diseases contracted from exposure to toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Agent Orange in Vietnam.
Sadly, taking care of veterans and their families seems to be of secondary importance to the new regime, which is all about cutting federal jobs to punish federal employees for being federal employees.
“Following a thorough review of mission and structure, the Department will affect a VA-wide RIF (reduction in force) in August,” said a departmental memo unearthed by the AP. “This effort will require the entirety of VA staff and organizations to work together in a collaborative fashion, as well as to coordinate actions with DOGE and the Administration as a whole, to achieve the desired results within the allotted time . . . the Department’s initial objective is to return to our 2019 end-strength numbers of 399,957 employees.”
Not so fast, says Jerry Moran.
“The Department of Veterans Affairs must provide veterans, their family members and survivors the health care and benefits that they have earned,” Moran wrote in a post on the Musk-owned social media platform X. “The VA is in need of reform, but current efforts to downsize the department and increase efficiency must be done in a more responsible manner. I expect the VA to work with Congress to right-size the VA workforce and allow us to legislate the necessary changes.”
It’s classic Moran Republicanism — if government can be run more efficiently, Congress owes it to the taxpayers to make it so. But you don’t fix a broken toilet by burning down the house.
In one short paragraph, Moran sent three strong messages to the administration and the DOGE Muskies:
- Cutting veterans’ services is not acceptable.
- Maintaining veterans’ services requires an adequate and effective workforce to deliver them.
- The road to more efficient management of VA runs through Congress and the legislative process, not a crew of 20-something tech bros in ball caps saying, “Hey, let’s go fire a few thousand government workers today.”
Responsibility to agriculture, education, weather service
Moran is not some obscure backbencher. He’s the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. He takes his responsibility to veterans seriously and unlike so many in Congress these days, he’s found his voice.
We can all fervently hope that Moran again raises that voice when it comes to other issues, most pressingly:
- Agriculture, where farmers are being whipsawed by the Trump administration’s on-again, off-again tariff policies and halting of spending for food aid that’s bought from Kansas growers and distributed around the world.
- Education, where the administration’s stated goal of eliminating the Department of Education would have dire consequences for rural and urban school districts across the state that rely heavily on federal funding to serve impoverished children.
- NOAA, which runs the National Weather Service and collects the basic data that government and private sector meteorologists use to make forecasts and issue severe weather alerts, which are literally a matter of life and death in Kansas.
Moran is well-positioned to be the voice of reason in these unreasonable times.
His GOP credentials are unassailable. The last time the Republicans won a Senate majority 10 years ago, Moran was the leader of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, capturing nine Democratic and open seats. Eight of those GOP senators are still in office.
The comparison couldn’t be more stark with Kansas’ other senator, Roger Marshall, R-MAGA.
While Moran is standing up for veterans, Marshall walked out on his constituents at his own town hall meeting in Oakley, rather than answer a polite and reasonable question from a local retiree about the impact of DOGE cuts on veterans, who make up 30% of the federal workforce.
The man who asked the question, retired agribusinessman Chuck Nunn of Garden City, said he agrees 100% with Moran’s statement about the VA.
“I wish Roger Marshall would have said the same thing,” Nunn said. “All that man actually would have had to have done is been truthful with us. He came in loaded for bear and he sat up there and he just gave the party line. He should have been prepared to answer some tough questions from concerned citizens about what was happening in Washington.”
To borrow a quote from Al Pacino in the movie “Scent of a Woman”: “When the s*** hits the fan, some guys run and some guys stay.”
Among our two Kansas senators, it’s not hard to tell which is which.
The MAGA movement has put out threats that GOP congressfolk who push back against the excesses of Trumpism will face primary opponents funded by Musk — the world’s richest man — when they come up for reelection.
Well, Musk can spend as much money primarying Moran as he can afford to waste.
The thing about us Kansans is, we appreciate it when one of our senators has our back. So stay the course, Sen. Moran, and we’ll have your back in 2028.
This story was originally published March 9, 2025 at 5:09 AM with the headline "A tale of two Kansas senators: Moran fights for veterans, Marshall runs away | Opinion."
