Honor the Promise to Our Veterans

The Promise

When a young American raises a hand and takes the oath of service, the country makes a promise in return: we will take care of you.  Not because it is generous, but because it is owed.  These men and women volunteered to put their lives on the line for the rest of us.  What they ask of us afterward—medical care for the injuries we sent them to collect, disability compensation for the health they spent in our service, a dignified burial when the time comes—is little enough by comparison.

Only the welfare of children should take higher priority in our national obligations.  That is not a policy position.  That is a statement about the kind of country we claim to be.

What Is Actually Happening

The Department of Veterans Affairs is a government agency containing, in effect, three large autonomous agencies: the Veterans Health Administration, the Veterans Benefits Administration, and the National Cemetery Administration, all reporting to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.  [1]  The scale is enormous: the FY2026 VA budget is approximately $435 billion, of which $302 billion is mandatory spending on benefits already earned.  [2]

In the summer of 2026, Congress debated the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act (H.R. 9237 / S. 4744), a 553-page omnibus package bundling over 60 bipartisan veterans provisions that had individually stalled for years, including the Major Richard Star Act.  [3]  The Star Act would end a long-standing injustice: roughly 54,000 combat-injured veterans who were medically retired with fewer than 20 years of service currently have their military retirement pay reduced dollar-for-dollar against their VA disability compensation.  [4]  The bill has 79 Senate cosponsors and 334 House cosponsors—far more than enough to pass in either chamber—and has never been brought to a vote on its own merits.  [4]

The obstacle is not the policy.  The obstacle is the accounting.

To fund the Star Act and the other 60-plus provisions in the package, Congress proposed to cut future disability ratings for tinnitus and sleep apnea—two of the most commonly claimed service-connected conditions—shifting an estimated $57 billion in costs over ten years onto approximately 1.5 million future veteran claimants.  [5]  In other words, Congress proposed to pay for veterans’ benefits by cutting other veterans’ benefits.  The Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, Paralyzed Veterans of America, and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America opposed the offset.  [3]  A coalition of 23 other organizations, including the American Legion and Wounded Warrior Project, supported the overall package despite misgivings about the funding mechanism.  [3]  On July 16, 2026, House leadership pulled the bill from the floor after three Republican members joined Democrats in opposing the offset provisions.  [6]

Senator Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, proposed an alternative: fund the Star Act with $13 billion in unspent, unobligated Department of Defense funds—money already appropriated but sitting unused.  [7]  That alternative was blocked.  [7]

Step back and look at what just happened.  Congress had a bill with overwhelming bipartisan support.  It could not pass because legislators insisted that it be “paid for”—and the only payment method they would accept was to take the money from other disabled veterans.  When someone proposed using money that was already sitting unspent at the Pentagon, that was blocked too.  The result: no bill, no benefits, no Star Act, and the combat-injured veterans who have been waiting for years continue to wait.

The Scale of What We Are Arguing About

The original CBO score for the Major Richard Star Act, as introduced, was approximately $9.75 billion over ten years—less than $1 billion per year.  [4]  A revised version expanded the estimated cost, but the core legislation for the 54,000 combat-injured retirees it was designed to help was always in the range of $8–10 billion over a decade.  [8]

The total VA budget is $435 billion per year.  [2]  The federal budget is approximately $6.75 trillion per year.  We are arguing about an additional expenditure that amounts to roughly 0.2 percent of the VA budget, or about 0.015 percent of total federal spending.  This is not a fiscal crisis.  This is a rounding error being used as an excuse.

Put it another way: the amount in dispute is less than Americans spend on sales tax in a single week.  If the cost of keeping a promise to combat-wounded veterans is too high for the richest nation in human history, then the problem is not the cost.  The problem is the priorities.

The Money Pit Around the Veterans

The debate over this bill is not just about fiscal policy.  It is about who profits from the system as it exists.

A friend of mine who is a veteran—and who has an active asbestos and AFFF case filed in North Carolina because every time he followed the VA’s prescribed process, he was stonewalled—put it to me plainly: the entire veterans benefits ecosystem has become, in his words, “a very large and lucrative money pit for a lot of people, with the veterans themselves being the most underserved.”

