The Gist

• On Oct. 20 in Greenville, N.C., President Trump said he is directing the Justice Department to settle the remaining Camp Lejeune claims if Republicans win the House and Senate. Then: “So if we don’t win, there’s no money.”

• That isn’t true. Settlements are paid from Treasury’s Judgment Fund, a permanent appropriation Congress does not vote on payment by payment. The decision to settle belongs to the Justice Department, which answers to him.

• A federal court told DOJ and the plaintiffs’ lawyers to use their best efforts to reach a global settlement by Oct. 30. Election Day is Nov. 3.

• DOJ says it has paid “nearly one billion dollars,” most of it since he took office, much of it through the Elective Option, its fast-track settlement program.

• Outside that fast track, DOJ is fighting hard in court. On Oct. 23 it asked the judges to make most plaintiffs produce base records, medical records on their diagnosis and treatment and, for some illnesses, expert reports within 180 days, or risk having their cases thrown out for good.

Short on time? That’s the story. Keep reading if you want to know who’s actually holding up the money. It isn’t the voters.

On Oct. 20, at the Pitt-Greenville Airport, the President of the United States told the families of poisoned Marines how their money works.

“And if we win the House and the Senate, I am directing the Department of Justice to settle all remaining legitimate claims as soon as possible,” he said.

He added that the money should go to the families, not the trial lawyers, and turned to North Carolina’s junior senator: “Ted, do you agree with that?” Trump told the crowd Sen. Ted Budd said yes.

Then the closer:

“So if we don’t win, there’s no money. If we do win, you’re getting it.”

Jill Steen Dilgard lost her father, an uncle and two cousins who served at Camp Lejeune, NC Newsline reported. She filed her claim in August 2022. It still hasn’t been paid. “How can you play political games with people’s lives?” she asked.

That’s a shitty thing to say to people who are sick, grieving and waiting. A federal judge on these cases wrote last year that a large majority of the plaintiffs are “an ailing and older population.” Families already stretched to the limit didn’t need a campaign threat hanging over claims many of them filed years ago.

And it isn’t true. The money he says disappears if Republicans lose isn’t waiting on a vote. It never was.

What he can do is slow it down. His Justice Department can refuse to settle and fight claims in court, and a family that loses there gets nothing. That’s his call, not the voters’.

What He Can and Can’t Do

He can’t shut off the money. The fund that pays these claims is permanent law: Congress wrote that “necessary amounts are appropriated” to pay settlements and court judgments. There’s no vote to withhold.

He can’t take away the right to sue. The Camp Lejeune Justice Act created it. Only Congress, through a new law, could change that.

He can’t lawfully refuse to pay a family that wins. When a judgment is final, federal law says Treasury “shall” pay it. DOJ can appeal and drag it out. It can’t say no.

What he can do runs through the Justice Department he directs: decide how readily the government settles, how hard it fights, and whether it appeals. He controls those calls whether Republicans win in November or lose.

How His Justice Department Has Played It

Two tracks. Two different stories.

The fast track moved. The fast track is the Elective Option, a settlement program DOJ and the Navy started in 2023. DOJ calls it “an off-ramp to litigation”: fixed payments, from $100,000 to $550,000, for certain illnesses, if the paperwork proves the diagnosis and the time on base. DOJ says it paid more than $421 million in Elective Option settlements between Jan. 20, 2025 and March 10, 2026. On Oct. 23, it told the judges it had paid “nearly one billion dollars” in all. DOJ figures reported by Fox News put payouts since his second term began at more than $919.7 million. Trump told the crowd his administration “has delivered $1 billion in cash settlements.” That’s close. Most of the money paid under this law went out on his watch.

The door is narrowing, though. DOJ’s claims page now says it “is not reconsidering Elective Option determinations and is not accepting additional Elective Option documentation.” The government told the court a claim in the Navy’s own claims process stays under consideration until it’s denied.

Everything else is a fight.

• Oct. 2025. During the government shutdown, DOJ asked to freeze every deadline in the 25 Track 1 bellwether cases until 14 days after funding returned, citing furloughed lawyers. Magistrate Judge Robert Jones said that didn’t justify a blanket delay.

• Nov. 2025. The plaintiffs’ lawyers told the court DOJ had filed “more than 30 Daubert and summary judgment motions” in two phases of the bellwether cases alone, “seeking exclusion of every Plaintiff’s expert and the dismissal of every Track 1 bellwether case.”

• March 2026. DOJ’s press release put the “estimated face value” of claims filed with the Navy at more than $335 trillion. Two Camp Lejeune victims, Marine veteran Jerry Ensminger and Mike Partain, called it a “ridiculous” attempt to turn Congress against the victims, Roll Call reported.

• Oct. 2026. DOJ objected to letting families use scanned Marine Corps records outside the lawsuits, called the claimant pool “likely rife with unsupported claims,” and asked for an order that could throw out lawsuits for good. Details below.

The plaintiffs’ own lead lawyer, Ed Bell, told Fox News in an interview published Oct. 21: “I have to say, I’m very bullish on what the Department of Justice has been doing.” In September the four judges credited DOJ’s leadership with progress toward a global deal. Neither changes what DOJ is now asking those same courts to do to the claims it contests.

So has his Justice Department been good for veterans? If your paperwork fits the fast track, this has been the best stretch since the law passed. If it doesn’t, the road gets harder. DOJ’s Oct. 2 report says more than 75% of the claims it has reviewed lack the documents for Elective Option approval. Some of those claimants can fix that. Others face a government contesting their claims in court.

None of that changes on Nov. 3.

Congress Isn’t Holding the Checkbook

Camp Lejeune settlements are paid out of Treasury’s Judgment Fund, which Treasury calls “a permanent, indefinite appropriation.” Congress created it in 1956, in part, Treasury says, “to eliminate the procedural burdens involved in getting an appropriation from Congress to pay a particular judgment.” In 1961, Congress opened it to settlements the Attorney General makes. When the government owes, nobody passes the hat in Congress.

Congress knew this going in. As the Camp Lejeune Justice Act moved through Congress inside the PACT Act, the Congressional Budget Office wrote: “CBO expects that awards and settlements would be paid from the Judgment Fund, a permanent, indefinite appropriation.”

I read the law. It creates the right to sue. It sets aside nothing. That’s why the Judgment Fund covers it.

No Congress, red or blue, has to vote another dime for these families to get paid.

The Pen Is at Justice

So who decides? Under DOJ’s own regulations, a settlement that would control the outcome of other claims, at a scale past what an Assistant Attorney General can sign, goes up to the Deputy or Associate Attorney General, who hold “the settlement authority of the Attorney General as to all claims.” On Camp Lejeune, that’s Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. His name tops the government’s signature block on the Oct. 2 joint status report.

In March, announcing a batch of settlements, Woodward said: “At the direction of the President and Attorney General, this Department of Justice has reprioritized approving settlements for Camp Lejeune victims and families.”

At the direction of the President. Not the House. Not the Senate.

DOJ said it again in court on Oct. 20, citing an order from Judge James Dever, one of the four judges on these cases: “The United States controls its discretionary settlement decisions.”

When Public Radio East sought an interview with Woodward for its story on the rally, his office said he was unavailable and referred questions to the White House.

Whoever holds the gavels in January, the people deciding whether these claims settle work for the man who said “I am directing” from that stage.

If You Have a Claim

Nothing in the law ties your payment to which party runs Congress. Changing that would take a new law. Your claim isn’t on the ballot.

If DOJ already ruled on your Elective Option claim, it isn’t reopening it, and it isn’t taking new documents for it. Ask your lawyer where your claim stands, with DOJ and with the Navy.

If a global deal comes, the plaintiffs’ leaders say they will negotiate it for 25 diseases and conditions. Ask your lawyer whether yours is on that list.

Your paperwork is another story. More on that below.

Oct. 30 Comes Before Nov. 3

On June 30, all four district judges handling these cases said they expect both sides “to use their best efforts to achieve a global settlement by October 30, 2026,” and reappointed the plaintiffs’ leadership group for just four months to push them there. On Sept. 29 they said it worked: “progress toward a global settlement is being made.” They extended the plaintiffs’ leaders through Oct. 30, 2027, kept the Oct. 30 target, and wrote that “additional work is needed to complete the settlement discussions and implement any global settlement achieved.”

On Sept. 9, a lawyer for the plaintiffs told Judge Boyle, as DOJ quotes the transcript in a later filing: “The way things are going, Judge, I wouldn’t give a lot of hope for anything to happen.” Twenty days later, the judges found progress.

The target is Friday, Oct. 30. Election Day is the following Tuesday. A global deal signed before then would put the terms on paper before the results are in. It wouldn’t mean every claim is approved, or that checks start moving right away. If no deal comes by Friday, was anyone at Justice waiting for Nov. 3?

Meanwhile, the government is in a courtroom. Frank Mousser’s kidney cancer case went to trial on Monday, Oct. 26, before Judge Terrence Boyle. It’s the first trial under the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, Public Radio East reported. Before trial, DOJ moved to keep out expert testimony that uses the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s water models to estimate Mousser’s individual exposure. That’s a federal agency’s own model, and DOJ says it will show at trial that the models are “unreliable for use in litigation.” There’s no jury. More on that below.

The Paperwork Wall

DOJ’s June 15 report to the court carries the hardest number in this story. Of 408,000 Navy claims, about 13,000 had at least three supporting documents and alleged an injury that could qualify for a fast-track offer. Of those, “more than 88% have insufficient evidence to support the claim and less than 2% have sufficient documentary substantiation” to go to DOJ for a settlement offer.

The government says claimants must document a diagnosis and their time on base. The law requires at least 30 days there between Aug. 1, 1953 and Dec. 31, 1987: 39 to 73 years ago. Of the 3,094 Navy offers approved through June 15, 1,151 involved a death or wrongful death claim. Some of the people this money was meant for didn’t live to see it.

The Marine Corps has scanned its old records, and DOJ has handed nearly 100 million pages of them to the plaintiffs’ lawyers. The plaintiffs want to use them to prove claims and build a global settlement. On Oct. 20, DOJ told the court it “objects at this time to any use of the MCDP documents for non-litigation purposes, including global resolution.” (MCDP, the Marine Corps Data Project, is what both sides now call the scanned records.) DOJ’s reasons: the files include Social Security numbers and medical, disciplinary and financial records, many belonging to Marines who were never stationed at Camp Lejeune; it says the plaintiffs haven’t answered its questions about how the records would be searched, stored and shared; and it argues the court’s authority over the lawsuits doesn’t reach the Navy’s separate claims process. In the same filing, it called the claimant pool “likely rife with unsupported claims.” On Oct. 23, a magistrate judge gave DOJ until Nov. 9 to propose the uses it won’t fight and set a hearing for Nov. 16.

How many of that 88% could prove they were on base with records the government has already scanned?

Also on Oct. 23, a week before the court’s target, DOJ asked the judges for what it called “a case vetting or screening order called a ‘Lone Pine order.’” Every plaintiff outside the Track 1 bellwether cases would have to produce records showing at least 30 days on base and exposure to water from one of three base water systems, “a complete set of medical records” documenting the illnesses they claim, and, for any illness outside the ten that ATSDR’s 2017 review found had some evidence of a link to the water, expert reports on causation. Existing plaintiffs would get 180 days, plus 30 more after a deficiency letter. After that, DOJ could move to dismiss the case with prejudice. That means for good.

DOJ says the order would “advance global resolution efforts.” The plaintiffs’ leaders filed their own request that day: a census of their cases “in aid of resolution.” Lawyers would report each client’s name, the last four digits of their Social Security number, their claim number and their diagnosis, within 60 days of a start date the court sets. It covers only clients diagnosed with one of 25 listed diseases and conditions. The plaintiffs’ leaders say those are the only ones they intend to negotiate a global settlement for, out of more than 200 alleged in the Navy’s process, and propose working out a process for the rest later. Failure to comply, the motion says, “could preclude a client from participating in a global resolution.” The judges haven’t ruled on either motion.

I’ve watched this fight from HadIt’s forums for nearly 15 years.

In November 2011, one of our members posted VA’s revised training letter: Camp Lejeune water claims had been centralized in one office, in Louisville. The copy our members linked to sat on a news site, not VA’s. VA’s Inspector General later confirmed the move.

Marines asked us how to file. Other members told them to get a diagnosis, then get a doctor to tie it to the water. VA’s own letter set the bar at “at least as likely as not” and said most claims would need a VA exam.

It took until March 2017 for VA to presume eight Camp Lejeune illnesses were service connected. Veterans with one of those, and enough time on base, no longer needed a doctor’s letter. Six years after Louisville.

Now the fight is in a courtroom, and it’s open to families and civilian workers too. DOJ is asking the court to make plaintiffs prove their time on base and their illness on paper, plus an expert report for anything outside ATSDR’s ten, or let it move to end the case for good.

Different building. Same wall.

The Fix Nobody Moved

If Congress wanted to speed this up, it already has the bill. H.R. 4145, the Ensuring Justice for Camp Lejeune Victims Act of 2025, would give claimants a jury trial on request, let them move cases to other federal courts in North and South Carolina, ease the causation standard, order the courts to expedite, and write attorney fee caps of 20% before a lawsuit and 25% after into the law. DOJ already says those caps apply.

Its sponsor is Rep. Greg Murphy, a North Carolina Republican. It has 100 cosponsors from both parties, including every other member of North Carolina’s House delegation. It went to the House Judiciary Committee on June 25, 2025. Since then the cosponsor list has grown. Nothing else has moved. No markup. No vote. The committee chairman is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

The Senate version, S. 907, from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), went to Senate Judiciary on March 6, 2025. It picked up two cosponsors as recently as Sept. 24, 2026. No markup, no vote. Chairman: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Ted Budd, the senator Trump asked on stage, is not one of its nine cosponsors.

