By Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
At the Fredericksburg VA Medical Center, staffing has fallen to roughly 41 percent of authorized levels, a direct casualty of the administration’s federal hiring freeze and workforce cuts. Veterans in our community are waiting longer, driving farther, and getting less. That single number is worth holding onto, because it’s the clearest local example of what happens when the people affected by a decision never get a vote on it. Over the past eighteen months, nearly every corner of the American economy has faced the same choice the VA’s own workforce didn’t get to make: fight the administration’s pressure, or fold to it. And the record is clearer than the headlines suggest—fighting worked more often than folding did. The companies and institutions that caved mostly didn’t have to. They just believed they didn’t have a choice.
Start with the plainest capitulation: banks. Within weeks of Trump’s return to office, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan scrubbed diversity language from their policies without a fight, and more than 200 S&P 500 companies followed. It bought them nothing—no friendlier regulators, no fewer investigations. Consulting firms faced sharper real coercion, with Deloitte alone losing well over a hundred federal contracts and mostly folded just as fast; that’s more understandable, since a cancelled contract doesn’t come back with a lawsuit. But even there, McKinsey held its ground on diversity goals, proving folding wasn’t the only option.
Now look at who fought instead—including inside the federal government itself. Law firms like Perkins Coie hit with executive orders stripping their lawyers’ security clearances for representing Trump’s adversaries, sued rather than fold like Paul Weiss did. Courts called the orders unconstitutional, and by this spring the administration had quietly dropped every case against a firm that fought back. Exxon and Shell lobbied to preserve federal emissions rules the administration wanted to scrap and won.
The clearest proof this pattern holds inside government, not just against it, is what happened to federal workers themselves. When Health and Human Services moved to gut the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, cutting more than 90 percent of its staff, the union didn’t fold. It organized. Nine months of sustained pressure from workers, labor advocates and public health experts later, HHS reversed course entirely and revoked every layoff notice. Congress backed this pattern too: after bipartisan pushback over cuts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Social Security Administration, the final 2026 spending deal restored hiring dollars to both—a Republican Congress and a Republican administration, moved by nothing more exotic than sustained, public insistence that the cuts had gone too far.
Everyone else split along the same line. Airlines divided over merit-based hiring mandates; auto and construction folded on tariffs, then quietly lobbied against the same policies they’d praised in public; small businesses got no choice at all, absorbing an estimated $63 billion in tariff costs since March 2025 with no lobbying budget to negotiate an exemption. Sean O’Brien’s Teamsters chose outright alliance instead and paid no price from the administration for it.
Here’s what ties all of this together: This pressure was rarely backed by settled law, and it didn’t always take a lawsuit to beat it. DEI was never made illegal—courts from both parties have repeatedly found the administration’s own enforcement lacks legal authority, and researchers at NYU concluded the diversity rollback was “heavily driven by the actions of the current administration... rather than the legal environment.” Companies folded not because the law required it, but because they were afraid of what might happen if they didn’t. NIOSH and the CISA and SSA staffing lines prove the same thing a different way: no court forced HHS to rehire, and no court forced Congress to add the money back. Sustained public pressure did the work a lawsuit usually does.
That cuts against the comfortable assumption that resistance is futile. Nearly everyone who tested the administration, in court or simply by refusing to blink, came out roughly where they started, sometimes better. Nearly everyone who folded preemptively got nothing back for it. The ones who paid the real, uncushioned price were those with no leverage to trade in the first place: the VA’s own workforce, and small business owners on Caroline Street watching margins shrink under tariffs, they had no seat at the table to negotiate.
So, does it pay to fight? More often than not, yes—but that benefit only ever reaches the people who test it. Nearly every institution in this piece that folded without a fight did so on an assumption—that resistance was pointless, that the smart move was to give something up before being asked—and never found out if that assumption was true, because it never tried. The ones who did try mostly discovered the assumption were wrong. For the rest of us without a legal team or a lobbying budget, the lesson isn’t to personally “fight” a federal agency, it’s to stop assuming someone else already tried and lost, and to pick the one fight closest to home where we can actually check.
That fight is already underway, and it deserves more of us behind it. Rep. Eugene Vindman sent five letters demanding a staffing timeline, introduced bipartisan legislation requiring monthly public vacancy reports, surveyed more than 200 Virginians about delays, and hosted a veterans roundtable in Fredericksburg just this month. Senators Warner and Kaine have raised it publicly for more than a year. And yet wait times have gotten worse, not better—mental health appointments now take roughly 70 days, primary care over 100. That gap between real effort and real results is the tell: letters from Washington alone aren’t enough leverage.
No VA facility has yet won this fight the way NIOSH’s workforce did, so let’s be honest about what it would take rather than promise a playbook that doesn’t exist yet. NIOSH took nine months of sustained organizing, not one letter or one town hall, before HHS reversed course. CISA and SSA got their funding back only after Congress felt bipartisan pressure through an entire budget cycle. Both cases share the same two ingredients: pressure that didn’t let up, and pressure that came from enough different directions—workers, advocates, lawmakers from both parties—that leadership couldn’t simply wait it out. Vindman is supplying one direction. The one missing is grassroots: an organized, standing local coalition, not a crowd that shows up once and disperses.
That means the VFW and American Legion posts, the Disabled American Verterans chapter and the regions Chambers of Commerce agreeing now to co-lead it together, not separately. It means collecting veterans’ own wait-time stories in writing, on the record, so the case doesn’t rest on a single statistic. It means committing to show up, in numbers, at every Vindman town hall and roundtable between now and whenever this resolves, however many months that takes. And it means someone in that coalition tracking the staffing numbers monthly and putting them back in front of the public and the press, so the pressure doesn’t fade the week after each event. The regions Boards of Supervisors and the City Council can help by formally backing Vindman’s transparency bill, but a council resolution doesn’t organize a single volunteer or collect a single story — that part only happens if this community builds it, the way NIOSH’s workers and CISA’s advocates built theirs. It’s not a guaranteed win. But nothing on this list of wins started as one, either—it started with people who decided to find out.
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Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, federal civil servant and consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.