He is not wrong.  There are over 6,000 VA-accredited attorneys and over 700 VA-accredited claims agents.  Hundreds of legal firms do pro bono work.  And then there are the “claim sharks”—unaccredited companies and individuals who charge veterans thousands of dollars to help file claims that accredited Veterans Service Organizations will file for free.  [9]  These predatory actors are not VA-accredited, are not bound by the professional or ethical standards of accreditation, and often provide advice that is misleading or outright fraudulent.  [9]  The VA has flagged over one million claims for patterns associated with claim shark activity.  [10]  Senators Blumenthal and Pappas introduced the SAFEGUARD Veterans Act of 2026 to restore criminal penalties for unaccredited claims representatives and close the enforcement loopholes these companies exploit.  [11]

Meanwhile, the organizations that lobbied for and against the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act number anywhere from 50 to 70 on any given day.  Many of the nonprofits that stood with the VFW in opposing the bill employ VSO staff whose salaries are funded through the Jobs for Veterans State Grants (JVSG) program.  Many of those organizations themselves operate on grant money or other government subsidies.  Veterans have been, as my friend put it, “the flavor of the month since we went into Iraq.”  The organizations that want to cut additional funding see free money floating around, and they want to be the ones allocating it.

My friend’s VA disability rating has been raised and lowered five times.  That is not a system working as designed.  That is a system in which the veteran is the least powerful participant.

What DOGE Got Wrong

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) looked at the VA and saw the same sprawl my friend described—autonomous sub-agencies, overlapping organizations, money moving in opaque directions.  They were not entirely wrong about the observation.  They were catastrophically wrong about the remedy.

According to a January 2026 Senate report, the VA lost approximately 40,000 employees over the preceding year, 88 percent from healthcare positions.  [12]  DOGE initially planned to eliminate 83,000 additional positions—approximately one in five VA staffers.  [12]  Public backlash forced a partial reversal, but the damage was done: mental health wait times reached 35 days nationally, suicide prevention service contracts were canceled and then hastily un-canceled after public outcry, and the VA’s Chief AI Officer resigned.  [12]  The PACT Act expansions for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits—bipartisan legislation passed with broad support—were directly undermined as the workforce hired to implement them was gutted.  [13]

As my friend observed: we are not a socialist or communist country where you can simply decree that a bureaucracy will shrink and expect it to keep functioning.  The VA’s complexity exists because the obligations it serves are complex.  You cannot cut 40,000 healthcare workers and then act surprised when veterans cannot get healthcare.  Finding genuine waste is a legitimate task, but it requires a scalpel, not a chainsaw.  [14]

What I Propose

Fund veterans benefits as a cost of war, not a line item to be offset.  The Major Richard Star Act and the other provisions in the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act should be passed and funded without cutting benefits from other disabled veterans.  If an offset is politically required, it should come from unspent Department of Defense funds—because these obligations originate with the Department of Defense, not the VA.  Combat-injured veterans should never be made to subsidize their own care.

Protect the VA workforce that delivers on the promise.  The mass firings and contract cancellations carried out under DOGE must be reversed where they have degraded veterans’ access to healthcare and benefits processing.  Efficiency gains are welcome; gutting the workforce that serves veterans is not efficiency.  Any future restructuring of the VA must be driven by measurable outcomes in veteran care, not by headcount targets.

Crack down on claim sharks.  The SAFEGUARD Veterans Act should be passed immediately, restoring criminal penalties for unaccredited claims representatives who charge veterans for services that accredited VSOs provide for free.  Veterans filing disability claims should not have to navigate a predatory marketplace to access benefits they have already earned.

Stabilize the ratings system.  A veteran whose disability rating has been raised and lowered five times is not being served by a functioning system.  The VA Schedule for Rating Disabilities should be updated through transparent rulemaking with genuine clinical justification—not through legislative budget offsets that use rating reductions as a funding mechanism.  Congress should never again accept the premise that disability ratings can be reduced to meet budget targets, because once that premise is accepted, every service-connected condition becomes a future target.

These are not large expenditures in the context of what we spend as a nation.  They are the minimum we owe to the people who volunteered to stand between us and harm.  If we cannot keep this promise, we have no business asking anyone to serve.

How We’ll Know It’s Working