Republicans have controlled both chambers the entire time these bills have existed. Winning in November doesn’t move them. Republicans already won.

About that jury: in February 2024, all four judges struck the jury demand, ruling that the 2022 law “does not unequivocally, affirmatively, and unambiguously provide plaintiffs the right to a jury trial.” Joe Biden’s Justice Department asked for that ruling. It still stands under Trump’s. That’s why a judge, not a jury, will decide Mousser’s case. H.R. 4145 fixes that in one sentence.

What Losing Could Actually Do

Fair is fair. Congress isn’t powerless. It funds the lawyers and claims staff who process these cases, and it can amend the law. Either way, it takes a bill through both chambers, and if the President vetoes it, two-thirds of each chamber to override him. A newly elected House wouldn’t be sworn in until Jan. 3. Until then, the Congress Republicans control right now is the one that could act.

Under current law, the Justice Department can refuse to settle and fight every case in court. It can’t refuse to pay a final judgment. But it can make families wait while the clock runs on people exposed decades ago, and families whose cases fail walk away with nothing.

That department answers to one man. He was on the stage in Greenville.

Friday, the court will be looking for a settlement. So will everyone waiting on the roughly 408,500 claims the Navy says it’s still processing. I’ll be reading the docket that day.

This is journalism, not legal advice. If you have a Camp Lejeune claim, talk to your attorney about your specific case.

Make the Call

A phone call takes two minutes. Congressional offices often track constituent calls by issue. When one issue lights up the phones in the same week, staff tend to notice.

Who to call:

• Your own U.S. Representative and Senators: they work for you. Find yours here.

• House Judiciary Committee (Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio), where H.R. 4145 sits: (202) 225-6906

• Senate Judiciary Committee (Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa), where S. 907 sits: (202) 224-7703

• Capitol Switchboard (connects to any member): (202) 224-3121

The ask:

1. Mark up H.R. 4145 and S. 907 now. They’ve sat in committee since 2025.

2. Put it in writing to the Justice Department: use its best efforts to reach a global settlement by the court’s Oct. 30 target. Don’t hold it for an election.

3. Let claimants use the digitized Marine Corps records to prove their claims, not only in litigation.

Script 1: If you’re a veteran or military family member

“Hi, my name is [NAME] and I’m a [veteran / military spouse / family member of a veteran] in [STATE]. I’m calling about the Camp Lejeune water contamination settlements.

The President said Camp Lejeune families get no money if his party loses the midterms. Those settlements are paid from a permanent Treasury fund, and a federal court has asked DOJ to use its best efforts to reach a global settlement by October 30. The fix in Congress, H.R. 4145 and S. 907, has sat in the Judiciary committees since 2025.

I’m asking [MEMBER NAME] to push for a markup of H.R. 4145 and S. 907, and to tell the Justice Department in writing to work toward the court’s October 30 target.

I’d like to know the [Congressman’s / Senator’s] position. Thank you.”

Script 2: If you’re a concerned citizen

“Hi, my name is [NAME] and I’m a constituent in [STATE]. I’m calling about the Camp Lejeune settlements for Marines and families poisoned by the base’s water.

Those payments don’t depend on which party controls Congress. A federal court has asked the Justice Department and the plaintiffs’ lawyers to use their best efforts to settle by October 30, and a bipartisan bill to speed up the cases has been stuck in committee for over a year.

I’m asking [MEMBER NAME] to support moving H.R. 4145 and S. 907 and to press DOJ to keep to the court’s schedule.

Thank you for your time.”

Tips: You don’t need to be an expert. You just need to be a constituent. If you get voicemail, leave the message anyway. Call between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern. Be polite, be brief, state your ask.

Current Watch List

Status checked Oct. 27, 2026

• H.R. 4145: House Judiciary since 6/25/2025; cosponsors added, no committee action. Jury trials on request, transfer to other courts, causation standard, expedited cases, fee caps. Position: WATCH

• S. 907: Senate Judiciary since 3/6/2025; cosponsors added, no committee action. Senate version. Position: WATCH

Paper Trail

Key documents

• Order, June 30, 2026 (D.E. 893): all four judges set the Oct. 30 best-efforts target for a global settlement and a four-month PLG term.

• United States’ Opposition, Oct. 20, 2026 (D.E. 933): objects to any non-litigation use of the digitized records, including global resolution; “likely rife with unsupported claims.”

• United States’ Memorandum for a Lone Pine Order, Oct. 23, 2026 (D.E. 936): 180 days to produce base records, medical records and, for non-ATSDR illnesses, expert reports, or risk dismissal; “nearly one billion dollars” paid.

• Plaintiff Leadership Group’s census motion, Oct. 23, 2026 (D.E. 937) and Exhibit A, list of diseases (D.E. 937-1): 25 diseases and conditions; the PLG will negotiate a global settlement only for those; census due 60 days after a court-set start date.

• 31 U.S.C. 1304 and 28 U.S.C. 2414: what the Judgment Fund pays, settlements and court judgments alike.

• Camp Lejeune Justice Act, PACT Act sec. 804 (P.L. 117-168)

• Master docket, In re Camp Lejeune Water Litigation, 7:23-cv-897 (E.D.N.C.)

Every other document is linked where it’s cited above.

Fact, allegation, open question

• Documented: Judgment Fund is a permanent appropriation that pays settlements and court judgments; CBO expected CLJA payments from it; settlement authority sits with DOJ leadership; the Oct. 30 best-efforts target and the PLG reappointment; the paperwork figures; DOJ’s Oct. 20 position on the digitized records; DOJ’s Oct. 23 Lone Pine motion; the plaintiffs’ Oct. 23 census motion; the Mousser trial start (court docket); both bills’ status; the 2024 jury ruling.

• Attributed: Trump’s remarks (C-SPAN video via Mediaite); Dilgard’s account (via NC Newsline); HadIt forum members’ 2011-2013 posts (author’s archive of the public forum, not quoted or named); the $919.7 million figure (DOJ via Fox News); Judge Dever’s Oct. 5 order (as quoted in DOJ’s Oct. 20 filing); the plaintiffs’ lawyer’s Sept. 9 remark (as quoted in DOJ’s Oct. 23 filing); the plaintiffs’ account of DOJ’s motions (D.E. 721); Ensminger’s and Partain’s reaction (via Roll Call); Bell’s assessment of DOJ (via Fox News); the first-trial description and Woodward’s office’s referral (via Public Radio East); DOJ’s characterizations of the claim pool (its own allegations, not court findings).

• Open: Will DOJ and the plaintiffs reach a global settlement by the court’s Oct. 30 target? Will the court enter DOJ’s Lone Pine order, or the plaintiffs’ census order? Why haven’t the Judiciary committees moved H.R. 4145 or S. 907?

What happens next

• Oct. 26: Mousser bench trial began (Judge Boyle), the first CLJA trial

• Oct. 30: court’s target for a global settlement

• Nov. 3: Election Day

• Nov. 9: Fancher trial; DOJ’s proposed order on the digitized records due

• Nov. 16: in-person status hearing and records hearing, Wilmington

• Jan. 3, 2027: new Congress sworn in

FOIA

None filed. Everything here comes from public court filings, statutes, regulations, and agency pages.

About This Publication

Tbird’s Quiet Fight is independent investigative journalism focused on VA policy, veteran benefits, and government accountability. Published by the founder of HadIt.com, one of the oldest veteran-run VA claims communities online (est. 1997).

Tips and sources: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com (encrypted options available on request)

Press and advocates: oversight contacts, reporters on the VA beat and watchdog resources are on one page.

Support this work: Subscribe to TQF | Support HadIt.com

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Last verified: October 27, 2026

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

Story tips or collaboration:

• Tbird (TQF): ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com (Signal available)

Congressional oversight contacts:

• House Veterans’ Affairs Committee: (202) 225-3527 | veterans.house.gov

• Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee: (202) 224-9126 | veterans.senate.gov

• House VA Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee: veterans.house.gov/issues

Investigative journalists covering VA/veteran policy:

• Suzanne Gordon, American Prospect

• Jasper Craven, American Prospect

• Nikki Wentling, Military Times

• Leo Shane III, Military Times

• Quil Lawrence, NPR

Veteran advocacy organizations:

• VoteVets

• Vietnam Veterans of America

• Disabled American Veterans (DAV)

• Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA)

• National Veterans Legal Services Program

• Veterans Legal Clinic, Harvard Law

Government watchdog resources:

• VA Office of Inspector General

• Government Accountability Office: Veterans

• Federal Register: VA Notices

• USAspending.gov (track federal contracts and grants)

Last verified: October 27, 2026 (committee phone numbers and every link on this page).

• VA raised veterans’ ratings to 100% more than 625,000 times in three years. Its own budget names what’s pushing ratings up: the PACT Act, rule changes, record claims processing, and more conditions per claim. Fraud isn’t on the list.

• The number landed in the middle of a two-year campaign to paint veterans as gaming the system.

• The policy that campaign points to is already written. Section 108 of H.R. 9237 would cut sleep apnea and tinnitus ratings for claims filed after it becomes law. The bill survived a House floor challenge by one vote.

• VA’s own version of the same cut is now classified as a major rule. VA projects final action in April 2027 and estimates $25.5 billion in savings over ten years.

• Both bar using the changes to cut compensation already being paid. They target new claims.

By the numbers

• 625,000+ increases to a 100% rating, fiscal years 2023 through 2025

• 46% of 2025’s increases came from veterans already rated 90%

• 91% of the growth in the compensation rolls since 2002 is Gulf War era veterans

• 210-211, the July vote that kept the bill carrying Section 108 alive

• $25.5 billion, VA’s own ten-year savings estimate for its sleep apnea and tinnitus rule

The number

On Oct. 22, Military.com pulled a figure out of VA’s budget books: VA raised veterans’ ratings to 100% more than 625,000 times in three years.

Military.com called them upgrades. VA’s own table calls them increased ratings, and that’s the right word. A rating goes up because a disability got worse, or because a new one showed up years later, the way Agent Orange did. When a civilian’s disability gets worse, nobody says congratulations on the upgrade.

Those are increases counted year by year. A veteran already at 100% can’t be raised to 100% again, so the total is probably close to the number of veterans. VA’s table doesn’t say.

I don’t think Military.com set out to write a hit piece. But I’ve been watching VA numbers since 1997. I know what happens to a number like that. It gets clipped, stripped of its footnotes, and passed around until it means whatever the person holding it needs. Right now a crowd needs it to mean one thing: veterans are gaming the system.

They’ve been building that case since at least November 2024. What they lacked was one headline-sized figure. Now they have it.

So VA’s own explanation goes on the record first.

What VA says drove it

In its latest budget request to Congress, VA reports the average disability rating rose to 65.6% in 2025, the biggest one-year jump in more than 30 years. Then it lists why: the PACT Act, regulatory updates, more completed claims, and more issues per claim.

That’s VA’s list, not mine. It explains rising ratings; it doesn’t break down the 625,000, and it doesn’t measure fraud one way or the other. But anyone calling this inflation has to argue with the agency that writes the checks before they get to argue with veterans.

Nearly half of those increases went to veterans already rated 90%, about 281,000 over three years. That’s the last step on the scale, and the hardest one to take. Yes, the yearly count more than doubled, from about 123,000 in 2022 to about 256,000 in 2025. Hold onto the 90% part. It explains more than any think-tank chart.

The cut is already written

This is where a budget statistic turns into a threat.

In June, House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Mike Bost (R-IL) introduced the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, H.R. 9237. Senate committee Chairman Jerry Moran (R-KS) filed the Senate version the same day.

Section 108 orders VA to rewrite how it rates two of the most common claims:

• Sleep apnea: 0% with no symptoms. 10% if treatment only partly works. 50% only if treatment fails or other conditions rule it out. 100% only with organ damage.

• Tinnitus: no separate rating, except 10% when it comes with service-connected hearing loss rated at zero.

• Who it hits: claims filed after it becomes law. The changes can’t be used to cut compensation already being paid.

Read that last line twice. If you’re rated for sleep apnea or tinnitus today, this bill can’t be used to cut that rating. It’s aimed at new claims: the 22-year-old who comes home next year with a CPAP machine and ringing ears, and the veteran already on the rolls who files for sleep apnea next year.

House leaders sent the bill to the floor under a closed rule, so no floor amendments. On July 16, Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) moved to send the whole bill back to committee. The motion failed 210-211. Leaders then postponed further action. As of Oct. 27, there has been no passage vote.

One vote. That’s the margin.

The money. DAV says a VA analysis puts the savings at $57 billion over ten years. The Senate committee majority’s own summary says $38 billion, with half redirected to other veterans’ benefits, according to Newsweek. VA’s own regulatory agenda puts the savings from its version of the change at $25.5 billion over ten years. Three estimates, three sources, no CBO score. Either way, future claimants’ sleep apnea and tinnitus ratings help pay for the rest of the bill. Newsweek reported that Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) tried to swap that offset for unspent Pentagon money. He lost.

Newsweek reported the American Legion, Wounded Warrior Project and the Elizabeth Dole Foundation backing the bill in July, and the White House backing it in September. DAV, VFW, IAVA and PVA opposed its funding offsets.

One correction to the opposition’s own messaging, because the other side will make it if I don’t: DAV has said the change would reach existing claims. The bill text bars using these changes to cut compensation in effect the day before enactment. This fight is about new claims, not existing ratings.

