By Larry Nazimek

On the afternoon of March 18, 2025, Cong. Delia Ramirez met with her Veterans Working Group at the Portage-Cragin Library. She is the ranking member of the Veterans Affairs Committee’s Compliance and Investigations Subcommittee.

She and Cong. Mark Takano, ranking Dem. of the Veterans Affairs Committee, had sent a letter asking DOGE numerous questions about their going through VA records to get personal information on veterans to which they are not entitled.

She has re-introduced her bill (H. R. 1391, Student Veteran Benefit Restoration Act of 2025) that would restore education benefits to veterans who had lost theirs through programs that went out of business or were scams.

The sense of this meeting was different from her meeting on Veterans Day, in that previous meetings were about improving VA healthcare and benefits, while this one was about fighting VA cutbacks by the Dept. of Government Efficiency. She reported that they want to fire 80,000 VA employees, 1/3 of whom are veterans, so she asked us for any ill effects of the cutbacks in order to assess how the they were affecting our care.

I had wondered if our emails to her office were regarded as nuisances, but she thanked me for them, because they gave her information that she did not otherwise have. She also liked my letter to the editor about VA cutbacks that was published in the Chicago Tribune, saying that she wanted to see more of them. This was followed by an evening Town Haul meeting at the Thorp Scholastic Academy.