LOS ANGELES — When Jesse Ugalde, who served in the Vietnam War, entered a Department of Veterans Affairs building Friday, he noticed a difference.

“Already, people are leaving,” Ugalde, 74, who relies on the VA for his health care, said of VA employees. “I was told that they’re going to try to provide services, but it’s going to take longer.”

To protest President Donald Trump’s push to slash the size of the federal government, which includes drastic staff cuts at the VA and other agencies, Ugalde took to the streets with hundreds of others in Westwood on Saturday.

It’s “not only the VA, but there’s other programs that we need desperately,” Ugalde said. “There’s no reason to do it this way ... I fought for this country, and I’ll fight for it again.”

The protesters marched toward the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard around noon, rallying against the government cuts and what they described as clear constitutional violations.

“We are here because we are not going to let Trump, we’re not going to let Elon Musk, his co-president, or anybody else take the United States Constitution down,” Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., told the crowd.

Musk’s advisory team, which he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has fired thousands of government workers, frozen billions of dollars in federal spending and ordered the almost complete shutdown of multiple federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Education.

Musk, a billionaire known for his “move fast and break things” approach at his companies, described wasteful government spending as an urgent and existential threat in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.

“The country is going bankrupt,” he said, referring to the growing national debt. “If we don’t do something about it, the ship of America is going to sink.”

But people at the protest — organized primarily by Democracy Action Network, a pro-democracy organization founded last year — said the programs on the chopping block are far from wasteful.

Shaun Law-Bowman, 67, spent 15 years as a public school teacher before moving into an administrative position.

“There’s no reasoning. There’s no excuse,” she said of Trump’s plan to shut down the Department of Education. “I was a special ed administrator — those are federal funds. There’s a huge amount of kids that need special help, and all that money is going to be gone. It’s just evil.”

Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that Trump and Musk’s dismantling of USAID was likely unconstitutional, arguing that the cuts were incompatible with the will of Congress.

Federal judges have also ruled that the administration’s firing of probationary employees did not follow the appropriate procedures for layoffs and that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management lacked the authority to order the firings.

The administration has bashed these rulings, with Vice President JD Vance posting on X that judges “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Many protesters spoke out against the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist. Khalil, an Algerian citizen, is being held in immigration detention even though he is a green card holder with no criminal record.

Trump, without immediately providing evidence, accused Khalil of supporting Hamas, which the U.S. considers a “foreign terrorist organization.”

For many, the demonstration was a way to take matters into their own hands.

“For all those people that say the protests don’t matter … we wouldn’t have the civil rights we had in the ‘60s without protests,” said Elizabeth Gietema, 28. “Vietnam might have gone on longer without the protests.”

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