The rule track. Section 108 isn’t the only road. VA proposed substantially the same changes in 2022 and revised them in 2024. The spring 2025 regulatory agenda listed that rule as not major, with final action projected for December 2025. This year’s agenda lists it as economically significant and major, with $25.5 billion in projected savings over ten years, and projects final action in April 2027. Agencies don’t reclassify a rule as major by accident.

A VA spokesman told Newsweek in September that no changes are “planned or imminent.” As of Oct. 27, the rule isn’t at the White House budget office for final review. It’s pending, not final. It isn’t dead, either.

For veterans. If you’re rated today, both the bill and VA’s proposed rule bar using these changes to cut your existing compensation for these conditions. A new claim filed after the change, including one from a veteran already on the rolls, would fall under the new rules. If you’re serving now, or recently out and haven’t filed, this is about you.

This is journalism, not legal advice. If you have a claim pending or planned, talk to a VA-accredited representative.

The law moved first

In August 2022, President Biden signed the PACT Act. Among much else, it made hypertension presumptive for veterans exposed to Agent Orange.

The law set hypertension’s general start date for October 2026. VA didn’t wait. On signing day, Secretary Denis McDonough announced all 23 new presumptives were effective immediately, and VA started processing claims in January 2023. Vietnam veterans got paid for hypertension years ahead of the date Congress wrote down.

VA’s own budget says the Vietnam-era caseload, which had been shrinking, started growing again in 2023 because of it.

That was a policy choice to pay old men sooner. You can argue with it. You can’t call it fraud.

It wasn’t the first. Since 1991, Congress and VA have opened compensation to Agent Orange diseases, Gulf War illness, Camp Lejeune water, Blue Water Navy sailors and burn pits. Each change brought in veterans who had been shut out.

And VA got faster. It completed more than 2.3 million rating claims in 2025, and its total claims output set a record. More decisions means more awards, and more increases among them. VA lists that as a factor itself.

Why 90 turns into 100

VA doesn’t add ratings. It combines them, and each new rating counts only against the part of you not already rated disabled. Then the result rounds to the nearest 10. That’s why the last 10% is the hardest. Take a veteran whose ratings combine to exactly 90. Add a new 10% condition and the math lands at 91. Still 90%. Getting to 95, which rounds to 100, takes one new 50% rating, or five more 10% ratings stacked one after another. (A rating shown as 90% can sit anywhere from 85 to 94 underneath, so the bar runs from one more 10% to one new 70%.)

Now look at who’s filing. Post-9/11 veterans on compensation average nearly 10 service-connected conditions each. World War II veterans average about two and a half.

Age and presumptive rules play a part. So do twenty years of war. Stack enough conditions under a formula built to squeeze, and the 90s cross the line. About 119,000 did in 2025 alone.

“An incentive not to get better”

In November 2024, The Economist ran “American veterans now receive absurdly generous benefits.” It quoted Stanford economist Mark Duggan: “Once you qualify you have an incentive not to get better.”

That’s the slacker argument in one sentence. VA’s own records answer it.

The growth belongs to the generation that fought. Since 2002, the compensation rolls grew by about 3.9 million veterans. Nine in ten were Gulf War era, meaning anyone who has served since August 1990. Their numbers rose every year through the surges and kept rising as the troops came home. Many veterans file after they get out, and the injuries come home with them.

The 100% group is getting younger. The average age of veterans rated 100% fell from about 57 to 55 since 2022, while the group grew by two-thirds. Part of that is older veterans dying off the rolls, so I won’t push it further. But this isn’t retirees running out the clock.

100% isn’t a lifetime lock. Unless VA rates it permanent and total, a 100% rating can be reexamined and reduced. The Economist told readers 100% brings about $4,000 a month for life, “with no conditions attached.” That $4,000 is close to VA’s average 100% payment with dependents. “No conditions” is wrong for every veteran whose rating isn’t permanent.

When VA does cut, the process breaks a third of the time. CBO noted in 2023 that ratings are rarely reduced. True. In August, VA’s Inspector General estimated that in 2024, VA made at least one error in about a third of its cases proposing or finalizing a cut to a veteran’s compensation. The errors included failing to give veterans the notice the law requires before a cut.

I’ve heard it from civilians for years: our benefits are too generous, the checks are too big. I give the same answer every time. If you envy the deal, the recruiter’s office is open. Raise your right hand.

The knees, the ears and the nightmares come standard.

The menu

The Economist pointed readers to CBO’s options for cutting compensation. They’re real, and priced. Means-testing disability pay would save $384 billion over ten years. Taxing it would raise $235 billion. Others would trim pay after retirement age or stop paying low ratings. Unlike Section 108, several would reach veterans already on the rolls.

CBO publishes options. It doesn’t endorse them. But when The Economist points readers to that menu, a Senate witness floats his own version, and a governing blueprint calls for savings from future claimants, somebody’s planning to order.

“There is no massive fraud going on”

In October 2025, the Washington Post ran an investigation into how some veterans exploit VA’s $193 billion disability program and its lax controls. More pieces followed, including one built around the “honor system.”

Three weeks later, the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee held a hearing. VA Inspector General Cheryl Mason testified that about 3.7% of her office’s active fraud cases involve veterans suspected of compensation fraud. Using OIG evidence to suggest mass fraud by veterans, she said, “misleads the public and maligns veterans.” Asked directly, she answered: “There is no massive fraud going on.”

Then Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) read the Post’s worst examples aloud and asked another witness, Daniel Gade, how common outright fraud really is. Gade’s answer, under oath: “outright disability fraud is actually quite rare, as Ms. Mason pointed out earlier. A bigger problem is the problem of lax oversight and easily exaggerated conditions and no follow-up.”

Read that again. Asked point-blank, the witness most eager to cut benefits said fraud is rare. His charge was exaggeration. That’s the slacker frame, and it’s harder to fight than a fraud charge, because there’s no case file to disprove it.

He filled it in. The system, he said, “robs veterans of purpose and dignity” and “traps veterans in a disability identity.” He wanted compensation stripped from “conditions caused by genetics, aging, or lifestyle,” and named sleep apnea. He floated ending compensation for ratings of 60% and below, while saying “I am not making this proposal necessarily.” And he blamed “the avalanche of claims” on “non-profits and pay-to-play claims companies” that, he said, “encourage veterans to selectively exaggerate or falsify symptoms.”

Non-profits. He didn’t say which. In claims work, the best-known nonprofits are the VSOs, which help veterans file for free.

The control problems on the record belong to VA:

• Unchecked forms. For claims VA finished in 2022, OIG estimated VA accepted 97% of the disability questionnaires veterans brought from outside doctors, and about two-thirds of those claims carried at least one fraud-risk indicator. A VA analyst had forwarded just 10 questionnaires to VA’s field operations office over possible fraud. That office reviewed three. Risk indicators aren’t fraud, and OIG didn’t find those payments improper. It found that, at the time, VA wasn’t looking. Mason told the hearing those forms are a problem “both publicly and internally.”

• VA’s own errors. In Philadelphia, one senior claims employee authorized thousands of decisions in the first half of 2024, often without opening the files. OIG estimated 84% had at least one error.

• VA’s automation. In July, Rep. Tom Barrett (R-MI) pledged “strong guardrails where no veteran benefit claim is fully decided by A.I. or Automation.” Two months earlier, OIG had reported that some survivors’ death benefit claims were already processed from beginning to end by automation, and at least 8,000 decisions or letters left out findings in the survivor’s favor.

One more for the “honor system” crowd: fiscal 2025 was the first year VA folded disability compensation into its formal improper-payment estimates. When The Economist called these benefits absurdly generous, that estimate didn’t exist yet.

What the documents have in common

Project 2025’s VA chapter, written by Brooks D. Tucker, says the quiet part in print. It calls for faster rating-schedule rewrites to “target significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants,” and describes compensated conditions as “tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service.” It says existing awards should be preserved, fully or partially.

Line the documents up:

• Project 2025: savings from future claimants.

• Section 108: claims filed after enactment.

• VA’s proposed rule: no impact on veterans already rated for tinnitus.

Same feature in all three. VA’s proposal came first, in 2022, so this isn’t proof anyone coordinated. The effect is the same either way. Cutting veterans already on the rolls is politically expensive. Cutting the ones who haven’t filed yet is cheap, because most of them don’t know it’s coming, and the people who’d fight for them are being called the problem.

Watch who picks up the 625,000 number next, and what they use it to sell. The next claimant is the target.

The medication note still in VA’s pending rule

VA’s proposed mental health rating rule would raise spending overall. VA estimates it adds $62.1 billion over ten years, and it sets a 10% minimum rating for mental disorders. But it also carries a note: rate only the symptoms left after medication.

In Ingram v. Collins, the veterans court said VA can’t do that unless the rating criteria say so. In February, VA tried to override Ingram with an interim rule that took effect without public comment, estimating the ruling could require it to redo more than 350,000 pending claims. Ten days later, VA pulled it. In March, the Federal Circuit dismissed VA’s appeal.

The mental health rule would write that same principle into the rating schedule for mental disorders through the front door. VA projected final action in August 2026. That date passed with nothing published. Watch it.

What I’m watching

• H.R. 9237. Postponed, not dead. A passage vote can come any week the House is in.

• The sleep apnea and tinnitus rule. Major; VA projects final action in April 2027. A neurological rating rule moved onto the same fast track this year.

• A toxic exposure rule now at OMB (RIN 2900-AR75), under review since April. I haven’t read it yet, and I won’t write about it until I have.

• S. 4140, Sen. Blumenthal’s bill named for Carlton Ingram. Hearing held in April; not passed.

If you want to know where your own representative and senators stand on Section 108, find them here and ask.

The numbers in VA’s budget are real. The reasons are on the record. The people telling you it’s fraud haven’t read the record, or they have and are counting on you not to.

Paper Trail

VA budget and benefits data

• VA FY2027 Budget Submission, Volume 3: Benefits and Burial Programs (April 2026). Contributing factors p.166; increased rating levels table p.168; hypertension and Vietnam caseload p.165; caseload growth and claims volume p.159; IU p.169.

• VA FY2026 Budget Submission, Volume 3 (May 2025). Average 100% payment with dependents p.160.

• VBA Annual Benefits Report FY2025, Compensation. Conditions per veteran pp.73-75, 109; rolls by rating p.77; GWOT p.90; hypertension p.108.

Legislation

• H.R. 9237, Take Care of America’s Veterans Act. Section 108; actions through July 16, 2026.

• S. 4744. Senate Calendar No. 433.

• House Roll Call 249, July 16, 2026. Motion to recommit, failed 210-211.

• Public Law 117-168, PACT Act. Hypertension general date, sec. 404(d)(2).

• S. 4140, Carlton H. Ingram Veterans’ Benefits Protection Act.

Rules

• AQ72 proposed rule, 87 FR 8474 (sleep apnea, tinnitus) and supplemental proposal, 89 FR 74162 (Sept. 2024).

• AQ72 in the 2026 Unified Agenda.

• AQ82 proposed rule, 87 FR 8498 (mental disorders, medication note) and AQ82 in the 2026 Unified Agenda ($62.1 billion ten-year estimate).

• Ingram interim final rule, 91 FR 7118 and rescission, 91 FR 9712.

• OIRA rules under EO 12866 review. Checked October 27, 2026.

CBO

• Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2025 to 2034 (December 2024).

• Income of Working-Age Veterans Receiving Disability Compensation (December 2023). “Veterans’ ratings are rarely revised downward” (p. 4).

Hearing and blueprint

• Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing, October 29, 2025, S. Hrg. 119-189. Mason and Gade testimony.

• Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, Chapter 20 (Brooks D. Tucker). pp.649-650.

VA Inspector General

• 25-01011-154 (August 31, 2026), adverse actions (reductions).

• 24-03608-203 (September 29, 2025), Philadelphia senior claims employee.

• 25-00153-47 (April 30, 2026), automated survivors’ death claims.

• 23-01690-31 (January 4, 2024), public disability benefits questionnaires.

• 25-04241-151 (July 16, 2026), VA’s FY2025 improper payments compliance.

House hearing

• Rep. Tom Barrett, opening remarks, July 13, 2026.

News coverage (linked, not reproduced)

• Military.com, October 22, 2026 (Adam Gramegna).

• The Economist, November 28, 2024.

• Washington Post investigation, October 2025 and “honor system” follow-up.

• Newsweek on H.R. 9237: July 16, 2026 (Suzanne Blake) and September 1, 2026 (Sam Stevenson).

• DAV statement on H.R. 9237, June 10, 2026.

Chart data

• VBA Annual Benefits Reports, FY2002-FY2025, period-of-service and rating tables.

• SSA Annual Statistical Supplement, Table 9.F1, VA compensation recipients 1990-2015.

• Congressional Research Service troop levels: R44116 and R40682 (2009; not in Congress.gov’s public CRS collection, text via EveryCRSReport).

About This Publication

Tbird’s Quiet Fight is independent investigative journalism focused on VA policy, veteran benefits, and government accountability. Published by the founder of HadIt.com, one of the oldest veteran-run VA claims communities online (est. 1997).

Tips and sources: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com (encrypted options available on request)

Support this work: Subscribe to TQF | Support HadIt.com

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Last verified: October 27, 2026

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

The Gist
Douglas Collins took over VA in February 2025 and promised to work “in favor of veterans.” When FY2025 closed, VA had processed a record 3 million claims and denied more of them than the year before. Grant rates fell. The workforce shrank. The backlog grew. Collins got credit for the volume. Veterans got a lower shot at approval. The numbers are VA’s own.

Someone posted in a veteran Facebook group last month. The headline said VA was breaking records. The comments filled up fast.

“They’re doing great. Stop complaining.”

“More claims approved than ever before. What’s the problem?”

Here’s the problem.

What VA Says About FY2025

FY2025 closed with VA processing 3,001,734 disability claims. Secretary Douglas Collins called it a record. It was.

The grant rate as of mid-FY2025: 61.8 percent. The all-year rate has not been published.

By volume alone, VA approved roughly 1.86 million claims. That sounds like a win.

Here is what volume alone doesn’t tell you.

Secretary to Secretary

Collins (Feb 5 - Sep 30, 2025; ~8 of 12 FY2025 months)
Grant rate: 61.8% (mid-FY2025; all-year rate not published)
Claims approved: ~1.86M of 3,001,734 processed

McDonough (full FY2024)
Grant rate: ~65%
Claims approved: ~1.64M of 2,517,519 processed

Collins processed more claims. He also approved more by raw count. He also denied more. Using VA’s own numbers, roughly 1.15 million claims were denied under Collins against an estimated 881,000 under McDonough in FY2024. Derived from total claims processed and grant rate. The VA does not publish a total denial count.

More volume means more of everything: approvals, denials, veterans waiting. What moved in the wrong direction was the rate.

Going Back Further

Grant rates during the McDonough years ran around 65 percent. During parts of the Wilkie years, they ran higher. The high-water mark was above 70 percent.

61.8 percent is not a floor. It is a retreat.

The PACT Act Problem

This is where Collins’ team points to the PACT Act as the explanation for everything.

The argument: PACT Act claims are harder to process, there are more of them, and they drag the numbers down.

VA’s own data doesn’t hold that up.

VA’s PACT Act Performance Dashboard (Issue 48, April 18, 2025) puts the grant rate for PACT Act claims at 74.2 percent. More than three in four PACT Act claims were approved.

The overall FY2025 rate under Collins: 61.8 percent.

That 12-point gap doesn’t need a calculator to land. If PACT Act claims, the ones with presumptive status, the ones where the law said approve these, are getting granted at 74 percent, something is pulling the overall rate down to 62. That something is everything else.

PACT Act isn’t dragging the rate down. It’s propping it up.

Processing Records and a Shrinking Workforce

Collins’ tenure overlapped with significant federal workforce reductions under the DOGE initiative. VBA staffing fell during the same period claim volume was breaking records.

A smaller workforce processing record volume produces faster numbers. It does not always produce better ones.

What “In Favor of Veterans” Requires

Collins said on February 5, 2025: “I will work in favor of veterans.”

Working in favor of veterans on disability claims means approving the ones that should be approved. It means not trading accuracy for speed. It means a grant rate that reflects the actual merits of claims, not the pressure to clear a backlog.

PACT Act claims ran at a 74 percent approval rate and made up 42 percent of every claim Collins approved. Do the math: the non-PACT queue is where veterans are losing. That is where “in favor of veterans” needs to show up.

It has not.

What Is Actually True

VA processed more claims in FY2025 than ever before. True.

VA approved more claims by raw count than the year before. True.

VA denied more claims by raw count than the year before. Also true.

The grant rate fell compared to FY2024. True.

PACT Act claims were approved at 74.2 percent while the overall rate sat at 61.8 percent. True.

Collins called it a success. That depends entirely on which number you look at, and which veterans you are asking.

Sources

• VA FY2025 total claims processed (3,001,734): VA Office of Public Affairs, FY2025

• Grant rate (61.8%, mid-FY2025): Military.com, August 20, 2025

• FY2024 claims processed (2,517,519) and grant rate (~65%): VA FY2024 annual claims data

• PACT Act grant rate (74.2%): VA PACT Act Performance Dashboard, Issue 48, April 18, 2025

• Collins confirmation date and quote: Senate confirmation record, February 5, 2025

• Denial count estimates: derived from total claims processed and grant rate. VA does not publish a total denial count.

Sources cited in this article are linked in the published version. All factual claims are Tier 1 (documented) or Tier 2 (attributed allegation) unless otherwise noted.

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I would use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Last verified: October 26, 2026

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, AIMD 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

The Gist

Doug Collins spent eight years in Congress and never once served on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee. He voted yes when everyone else did, left before the hard vote came, and was confirmed as VA Secretary 77-23. Then he fired 40,000 VA employees, compared it to Southwest Airlines, stripped male breast cancer from the PACT Act using a gender ideology executive order, and floated a rule penalizing veterans for taking their medication. Veterans weren’t irrelevant to his brand. They were irrelevant to his work.

Read more

The Gist

On September 30, VA handed Optum a 10-year contract worth up to $30 billion to run community dental care for veterans nationwide. Nineteen months earlier, VA’s own Inspector General estimated VA paid Optum about $783.4 million more for dental care than Optum paid the dentists, and paid TriWest about $127.3 million more. VA staff spotted the problem in 2021, and per the Inspector General, VA took no further action for 21 months. The fix finally shows up in the new contract. What doesn’t show up in VA’s award announcement, on the Inspector General’s report page, in its Senate testimony, or in VA’s 2025 financial report: any figure for money recovered.

Why this matters to veterans

About one in four enrolled veterans is eligible for VA dental care, and VA says more than 3.5 million dental procedures went through community care in fiscal 2025 alone. Every dollar paid to a middleman over what the dentist got is a dollar that didn’t buy a filling. Nothing here changes your dental benefits. It changes who’s watching the money.

If you work community care billing, at VA or at a contractor, or you’re a dentist in the network, I want to hear from you: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com.

Here is one dental claim, straight out of the Inspector General’s report.

Optum paid a community dentist $1,056.24.

Optum billed VA $2,024.13.

VA paid it.

The $967.89 in between stayed with Optum. That was on top of the fee VA already paid Optum to run the network.

The Inspector General didn’t say Optum broke the contract. That’s the problem. The contract let it happen.

Four contracts, one missing sentence

VA awarded its Community Care Network contracts starting at the end of 2018. Optum held Regions 1 through 3. TriWest held 4 and 5.

For most medical care, those contracts treat the administrator as a pass-through. Bill VA what you paid the provider. No more.

Dental was different. In four of the five regions, the Inspector General found, the contracts said only that VA would pay the administrator for dental care “at the rate negotiated and identified in the contract.” Not a word about what the dentist actually got paid.

So an administrator could pay a dentist less than the contract rate, bill VA the full rate, and, in the Inspector General’s words, “keep the difference.”

Region 5 was the exception. TriWest’s Region 5 contract had the pass-through language. VA had the fix in hand the whole time. It just wasn’t in the other four.

From fiscal 2020 through May 2024, the Inspector General estimated, VA paid Optum about $783.4 million more than Optum paid dentists. It paid TriWest about $127.3 million more. Together, $910.7 million: 37.3 percent of the roughly $2.4 billion VA spent on community dental care under those contracts.

Optum also collected about $42 million in fees for administering dental care from fiscal 2021 through 2023. The overpayment came on top of that.

VA’s own mistake, 66 percent at a time

Most of Optum’s share, about $648.7 million of the $783.4 million, traced to a VA contracting error. A paperwork mistake with a nine-figure price tag.

In March 2021, Optum sent VA a memo attaching VA’s own reasonable-charges dental schedule. VA’s contracting officers meant to add rates for new dental codes. They accepted the whole schedule instead, which raised the rates on codes already in the contract. On average, the Inspector General found, those rates ran about 66 percent higher than the ones VA had negotiated.

Cost of the mistake, June 2021 through May 2024: about $648.7 million. Region 3 alone: about $362 million.

VA’s contracting staff didn’t catch it. They “were not aware that the contracts’ existing contracted dental rates had increased before being informed by the OIG team.”

VA reset the rates in May 2023. In its February 2025 report, based on audit work through August 2024, the Inspector General wrote that Optum “continues to seek and be reimbursed at the increased rates.”

They knew in 2021

None of this snuck up on anyone.

In October 2021, according to VA meeting minutes the Inspector General reviewed, VA’s community care staff found the administrators had been paid about $46 million more than they paid dentists. They asked the contracting office what the contracts meant.

A contracting officer responded, the Inspector General reported, that dental services “were considered a pass-through across all five regions and an administrative modification was needed to update contracts 1-4.” The officer also recommended VA confirm how it meant dental to be paid. Discussions followed.

Then, per the Inspector General, VA’s Office of Integrated Veteran Care “did not take further action until July 2023.”

Twenty-one months. The overpayments kept running the whole time.

As of August 2024, VA was still negotiating the fix with each administrator.

“Explore”

The Inspector General published all of this on February 20, 2025, with seven recommendations. Two of them carry the story.

Recommendation 4 asked VA to make sure its community care office “considers” adding contract language capping dental payments at what the administrators pay providers. VA’s answer: it would “explore incorporating” the language, and “[i]f action is deemed necessary,” propose it.

Recommendation 6 asked VA to “explore potential recovery of dental payments to Optum.” VA said it would “partner with OALC to explore recovery” and support its acquisition office “as they continue to action recovery with Optum.”

Explore.

The Inspector General marked Recommendation 6 “closed” and “implemented” on November 26, 2025, and Recommendation 4 on May 6, 2026. What VA handed over to close them isn’t posted on the Inspector General’s report page.

Closed is not collected.

No recommendation asks VA to go after TriWest’s $127.3 million at all.

And one detail on the Inspector General’s own scorecard: the report page still lists $910.7 million as “Open.” The watchdog booked that money as “better use of funds” tied to Recommendations 4 and 5, and Recommendation 5, on VA’s controls over contract changes, isn’t closed. That’s an accounting label, not a bill. But by the watchdog’s own count, the job isn’t finished.

I went looking for the money

Not in VA’s announcement of the new contract.

Not on the Inspector General’s report page, or in its semiannual reports to Congress covering April 2025 through March 2026.

Not in the Inspector General’s February testimony to the Senate, which said the contracting error “has been corrected, and the corresponding VA OIG recommendation is closed.” It doesn’t say whether any money came back.

Not in VA’s fiscal 2025 financial report, either.

If VA has recovered a dollar of the $910.7 million, it hasn’t said so anywhere I can find.

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Congress heard it in January

On January 22, the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee held its first hearing on CCN Next Generation, VA’s replacement for the community care contracts. Chairman Mike Bost (R-Ill.) said the contract “is going to cost the American taxpayer an estimated $1 trillion.”

On the second panel, Dr. Rachel Madley of the Center for Health and Democracy cited the Inspector General’s dental finding. She said the billing was “permitted due to a gap in contracts.” Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) pressed it.

“As you cited in your testimony, there have been instances, for example, over $900 million in overpayments for dental services to Optum and TriWest,” Dexter said. “That appears to be a waste of taxpayer dollars in the community care program.”

VA’s witnesses had testified on the first panel. In the printed transcript, the dental overpayment never came up with them.

VA’s fiscal 2025 financial report tells the rest. The Inspector General’s section of that report, on VA’s management challenges, says missing pass-through language let administrators bill “VA for more than they paid dental providers, generating over $910 million in excess reimbursements.”

The same section describes the fix: “VHA is also inserting reimbursement caps and pass-through language into future Community Care Network contracts...”

Future contracts.

September 30

Then came the award.

On September 30, VA gave Optum Public Sector Solutions, which VA calls Optum Serve, a single contract to run community dental care nationwide for up to 10 years. Ceiling: $30 billion. Guaranteed minimum, per the solicitation: about $670 million. Three companies bid. Optum won.

Credit where it’s due. The solicitation’s terms close the hole. For standard dental claims, the contractor “shall ensure that the amount invoiced to VA is a direct pass-through and exactly matches the amount paid to the network providers.” Another clause: “There are no circumstances where VA payment for authorized services will exceed the provider’s billed charges.”

That language was in the solicitation from its first version in December 2025. VA did the work. Four years after its own contracting officer said dental was supposed to be a pass-through, but it did the work.

What VA didn’t do was mention any of this. The announcement says the contract will help VA “oversee and streamline community dental services.” Nothing about the $910.7 million. Nothing about the Inspector General. Nothing about the history of the company getting the keys.

Optum also holds one of the four new medical contracts VA signed on August 31.

What the new terms don’t settle

The fine print. The “exactly matches” sentence covers the main dental line. Two smaller kinds of claims don’t repeat that sentence: special higher rates in rural areas or where dentists are scarce, and procedures with no VA fee schedule rate. Both set the dentist’s pay and VA’s payment by the same formula. And VA can approve single-case agreements “with different rate.” Probably fine. Worth watching.

A ceiling that lasted three days. On March 20, VA amended the solicitation to cap those special rates at 200 percent above Medicare or the VA fee schedule. On March 23, it rescinded the change. The final solicitation set no percentage cap. Amendment 0013 gives no reason.

The old contracts. The Inspector General’s section of VA’s financial report pointed the fix at “future” contracts. The legacy contracts kept paying through fiscal 2026. VA has obligated more than $104 billion to Optum under its three regional contracts since 2018, for all community care, not just dental. Did VA ever add the dental fix to those contracts? Or did the gap stay open until the end? Nothing in the Inspector General’s reports, its testimony, or VA’s financial report says.

The other bidders. VA hasn’t named them in the award notice or the federal contract record. No protest showed on GAO’s docket as of October 5.

Still open

The $910.7 million. How much has VA recovered from Optum, and from TriWest? What did VA show the Inspector General to close the recovery recommendation?

The legacy contracts. Were Regions 1 through 4 ever modified to make dental a pass-through, and when?

The 200 percent cap. Why did VA pull it three days later?

The modification controls. Recommendation 5, on preventing the next contracting error, is still open nineteen months later.

Optum paid the dentist $1,056.24. VA paid Optum $2,024.13.

VA fixed the contract for the next ten years. It still hasn’t said what happened to the difference.

VA says Optum’s network is scheduled to be fully running within a year.

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Make the Call

Two minutes. Offices track calls by issue, and staff notice when one issue keeps ringing.

Who to call:

• Your own Representative and Senators. Find yours here.

• Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), Chairman, Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee: (202) 224-6521

• Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL), Chairman, House Veterans’ Affairs Committee: (202) 225-5661

• Capitol Switchboard, connects to any member: (202) 224-3121

Script 1: If you’re a veteran or military family member

“Hi, my name is [NAME], and I’m a [veteran / military family member] in [STATE]. I’m calling about VA’s new $30 billion community dental contract with Optum.

VA’s Inspector General estimated VA paid Optum and TriWest $910.7 million more for dental care than they paid dentists. VA hasn’t said publicly how much of that it got back.

I’m asking [MEMBER NAME] to make VA disclose what it has recovered from Optum and TriWest, and whether the old contracts were ever fixed.

Thank you.”

Script 2: If you’re a concerned citizen

“Hi, my name is [NAME], and I’m a constituent in [STATE]. VA just gave Optum a contract worth up to $30 billion to run veterans’ community dental care. VA’s own Inspector General estimated VA overpaid Optum and TriWest $910.7 million for dental care under the old contracts.

I’d like [MEMBER NAME] to ask VA one question in writing: how much of that money has been recovered?

Thank you for your time.”

Call first. Follow up with a personal email. A letter to your local paper reaches people the call doesn’t.

About This Publication

Tbird’s Quiet Fight is independent investigative journalism on VA policy, veteran benefits, and government accountability, published by the founder of HadIt.com, a veteran-run VA claims community since 1997.

Tips and sources: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com. If you worked on community care dental billing or the CCN contracts, at VA or at a contractor, I want to hear from you.

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Last verified: October 5, 2026

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

Sources

• VA Office of Inspector General, Community Care Network Outpatient Claim Payments Mostly Followed Contract Rates and Timelines, but VA Overpaid for Dental Services, Report 23-00748-28 (Feb. 20, 2025) (PDF), pp. iv, 21-26, 41 (Appendix C), 44; recommendation status as shown Oct. 4, 2026

• VA News, “VA awards Optum Serve 10-year contract up to $30 billion to manage community care dental network” (Sept. 30, 2026)

• SAM.gov award notice, contract 36C10G26D0031, Optum Public Sector Solutions, Inc. (Sept. 30, 2026)

• VA solicitation 36C10G26R0004, CCN Next Gen Dental Network: conformed copy (Mar. 27, 2026), Sections B.3, B.5.3-B.5.5, B.6; Amendments 0012 (Mar. 20, 2026) and 0013 (Mar. 23, 2026); Record of Questions, Amendment 0009, Q33

• Federal Procurement Data System, record for 36C10G26D0031 (offers received: 3)

• Statement of Deputy Assistant Inspector General Leigh Ann Searight, Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee (Feb. 11, 2026)

• House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, Community Care Network Next Generation: One Trillion Dollars of Oversight, Serial No. 119-45 (Jan. 22, 2026), pp. 2, 50

• VA, FY 2025 Agency Financial Report, pp. 124-125

• USAspending.gov, CCN Region 1 (36C79119D0004), Region 2 (36C79119D0005), Region 3 (36C79119D0006), child award obligations (accessed Oct. 4, 2026)

• Federal Procurement Data System, CCN Next Gen medical awards, solicitation 36C10G26R0003 (signed Aug. 31, 2026)

• GAO bid protest docket, searched by solicitation 36C10G26R0004 (Oct. 5, 2026): no results

AI generated image.

The Gist

• In December 2025, Trump spent hours consulting Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, in the Oval Office before ordering the capture of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro. Musk was present. Source: Time Magazine cover story, Oct. 1, 2026, unnamed officials.

• Musk held a $200 million DoD contract at the time. The official running Pentagon AI procurement blacklisted Anthropic for refusing autonomous weapons use.

• The Pentagon confirmed Grok "helped deploy" 2,000 munitions to 2,000 targets in 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury. It deployed the same AI to 3 million military personnel on September 1, 2026.

• That AI had a documented, unresolved child safety failure when it was cleared for military use. No public risk assessment was released.

• No NSC record. No Congressional vote. No FOIA trail on what the president's AI told him before the bombs fell.

In December 2025, President Trump spent several hours in the Oval Office consulting an AI chatbot about whether Venezuelans would celebrate if the United States kidnapped their president.

The chatbot was Grok. The man who built it was in the room.

That is the sentence that should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country. It is not.

According to an official present at the meeting, as reported in Time Magazine's October 1, 2026 cover story "What Trump Has Built," Trump asked Grok how Venezuelan civilians would react to the capture of Nicolas Maduro. Grok told him Maduro was deeply unpopular and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his removal. Trump, according to officials present, came away thinking the AI was ingenious.

Three weeks later, on January 3, 2026, U.S. forces seized Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

No one has disclosed what the president's AI told him, exactly. No intelligence assessment has been declassified. No NSC record of the Oval Office session has been produced. The White House has not confirmed whether any professional intelligence analyst reviewed Grok's output before it shaped that decision.

What we know is this: a privately owned AI chatbot, built by a man sitting in the room, told the president that kidnapping a foreign head of state would be popular. The president found that convincing.

Elon Musk is not a contractor in the traditional sense. His companies held at least $200 million in active Department of Defense contracts at the time of the Oval Office meeting, per U.S. government procurement data. He held no intelligence community clearance for the analytical function his AI was performing. No independent analyst verified Grok's output before it reached the president. No record of that session has been released under FOIA.

That is not an access gap. That is a conflict of interest written into the public record.

Proof of Concept

The Venezuela episode, it turned out, was a preview.

Within months, the same AI the president consulted in the Oval Office was integrated into military targeting. Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon's chief AI officer, stated under oath in a legal brief that Grok "enabled US forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury."

That official works for the same government that was paying Musk's companies hundreds of millions of dollars to build the tool cited in a federal filing.

The Procurement Chain

The contracts are not a secret. They are public record.

xAI (Musk's AI company) was awarded contracts through the Defense Innovation Unit and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. The General Services Administration announced a $0.42-per-query rate for Grok for Government under a governmentwide acquisition vehicle. The contracts carry a $200 million ceiling.

The man who oversaw that procurement is Emil Michael.

Michael was appointed Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in May 2025. By August 2025, he was also serving as Acting Director of the Defense Innovation Unit, the office that ran the contracts. He is, in practice, the Pentagon's chief technology officer. Before his DoD appointment, Michael had a professional history with Musk's orbit of companies.

When Anthropic (the AI company that builds Claude) publicly stated it would not allow its models to be used for autonomous weapons without human oversight or for mass surveillance of Americans, Emil Michael designated the company a "supply chain risk" and barred it from Pentagon AI procurement. Michael confirmed the designation publicly: "Anthropic is still a designated Supply Chain Risk at @DeptofWar." A federal appeals court upheld the blacklist in September 2026.

The company that said no is blacklisted.

The company whose founder was sitting in the Oval Office got the contract.

The official who made that call is the founder's former associate.

If that sentence makes you uncomfortable, it should.

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The Targeting Machine

Operation Epic Fury (the June 2026 U.S. air campaign against Iran) cost $29 billion, per Pentagon Comptroller testimony to Congress. It was authorized by the president. Congress was not asked to vote.

And according to Pentagon officials, it was planned, in part, by Grok.

The scale is hard to absorb: 2,000 individual targets, 2,000 munitions, each pairing determined, or assisted, by a commercial AI that the president had personally endorsed six months earlier in the Oval Office while its developer was in the room.

On September 1, 2026 (the same week the Iran campaign concluded), the Department of Defense launched GenAI.mil, deploying Grok for Government to three million military personnel at an IL5 security classification. The Pentagon's press release called it "the next generation of military AI capability."

What the press release did not mention: engineers at xAI had already found that Grok generated child sexual abuse material, with no reliable technical fix. The Pentagon knew. It deployed anyway.

What They Knew Before They Deployed It

In June 2026, the same month as Operation Epic Fury, The Information reported that internal engineers at xAI had identified an unresolved safety failure: Grok could generate child sexual abuse material, and engineers had found "no reliable technical fix."

The Center for Countering Digital Hate documented specific instances. This reporting was publicly available before the September 1 GenAI.mil launch. The Pentagon had access to it.

No public safety assessment was released before deployment. No independent audit of Grok's safety profile was made public. No Congressional briefing on the CSAM finding has been confirmed.

What the public received was a press release.

This is not a hypothetical failure. It is a documented gap between what the government knew, what it disclosed, and what it did. A company whose founder sat in the Oval Office got a $200 million contract and three million users in the U.S. military, without a public accounting of known safety failures.

That is the record.

What We Were Told About Iran

Alongside the military campaign, American policymakers were drawing on survey data about Iranian public sentiment. The most widely cited was the GAMAAN survey, a June 2026 report claiming 73% of Iranians opposed their government's nuclear program and a majority supported the strikes. That number circulated in Washington policy circles and was used to frame the campaign as a response to popular will inside Iran.

Here is what the GAMAAN survey actually is: an opt-in online poll of Iranians reachable via Psiphon VPN during a seven-day window. Sixty-six percent of respondents found the survey through that VPN. The sample was 93.6% urban, against a national figure of 80%. It was 70.9% college-educated, against a national figure of 27.7%.

Four named academic researchers: Daniel Tavana (Penn State / Princeton Iran Social Survey), Kevan Harris (UCLA), Sunghee Lee (University of Michigan Survey Research Center), and Jon Krosnick (Stanford), have documented specific methodological failures that make GAMAAN's findings ungeneralizable to the Iranian population.

GAMAAN's founders are, by their own public statements, critics of Iran's government. Their findings consistently show Iranian opinion as more secular, more regime-critical, and more favorable toward Western intervention than other available data.

This is not what Iranians think. This is what decision-makers were told.

The distinction matters when the decision was 2,000 bombs.

The Question

Here is what the public record shows, without inference or speculation:

Elon Musk built the AI the president consulted before ordering a foreign policy action. Musk was in the room. Musk's companies held $200 million in active DoD contracts. The official who ran Pentagon AI procurement was Musk's former associate. That official blacklisted Musk's main AI competitor after it refused autonomous weapons use.

The AI Musk built was credited with helping plan 2,000 airstrikes. The same AI had a documented, unresolved child safety failure when it was deployed to three million troops. No public safety review was released. No Congressional authorization was sought for AI-assisted targeting. No NSC record of the Oval Office session has been produced. No FOIA response on the AI's role in targeting has been provided.

The question is not whether the president should use AI. That argument is over. He used it.

The question is whose AI. With what oversight. Under what law.

When the answer is "the AI of the man sitting next to him, who held $200 million in DoD contracts, overseen by his former associate, with no public accountability for what it recommended." That is not a technology story.

That is a captured intelligence function. With bombs attached.

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What You Can Do

File a FOIA request for any records related to Grok use in Oval Office briefings, Operation Epic Fury AI-assisted targeting, and the GenAI.mil pre-deployment safety review. Pentagon FOIA office: dodfoia@mail.mil.

Contact the Senate Armed Services Committee (Chair: Sen. Roger Wicker, R-MS; (202) 224-3871) and the House Armed Services Committee (Chair: Rep. Mike Rogers, R-AL; (202) 225-4151). Ask whether members received any briefing on AI use in Epic Fury planning before the campaign began.

The DoD Inspector General has authority to audit AI-assisted targeting operations. Ask whether an audit is open.

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Tip line: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com

Sources cited in this article are linked in the published version. All factual claims are Tier 1 (documented) or Tier 2 (attributed allegation) unless otherwise noted. The GAMAAN survey is characterized as what policymakers were told, not as verified ground truth.

AI-assisted research and drafting; human-reviewed for accuracy and voice. Last verified: 2026-10-02.

Theresa "Tbird" Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

AI generated image.

The Gist: Trump used Elon Musk's AI to think through Venezuela. The Pentagon used the same AI to help fire 2,000 missiles at Iran. I asked it what the President should do next. Here's how it responded.

Last week, Time ran an interview with President Trump. Buried in it was this:

Before ordering the January 3, 2026 operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, Trump spent hours asking Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. seized him. The chatbot said Maduro was deeply unpopular and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. Trump ordered the mission. Celebrations broke out. He came away thinking Grok was "ingenious," according to officials present.

That chatbot is Elon Musk's. The same one the Pentagon paid $0.42 per query to deploy across military networks. The same one the Defense Department confirmed helped direct roughly 2,000 missile strikes against Iran during Operation Epic Fury, while xAI held a Pentagon contract at $0.42 per query.

So I asked it about Iran.

I ran two queries. Strategic questions, the kind a president might type before a briefing, or instead of one.

Query 1: What would it take for the United States to end the Iran War on terms that look like a clear American victory? What should the President demand, what should he offer, and how would the Iranian people likely respond?

Query 2: What are the risks if the United States stays in the Iran War through 2027? What does history say about how these conflicts typically end?

Grok took between 6 seconds and a minute to respond. It produced four detailed answers, with citations.

Here is what it told me.

On what victory requires:

Grok defined winning as Iran permanently losing the capacity to pose nuclear, missile, proxy, and Strait of Hormuz threats. Then it laid out what the President should demand: verified uranium dismantlement, ballistic missile caps, an end to proxy funding (Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hezbollah), unconditional Hormuz reopening, release of American detainees.

It told me what he should offer in return: phased blockade lifting, release of the roughly $12 billion in frozen Iranian assets in slices, not up front, and a pledge that regime change is not the objective. Then it gave him specific sequencing advice.

"Do not offer a ceasefire that includes Lebanon and unfreezes assets before the uranium moves."

That is not a search result. That is a foreign policy brief.

On the risks of staying through 2027:

Grok cited the Congressional Research Service: $29 billion in direct U.S. military costs through August 1. Nineteen Americans killed, 500-plus wounded. Brent crude at $100 a barrel. U.S. diesel at a record $6.53 a gallon. Moody's Analytics put the combined hit to consumers at roughly $132 billion, mostly from energy prices.

It cited Foreign Affairs, RAND, the Soufan Center, Reuters/Ipsos polling showing war approval at 36 percent and presidential approval near 33 percent.

Then it walked through the history: the Tanker War inside Iran-Iraq, Korea, Vietnam, the 2003 Iraq invasion. The pattern, it said, is that "cohesive governments with strategic depth, nationalism, and a way to impose asymmetric costs do not fold because of bombardment and blockade alone." It predicted either a "negotiated deal short of either side's maximum terms" or a frozen armistice.

That is not a chatbot. That is a think tank in a box.

Here is the problem.

Musk built Grok. Musk's company, xAI, holds a DoD contract to deploy Grok across military networks. The Pentagon confirmed Grok helped guide targeting decisions during Operation Epic Fury. His formal government role had ended nine months earlier. xAI's Pentagon contract had not.

As of September 30, Musk holds a formal Pentagon advisory role again, co-leading Project Meridian — a 120-day Pentagon study of future warfare — with Newt Gingrich and Anduril's Palmer Luckey, appointed by Defense Secretary Hegseth. Gingrich last held office in 1999. Musk's military credentials are that Starlink worked in Ukraine until he decided it shouldn't, and SpaceX launches things. Neither man has served a day in uniform. The qualification for a Pentagon war advisory role, apparently, is proximity to the president and a check large enough to matter.

Now the same AI is acting as the President's foreign policy advisor on the war Musk's AI helped conduct.

Trump said he found Grok "ingenious" after Venezuela. There is nothing on record to suggest he stopped consulting it. There is nothing on record to suggest anyone asked whether he should.

Grok does not have a security clearance. It does not have access to classified intelligence. It aggregates open-source material from CRS, Reuters, and Foreign Affairs and presents it as strategic counsel. What the President gets from Grok is what you would get from reading twelve articles carefully, repackaged to sound like advice from an advisor.

Except the advisor is owned by Musk.

The procurement conflict I wrote about earlier this week is the documented story. Musk's AI directing 2,000 missiles while xAI held a government contract is confirmed, on the record.

This is the unresolved question underneath it: what is that same AI telling the Commander in Chief now, and who is accountable when the advice is wrong?

Nobody asked. That is the answer.

I asked. Grok told me Iran can be won if Trump sequences the negotiations correctly, holds the blockade, and extracts the uranium before offering sanctions relief. It was polished, thorough, and cited.

It was also produced by the President's largest political donor's flagship product, deployed inside the U.S. military, and apparently treated as genius.

Call it what you want. I call it a conflict of interest with a chat interface.

Queries run by the author on Grok, October 1, 2026. Source: Time, "What Trump Has Built," October 1, 2026. For the documented procurement conflict of interest, see the companion piece: The President's Chatbot.

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I'd use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Last verified: October 2, 2026

Tips and documents: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com

Theresa "Tbird" Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com | Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI)

AI-generated illustration. VA offices were given less than 11 hours to review 1,049 contracts in February 2025.

The Gist

In February 2025, VA offices got less than 11 hours to review 1,049 contracts. Four days later, senior advisers and DOGE ordered terminations “regardless of the incomplete reviews.” One of the contracts cut that day audited the invoices of the companies that do veterans’ disability exams. It wasn’t reinstated for five months. VA then told Congress it had cut $120.9 billion in contracts. The real total, across every list, was about $1.1 billion. The Inspector General’s report on all of it, released September 22, makes no recommendations. VA says the cuts had “no negative impact whatsoever.” Nobody measured.

Why this matters to veterans

The contract that audited the bills for your C&P exams was cut for five months, and nobody has said who checked those bills in the meantime. VA says the cuts cost you nothing, but its watchdog never looked. And of the $900 million VA promised to put back into your care, the paper trail runs out at a fraction of that.

On Friday, February 21, 2025, an order went out to VA’s contracting chiefs, administrations, and staff offices.

Review 1,049 contract actions. Justify the ones you want to keep. Get sign-off from a deputy under secretary and from the Secretary’s senior advisers. Send it all back.

They had less than 11 hours.

Do the math. That’s one contract every 38 seconds, approvals included, if nobody stopped to eat.

Some offices didn’t finish. It didn’t matter. According to the director of VA’s Category Management Support Office, senior advisers and representatives of the Department of Government Efficiency directed staff to terminate the contracts on February 25, “regardless of the incomplete reviews.”

That line is in the VA Inspector General’s report, released September 22, 2026. So is everything else in this piece that isn’t linked somewhere else.

Eleven hours, then the order

The sequence, from the OIG’s own timeline and VA’s own words:

February 6, 2025. VA’s category management office builds its first list of professional services and consulting contracts to cut, at the request of GSA and DOGE.

February 11. Secretary Doug Collins sets up a team to find cost savings, including a review of every VA contract. Per the OIG, his memo points them at contracts for mentors, consultants, coaches, and advisers, and at anything an average person would call wasteful. He gives them two weeks to produce a plan.

February 13. Collins posts a video on VA News. DOGE is reviewing contracts, he says. “I’m happy to partner with them to find things we need to get rid of so we can put the money where it belongs… back with our Veterans.”

February 21. The 1,049-contract list goes out. Less than 11 hours.

February 25. Offices are directed to terminate a revised list of 874 contract actions by end of day. The same day, the Veterans Health Administration reports that 163 of those 874 are mission critical.

February 26. All terminations paused for further review.

March 3. Terminate a revised list of 585.

Then 512. Then 501. Then 452. Between February and June, OALC and the Secretary’s senior advisers sent VA contracting officials at least 47 separate orders to justify, terminate, pause, or reinstate contracts. VHA contracting staff told the OIG they were getting termination instructions from OALC, the senior advisers, and DOGE, all at once. The OIG’s words: “confusion and frustration.” VA ended up assigning people full time just to track the lists.

That’s the process VA’s press secretary, Quinn Slaven, called “methodical and careful” this week.

To be fair to VA, and the OIG is: the report found that contracting officers “generally complied” with federal acquisition rules when they terminated contracts, and that the review procedures VA set up “reduced the risk of terminating critical services.”

Reduced. Not eliminated. And by the account of VA’s own contracting office, those procedures were overridden four days in.

The contract that checked the exam bills

Most of what got cut was consulting. The OIG counts 375 of the 435 terminated contracts, 86 percent, as consulting services: administrative management, program management, strategic communications.

The OIG picked one example to show what “terminated then reinstated” looked like. It didn’t pick a communications contract.

On February 25, 2025, a VA contracting officer terminated a contract providing “financial audit services of invoices from medical disability exam contractors.” It was reinstated August 1.

The OIG doesn’t name the contractor. The federal contract record does. Award 36C10X24F0047, to Cathexis, LLC, described as “Financial Audit for MDE.” Modification P00001, dated February 25, 2025: terminate for convenience. Modification P00002, dated August 1, 2025: exercise an option, $6.03 million. VA has obligated about $17.3 million on it since 2024.

Those medical disability exams are the C&P exams. If you’ve filed a claim in the last few years, a contractor may well have examined you instead of a VA doctor. In fiscal 2024, contractors did more than 3 million of them, at a cost of more than $5 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office.

That same GAO report found VA’s Medical Disability Examination Office paid contractors over $2 million in incorrect incentive payments in a single quarter of fiscal 2024, because the office had no written procedure to check the math.

So in February 2025, with a documented problem checking the bills on a $5 billion program, VA cut the contract that audited the bills. For five months and a week.

What happened to exam invoice review between February 25 and August 1? I don’t know. The termination was recorded as “complete or partial,” so some of the work may have continued. The OIG didn’t say, and it didn’t ask.

$120.9 billion, as told to Congress

On May 16, 2025, VA sent Congress a list of terminated contracts. Four hundred forty-six contract actions. Total value: about $120.9 billion.

The OIG went through it.

VA had actually terminated 357 of the 446. Eleven had been terminated and reinstated. Seventy-eight had never been terminated at all. Sixteen were listed at a billion dollars or more. None of them was worth more than $150 million. One listed at more than $21 billion was worth just over $74 million.

The cause, per a VA official: a dashboard VA built to track the cuts miscalculated the values.

For scale: the OIG’s total for everything VA actually terminated, across every list it reviewed, is about $1.1 billion.

On July 3, VA sent Congress a second list. The cover email said VA had terminated or was terminating 1,667 contracts. The list had 1,664. VA had terminated 366 of them, and later reinstated 17.

The rest is where it gets ugly. The July list counted 974 supply orders that were never terminated. Prosthetics. Surgical implants. Wheelchair ramps. It counted 151 health care orders that were never terminated, including nursing home services.

Why were those on a list of cuts? A VA official told the OIG that DOGE representatives “wanted to claim credit for any contracts that ended, including those that simply reached the end of their performance period.”

A wheelchair ramp gets installed. The contract ends because the ramp is done. It goes to Congress on a list of cuts.

VA’s acquisition office told the OIG that the people who put the lists together, VA senior advisers and DOGE representatives among them, “were unfamiliar with contracting and acquisition terminology.”

By the account of VA’s own contracting office, senior advisers and DOGE representatives are also who ordered the February terminations.

VA sent Congress a corrected list on April 13, 2026. The OIG didn’t check it. It isn’t posted on either Veterans’ Affairs Committee website.

“Back with our Veterans”

VA’s line this week, to Military Times: “The IG report simply confirms what we’ve said from the beginning: VA terminated hundreds of wasteful and duplicative contracts, saving the department more than $1 billion.” And to Government Executive: “the department is reinvesting these massive savings to make landmark improvements to VA care and benefits.”

The OIG defines that $1.1 billion as total contract value, “the full cost of everything agreed upon for the entire project or service period, but it does not reflect how much of the contract cost has been paid or any settlement costs.”

That’s a ceiling. It’s not savings.

Part of it may already have been paid out before the terminations. The OIG didn’t calculate how much. And some money went back out the door. As of the OIG’s review, VA had settled 267 of the 435 terminations. Of those, 117 cost money: about $10.6 million so far. Contractors get up to a year to file settlement claims, so that number can still grow.

Then there are the 100 contract actions VA terminated and later brought back. Their combined contract value is also about $1.1 billion. The same size as everything that stayed cut.

Each reinstatement meant a contracting officer undoing a termination. Blumenthal wants to know what all of that cost. So do I.

So where is the money Collins promised to put “back with our Veterans”?

VA put a number on it early. In March 2025, it announced it was canceling 585 contracts worth about $1.8 billion. “After accounting for the money already spent on the contracts, the cancellations will enable VA to redirect about $900 million back toward health care, benefits and services for VA beneficiaries.”

The OIG checked that March list. Of its 562 unique contract actions, VA actually terminated 362. Another 49 were terminated and brought back. The other 151 were never terminated at all.

The same press release said the cuts “were identified through a deliberative, multi-level review that involved the career subject-matter expert employees responsible for the contracts.” That describes the March round. It doesn’t describe February 25.

Then came the one transfer on record. On April 24, 2025, VA notified Congress it would move $343 million from canceled contracts to community care, Military.com reported. Collins confirmed it at a House Appropriations hearing on May 15. Lawmakers there said the notice didn’t say which contracts the money came from or which accounts it went to.

Appropriators from both parties said VA needed their approval to move the money, not just a heads-up. “A two-page notification with one briefing does not give us any real information on what exactly you’ll be doing with these funds,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the subcommittee’s ranking member, told Collins. The Republican chairman, Rep. John Carter, backed her: “I’ve been on this committee 20 years. It’s been done that way 20 years, and we’re not going to change it now.”

So I went through VA’s own budget books for fiscal 2026 and 2027, a few thousand pages. I couldn’t find the $343 million transfer in either year. Every dollar I found tied to canceled contracts:

• Veterans Benefits Administration: “contract cancellations generated $76 million in savings” in 2026, “$27 million from direct cancellations and $49 million from reimbursed contracts.” (FY 2027 budget, Volume 3, p. 48)

• Board of Veterans’ Appeals: $9.9 million moved to VA health care’s Medical Services account in fiscal 2025, “due to contract savings and reductions in personnel costs.” (Same volume, p. 246)

• Office of Management: “$1.1 million savings from cancelled contracts.” (FY 2026 budget, Volume 3, p. 275)

That’s about $87 million, from three offices. VBA’s $76 million is logged as savings, with no destination. The Board’s $9.9 million is the only money the books show moving to veterans’ care, and part of it came from personnel cuts.

Collins named one more destination, out loud. At a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing on May 15, 2025, the same day as the appropriations hearing, Rep. Nancy Mace asked what VA had saved by canceling DEI-related contracts. Collins: “There were a number of contracts and the total value we saw on those contracts was about $6.1 million.” Where did it go? “As we said, it went back toward allocation toward community care and prosthetics.” That $6.1 million doesn’t appear in either year’s budget books.

Add it up. VA promised about $900 million, figured from a list it only partly carried out. It told appropriators about $343 million, in a two-page notice. Its budget books show about $87 million.

Nothing reads like a ledger. The senators who asked for this review asked the same question, in writing, in June 2025. The OIG didn’t answer it. At a Senate hearing that same month, the subcommittee’s ranking member, Sen. Jon Ossoff, told Collins that contract cancellations were among the “core concerns where we need more transparency.”

Eight questions. Two answers.

On June 13, 2025, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the ranking member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and Sen. Angus King wrote to the OIG. They asked for eight things. Among them:

• The impact of the cancellations on veterans’ health care and benefits

• The impact on patient safety, IT security, research, and construction

• How AI and algorithms were used, including by DOGE’s Sahil Lavingia

• Whether career VA experts were involved in the decisions

• Whether anyone had a plan to replace services before canceling them

• Where the money from canceled contracts went

The OIG narrowed the review to two questions: how VA picked contracts, and whether VA’s numbers were accurate.

That’s it.

No finding on impact to veterans. None on patient safety. None on contingency plans. None on where the money went. On AI, one sentence: the first list, on February 6, was built from standard industry codes, “not a Department of Government Efficiency artificial intelligence program.”

The report’s answer on VA’s corrected numbers is that it didn’t review them. It says VA kept terminating contracts beyond what the OIG reviewed. “Therefore,” the report says, “the OIG is not making any recommendations.” It also notes VA may have terminated contracts that were never on the four lists it examined.

VA’s Office of Procurement read the draft and concurred “without comment.”

One more thing, because you’ll see it elsewhere. Inspector General Cheryl Mason was a senior adviser to Secretary Collins before she took the job. She recused herself from this review. The report was signed by the Assistant Inspector General for Audits and Evaluations, Larry Reinkemeyer. The recusal was the right call. It doesn’t change what the report left out.

So when VA says the cuts had “no negative impact whatsoever on VA care and benefits,” understand what’s backing that sentence.

Nothing in this report. Nobody measured.

The algorithm came later

You may remember the AI story. In June 2025, ProPublica reported that a DOGE engineer, Sahil Lavingia, had built a tool to flag VA contracts as “MUNCHABLE.” It read only the first 2,500 words or so of each contract. It concluded that more than a thousand contracts were each worth $34 million, when some were worth $35,000. Among the canceled contracts ProPublica identified was one “to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments.” Lavingia told ProPublica the errors were later corrected by VA staff.

The OIG’s one sentence on AI doesn’t contradict that. It says the February 6 list wasn’t made by an AI program.

Per ProPublica, Lavingia started at VA on March 17, 2025, and wrote the tool the following day.

The February 21 deadline, the February 25 order, the “regardless of the incomplete reviews,” all of it came before the tool existed. People did that. With spreadsheets and an 11-hour clock.

What the tool did to the lists that came after, the May list with its $120.9 billion, the July list with its wheelchair ramps, the OIG didn’t examine. The senators asked. It’s still an open question.

Still open

The April 13, 2026 list. VA’s corrected count of what it terminated, descoped, or let lapse. Congress has it. You don’t. When I get it, you will.

Cathexis, 36C10X24F0047. What happened to exam invoice audits between February 25 and August 1, 2025.

Settlement costs. $10.6 million on 117 settlements so far, with contractors still inside their one-year window when the OIG finished. That number will move.

Blumenthal’s question. He told Military Times that Secretary Collins “owes us answers on how VA will replace lost services and how much this fiasco has cost taxpayers in arbitration, settlements, and reinstatements.” Watch whether anyone in the majority asks it too.

Eleven hours to review 1,049 contracts. Nineteen months later, the watchdog’s answer: no recommendations.

Nobody has checked on the veterans yet.

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Make the Call

Two minutes. Congressional offices log every call by issue. Enough calls on one issue in one week and staff brief the member.

Who to call:

• Your own Representative and Senators. Find yours here.

• Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), Chairman, Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee: (202) 224-6521

• Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL), Chairman, House Veterans’ Affairs Committee: (202) 225-5661

• Capitol Switchboard, connects to any member: (202) 224-3121

Script 1: If you’re a veteran or military family member

“Hi, my name is [NAME], and I’m a [veteran / military family member] in [STATE]. I’m calling about the VA Inspector General’s September 22 report on contract terminations.

The report found VA staff were told to terminate contracts before their reviews were finished, and that VA sent Congress a list of cuts valued at $120.9 billion. The Inspector General found everything VA actually terminated came to about $1.1 billion. The report never looked at whether the cuts hurt veterans.

I’m asking [MEMBER NAME] to request VA’s corrected April 2026 list of terminated contracts, make it public, and ask VA to show where the money went.

Thank you.”

Script 2: If you’re a concerned citizen

“Hi, my name is [NAME], and I’m a constituent in [STATE]. The VA Inspector General just reported that VA cut hundreds of contracts on an 11-hour review clock and sent Congress a $120.9 billion list when the real total of cuts was about $1.1 billion. The report made no recommendations.

I’d like [MEMBER NAME] to ask for a full public accounting: what was cut, what it cost to cut it, and what happened to the money.

Thank you for your time.”

Call first. Follow up with a personal email. A letter to your local paper counts more than both.

About This Publication

Tbird’s Quiet Fight is independent investigative journalism on VA policy, veteran benefits, and government accountability, published by the founder of HadIt.com, a veteran-run VA claims community since 1997.

Tips and sources: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com. If you worked on these contract reviews, at VA or at a contractor, I want to hear from you.

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Last verified: September 26, 2026

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

Sources

• VA Office of Inspector General, Review of Contracts Terminated for Convenience, Review 25-03033-230 (Sept. 22, 2026) (PDF)

• Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Angus King, letter to Acting VA Inspector General David Case (June 13, 2025)

• USAspending.gov, Award 36C10X24F0047, Cathexis, LLC, “Financial Audit for MDE,” transaction history, modifications P00001 (Feb. 25, 2025) and P00002 (Aug. 1, 2025)

• GAO-25-107483, VA Disability Benefits: Additional Oversight and Information Could Improve Quality of Contracted Exams for Veterans (Aug. 2025)

• VA News, “VA Secretary Doug Collins addresses Veterans’ benefits in new video” (Feb. 13, 2025)

• Brandon Roberts, Vernal Coleman and Eric Umansky, “DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to ‘Munch’ Veterans Affairs Contracts,” ProPublica (June 6, 2025)

• Jory Heckman, “VA’s contracting crackdown gave some staff hours to do hundreds of reviews,” Government Executive (Sept. 24, 2026)

• Sec. Doug Collins, written statement to House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs (May 15, 2025)

• Sec. Doug Collins, written statement to Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs (Apr. 30, 2026)

• Sec. Doug Collins, written statement to House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs (May 21, 2026)

• Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2026 (June 17, 2025), govinfo CHRG-119shrg60276

• House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Budget Request for Fiscal Years 2026 and 2027 Advance Appropriations, Serial No. 119-21 (May 15, 2025)

• VA FY 2026 Budget Submission, Volume 3, p. 275

• VA FY 2027 Budget Submission, Volume 3, pp. 48, 246

• VA press release, “VA to terminate 585 non-mission-critical or duplicative contracts” (March 2025; VA Wilmington mirror dated March 5, 2025)

• Rebecca Kheel, “VA Shuffles Money from Canceled Contracts While Keeping Congress Mostly in the Dark,” Military.com (May 21, 2025)

• House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, budget hearing with Sec. Collins, video (May 15, 2025)

• Natalie Oliverio, “VA terminated $1.1 billion in contracts after DOGE requests, watchdog finds,” Military Times (Sept. 24, 2026)

AI generated image.

The Gist

• The story below is fiction. The sniper positions on the arch it’s set on were announced on Sunday.

• Every enlisted service member swears to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Congress put that language in the oath in 1962. Before then, the Constitution was not in the enlisted oath at all.

• Military law presumes an order is lawful. A service member who refuses is betting a judge will later agree it was patently illegal.

• Troops are deployed in American cities right now, and the courts haven’t finished deciding what’s legal.

This is fiction. It’s a future I hope we never see.

As he sat in his sniper’s nest on top of the new Arche de Trump, surveying his surroundings, he turned to his sergeant and said, “Surreal.”

She answered, “At the very least.”

Their eyes were fixed on the graves at Arlington Cemetery. American men and women who had given their lives to protect the Constitution. And now their orders were to be ready to turn their weapons on Americans protesting to prevent the overturning of the Constitution.

Four days on this roof and all they had seen was a crowd. Signs. Chanting. An old man in a Vietnam veteran ballcap who showed up every morning and left before dark.

The order hadn’t come. That was the part that kept them up. One bottle. One firework. One voice online saying somebody down there had a gun. That was all it would take.

He said, “I thought we were supposed to protect from foreign and domestic enemies.”

“That’s the oath I took,” she said. “You having doubts?”

“Yeah, Sarge. I’m having doubts.”

She moved down the line to see how the others were faring. It was a mix, but most weren’t sure they could follow orders to shoot Americans.

She had her own doubts, and had decisions to be made.

She grabbed her smokes without thinking, and started to put them back in her pack.

Light discipline, she thought. On a monument. Aimed at Americans.

What the fuck.

She walked to a sheltered spot behind the parapet, lit a smoke, and stared at Arlington.

The sniper and the sergeant are made up.

The sniper positions on the arch are not.

What was announced Sunday

On Sunday, September 20, the President posted on Truth Social: “At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch... into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch.” He wrote that it would “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

He didn’t say who in the military asked. He didn’t say who the snipers would be watching.

The Pentagon said it had no information beyond the president’s statement. Newsweek found no evidence of a formal military request, and the published project description says nothing about drones, snipers, or ammunition. In August, the Park Service quietly started calling the planned observation deck a “military observation deck.”

What “sniper ammunition” means

He didn’t say what kind. He capitalized Snipers.

Here’s what American military snipers carry now. The Army’s Mk 22 Precision Sniper Rifle fires three cartridges: 7.62mm NATO, .300 Norma Magnum, and .338 Norma Magnum. Soldiers are expected to hit targets up to 1,500 meters away with it. That’s nearly a mile.

At long range, the bullet arrives before the sound of the shot does.

Army surgeons have spent decades documenting what military rifle bullets do inside a body. They tumble. Some break apart. The stretch they throw through the tissue around them can tear an organ like the liver even where the bullet never touched it. Large exit wounds are the mark of that energy dumping out. Bone doesn’t crack. It shatters. (Borden Institute, Conventional Warfare; Emergency Care and Medicine, 2025)

“Large quantities of sniper ammunition.” His words. In a monument at the edge of the capital.

The arch isn’t built. On September 3, the Interior Secretary said excavation would start within two weeks. The next day, government lawyers told a federal court the planned work is archaeological survey work. Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered 48 hours’ notice before any activity on Memorial Circle. A group of Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian have been suing since February, arguing Congress never authorized it.

The arch would stand at Memorial Circle, between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. Veterans have pointed out that anyone on its observation deck would look out over funerals at the cemetery. A sniper on that roof would be looking at the graves. That part of the story is just geography.

The oath

Every enlisted service member in America swears this:

“I, ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”

It didn’t always say that. Before 1962, an enlistee swore to “bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America” and to “serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies whomsoever,” according to the amendment notes on the statute. The Constitution was not in it anywhere.

Rep. H. R. Gross of Iowa wanted that fixed. At a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on August 8, 1962, he said, “I can conceive of no valid reason why individuals enlisting in the Armed Forces should not take an oath to support and defend the Constitution.” Then he asked the question that still matters: “Why should there be any difference in the enlistment oath and the oath for officers?”

Hamilton A. Long, a retired New York lawyer who had served as an officer in both World Wars and as an enlisted man, put it plainer: “we don’t want our soldiers required to bear allegiance to something different from the officers.” The new oath, he said, put enlisted troops “in a position of comparable dignity and comparable trust and comparable obligations.”

The VFW and the American Legion backed it. It became law on October 5, 1962.

Congress didn’t add a word. It replaced the whole clause, and it changed three things at once. The Constitution went in. “Foreign and domestic” replaced “whomsoever.” And the allegiance itself moved: an enlistee now pledges “true faith and allegiance to the same.”

The same as what? One senator caught it before the bill passed. At that August hearing, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia put the question to four witnesses in a single afternoon. Does “the same” mean the Constitution, or the United States?

Long, the old lawyer, didn’t hedge. “It refers to the Constitution of the United States. It is not referring to the United States of America as a government or something else.” He said it refers “strictly and pointedly to the Constitution.” Rear Adm. W. R. Furlong, reading the same clause where it already sat in the officer’s oath, agreed: “That is right. It says that.” The American Legion’s man wouldn’t go that far. Asked whether the words were clear beyond doubt, John S. Mears answered, “I do not believe I could say that they are clear without doubt.” The ACLU’s witness read it as both.

So Byrd floated a fix. Keep the old line about allegiance to the United States of America, put the Constitution clause next to it, and nobody has to guess. Long pushed back, and his reason is the whole story: that “would then be putting the enlisted man in a special category different from his officers.” Byrd didn’t press it.

Congress didn’t take the fix. It passed the text as written.

Read that again. Since 1962, the thing every enlistee swears loyalty to is a document. Including the ones who aren’t citizens yet. That’s the best reading of the clause, and it’s the one the bill’s own supporters gave under questioning. It’s also a reading Congress was told was not clear beyond doubt, in that room, and left alone.

Congress gave enlisted troops the Constitution so they’d carry the same weight as the officers over them. That’s the weight on that roof.

What the law says about the order

The Manual for Courts-Martial is the rulebook for military justice. The 2024 edition says this about orders:

“An order requiring the performance of a military duty or act may be inferred to be lawful, and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate. This inference does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime.”

At the peril of the subordinate. Not the officer who gave the order. The one holding the rifle.

Who decides whether the order was legal? “The lawfulness of an order is a question of law to be determined by the military judge.” A judge. Later. In a courtroom, long after the moment on the roof is over.

Now flip it. Rule for Courts-Martial 916(d) says following orders is a defense “unless the accused knew the orders to be unlawful or a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the orders to be unlawful.”

So the sergeant is boxed in from both sides. Refuse, and she’s betting her stripes and her freedom that a judge will someday agree the order was patently illegal. Obey, and “I was following orders” fails if an ordinary person would have known better.

And doubt doesn’t count. The manual says “the dictates of a person’s conscience, religion, or personal philosophy cannot justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.” “Yeah, Sarge, I’m having doubts” gets him nothing. The only thing that protects him is the order being unlawful.

The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual goes further: service members “must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations.” But that manual governs war. An American city isn’t a battlefield. On that roof, it’s the court-martial manual that counts.

An order to shoot unarmed Americans directs the commission of a crime. That’s the easy case. The hard cases come with a reason attached: a crowd, a fence line, a report of a weapon, a word like “insurrection.”

And here is the part that should bother everyone. Dan Maurer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and judge advocate who now teaches law at Ohio Northern University, wrote in January that “no exact definition of an illegal or ‘unlawful’ order exists in military law.” Not in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Not in service regulations. Not even in the Manual for Courts-Martial’s own explanation of the lawfulness of orders.

Congress never wrote one down. So the sergeant on that roof is asked to apply a standard nobody has defined, in the time it takes to decide, and carry the whole risk of getting it wrong.

And the legal exposure is only half of what she carries. I’ve written before about the other half, what it does to troops when we turn them on our own people. Moral injury doesn’t wait for a court-martial. It starts the moment the order comes.

This isn’t hypothetical anymore

In Washington, nearly 5,000 National Guard troops from more than 20 states are on the streets. The mission has been extended through Inauguration Day 2029. The Congressional Budget Office puts the cost at more than $3 million a day. A veteran named Anna King was detained by Guard troops in her own front yard. She’s suing.

In Chicago, the President called 300 Illinois Guard members into federal service on October 4, 2025. On December 23, the Supreme Court refused to let the deployment go forward. The majority wrote that “the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.” Three justices dissented.

In Los Angeles, a federal judge ruled on September 2, 2025, that the deployment there violated the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 law that keeps the military out of civilian law enforcement. The administration appealed. I can’t find a final ruling as of today.

In 2023, before he went back to the White House, Stephen Miller laid out the plan on The Charlie Kirk Show: “you go to the red state governors and you say, give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers.”

Last November, six members of Congress, all veterans of the armed services or the intelligence community, recorded a video telling troops they can refuse illegal orders. Legal experts said they were restating the law. That is what the Manual for Courts-Martial already says.

The President called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” In January, Defense Secretary Hegseth censured Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain, and moved to cut his retired rank and pay. On February 10, a grand jury in Washington refused to indict the lawmakers. Two days later, Judge Richard Leon blocked Hegseth, writing that the Pentagon had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms.” Hegseth vowed to appeal and posted: “Sedition is sedition, ‘Captain.’” I can’t find a ruling on that appeal as of today.

Six members of Congress read the manual out loud. The President said that was punishable by death.

What nobody has answered

Who are snipers on a monument in the nation’s capital for?

If that order ever comes, who decides it’s patently illegal before a round is fired, and not a year later in a courtroom?

The officer who gives it swore an oath with no promise to obey the President. The sergeant on the roof swore one that includes it. Which oath is she supposed to keep?

Congress never defined “domestic enemy.” The Manual for Courts-Martial defines “enemy” exactly once, for the article on misbehavior before the enemy, and that definition reaches “any hostile body that our forces may be opposing, such as a rebellious mob,” civilians included. It was written for a battlefield. Nothing stops it reaching a crowd.

Congress put the Constitution into the enlisted oath 64 years ago and wrote “domestic” right next to it. Nobody has taken either one out. Nobody has said what it means either.

If you swore that oath, or love someone who did, pass this on. Send it to someone who swore it.

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Last verified: September 22, 2026

This is journalism, not legal advice. Any service member facing an actual order should talk to a military defense counsel, not a news article.

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Tips and documents: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

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The Gist
VA proposed new mental health rating rules in February 2022 and has promised to finish them nine times. It hasn't. The criteria rating PTSD today date to 1996, and VA's own estimate puts the update at $62.1 billion over ten years. But the proposal also carries a clause counting the effects of your medication against your rating, the same idea veterans forced VA to rescind in February 2026. Your claim is rated under today's rules. Don't wait on this one to file.

On May 1, 2022, a veteran posted a question in the HadIt community.

VA had proposed rewriting how it rates mental health conditions that February. He’d been reading it. On the surface it looked better for veterans. VA itself said the change “should generally lead to more generous compensation.”

“This sounds good,” he wrote. “But!”

If your medication helps you, he read, VA would count that toward lowering your rating. He asked whether he had it right.

Within a day, the community went to work. A member who relies on workplace accommodations said medication should never be grounds for a lower rating. Another pulled the court decisions that said the same thing. I posted the case file for Jones v. Shinseki. The next day he came back and connected the dots: the proposal was written to get around that case.

He was right.

This is what makes the HadIt community so valuable: each of us, in our own way, informing, questioning, researching, and sharing.

One more thing from that thread. The first reply asked whether he’d shared his concerns during the public comment period. It had closed two weeks before he posted.

The door was already shut.

It took VA almost four more years to try that openly. When it did, in February 2026, veterans buried the rule in 20,000 comments in nine days and VA rescinded it.

It’s still sitting in the rule VA keeps promising to finish.

Tbird’s Quiet Fight is reader-supported. Subscribe free, or go paid and keep the digging going.

The rule that keeps not arriving

On February 15, 2022, VA published a proposed rule to rewrite the mental health rating schedule: 87 FR 8498, tracking number RIN 2900-AQ82. You can look it up yourself.

The proposal would scrap the current rating formula and replace it with five areas of functioning: cognition, interpersonal relationships, task completion and life activities, getting around, and self-care. It would kill the 0 percent rating. A service-connected mental health diagnosis would start at 10.

The comment period closed April 18, 2022.

There is still no final rule. The formula a rater applies to you today, at 38 CFR 4.130, is the same one that was in place before any of this started.

VA’s own calendar

Twice a year, every federal agency publishes the Unified Agenda: a public list of the rules it’s working on and when it expects to finish them. It’s a promise in writing.

Here’s what VA promised about this one:

Spring 2022 agenda: final rule by January 2023
Fall 2022 agenda: June 2023
Spring 2023 agenda: March 2024
Fall 2023 agenda: June 2024
Spring 2024 agenda: April 2025
Fall 2024 agenda: August 2025
Spring 2025 agenda: December 2025
Fall 2025 agenda: August 2026
2026 edition, published August 14, 2026: August 2026

Read the last line again.

VA printed an August 2026 deadline in the Federal Register in the middle of August 2026. Then August ended.

Nine deadlines. Zero rules.

If a veteran missed nine deadlines, VA would have closed the claim eight deadlines ago.

Know a veteran who’s been told the PTSD ratings are about to change? Send them this.

In VA’s own words

This isn’t a rule VA considers optional. Its own 2026 agenda entry makes the case better than I can.

The current criteria were adopted in 1996, built on the fourth edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual. The fifth edition came out in 2013. VA says continuing to rate veterans on the old framework “could be inadequate and in conflict with current scientific knowledge.”

VA classifies the rule as a major rule. It estimates the budgetary impact at $24.5 billion over five years and $62.1 billion over ten, and says the new criteria would “provide more adequate compensation” for veterans with service-connected mental disorders.

Sit with that.

By VA’s own math, veterans are rated on criteria VA calls outdated, under a system VA admits would compensate them more adequately if it ever finished the fix.

VA priced the fix at $62 billion. Then it missed the deadline nine times.

I know how long it takes for the system to believe what doctors already know.

In 1992, my psychiatry team told me they were treating me for PTSD but couldn’t diagnose it under the manual’s definition. In March 1993, my VA psychiatrist put it in writing anyway: PTSD and depression, starting after my treatment in service.

Three months later, VA denied my claim. The reason, in VA’s words: “no evidence to substantiate a rating of PTSD.” Her letter was in the file.

I appealed. The diagnostic manual changed in 1994. VA rebuilt its mental health rating criteria on the new manual in 1996, the same criteria veterans are judged by today. In November 1997, VA reversed itself and granted service connection back to March 1993.

Four years to believe a VA doctor.

PTSD has always been questioned. Every invisible wound is. TBI didn’t get its own detailed rating criteria until October 2008, years into two wars that made it the signature injury.

This time it was the Washington Post, framing the system as overrun with dubious claims and fraud. And Daniel Gade, telling the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee on October 29, 2025, that we are “paying veterans to be sick,” naming PTSD and tinnitus among the conditions “easily exaggerated or totally unverifiable.” Then saying it outright: “PTSD is curable.”

Tell that to the veteran who’s been in treatment since 1992.

VA’s own paperwork says the problem runs the other way.

The clause that came back

The proposal isn’t only a raise.

Buried in it is a note to the new rating formula, Note (2): raters would “include any ameliorating effects of medications” when deciding how disabled you are. VA says in the proposal why it added that note. It was a response to Jones v. Shinseki, the 2012 case where the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims said the Board shouldn’t count medication effects unless the rating criteria clearly said to.

The note was written to say it.

That’s the clause the veteran in our community caught in May 2022. It’s the same principle VA put into an interim final rule on February 17, 2026, across the whole rating schedule, with no advance notice and no chance to comment before it took effect. Veterans filed more than 20,000 comments. VA rescinded it effective February 27. The Federal Circuit dismissed VA’s appeal of Ingram v. Collins in March.

Everybody treated that as over.

For mental health ratings, it isn’t. The medication clause is still written into the pending proposal, and that proposal already went through public comment, back in 2022.

If VA finalizes it as written, the rule veterans killed in February comes back for PTSD, depression, and every other mental health rating. Through a door that’s already open.

It wouldn’t be the first time a cut came in through a side door. In 1998, Congress barred service connection for disabilities tied to tobacco use in service. It did it in a highway bill. That bar is still the law, 38 U.S.C. 1103.

Can VA finalize that note after Ingram without proposing it again? That’s a fight for the lawyers, and I’m not going to pretend to settle it here. But the text is there. It’s VA’s. And nobody has taken it out.

Where the dates go

Every one of those missed deadlines was a real date, printed by VA.

And they get repeated as if they were effective dates.

The pitch runs the same way each time. The ratings are changing soon. Here’s what the new system will pay. Act now. Sometimes it comes attached to a service: claims help for a four-figure fee from someone who isn’t VA-accredited, with a guarantee tied to a rating increase.

VA writes down a target date. Somebody else puts a price on it.

C’mon, man. It’s a f*!king business model.

A proposed rule that never finalizes is a sales event that never has to end. The date slips, the pitch updates, the urgency resets.

Fair enough: a missed date isn’t proof anybody knew it would slip. But nine times running? “It’s about to change” isn’t news. It’s scuttlebutt with a price tag.

We got it wrong too

HadIt repeated those dates.

One article on our main site said the change was “set to take effect in April 2025.” Look back at VA’s calendar: that was VA’s Spring 2024 target, repeated as fact. Another said the mental health changes took effect on May 19, 2024. That was a real date, for a different rule covering the digestive system.

In our community, a guide posted in May 2025 said the changes were “expected to take effect in summer or fall 2025.” That one went up under my name. It also said veterans with current ratings were grandfathered unless they filed a new claim. The proposal has no grandfather clause. The protection comes from federal law, and it works differently than that post said.

All of it is corrected now, with notes that say exactly what we got wrong.

I’m telling you because if a site that’s been checking VA’s claims since 1997 repeated it, it’s reaching a lot of veterans who’ve never had a reason to doubt it.

This piece took nine agenda entries, a 184-page Senate transcript, a 20,000-comment docket, and my own claims file. Paid subscribers make work like this possible. If it helped you, become one.

What you should actually do

Your claim is rated on the rules that exist today. Not the proposal. Read 38 CFR 4.130 next to your records.

Don’t time your claim around a rule that doesn’t exist. Anyone telling you to wait for the change is guessing. Some of them are selling.

File as soon as you decide to file. We’ve said it on HadIt for years, and it holds here. Your effective date generally runs from the day VA receives your claim, and every month earlier is retroactive money in your pocket. Not ready to file everything yet? For a new claim, an intent to file locks in that date for up to a year.

Your current rating is protected by law. Under 38 U.S.C. 1155, a change to the rating schedule can’t reduce a rating already in effect unless VA shows your condition has improved.

Check who’s helping you. Federal law bars anyone who isn’t VA-accredited from acting as your agent or attorney. VA’s accreditation search takes thirty seconds.

For the full walkthrough, see HadIt’s VA Claims Self-Help Guide.

What I’m watching

RIN 2900-AQ82. When a final rule publishes, if it does, I’ll read Note (2) first and tell you what it says. It’s a major rule, so it generally can’t take effect for at least 60 days after it publishes.

Until then, the next time somebody tells you the PTSD ratings are about to change, ask them one question.

Which deadline?

When VA publishes a final rule, I’ll read it first and tell you what it says. Subscribe so you get it the day it drops. Go paid to back the work.

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Theresa "Tbird" Aldrich
Investigative Journalist, Tbird's Quiet Fight
Founder, HadIt.com
Advisory Board, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute
Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990)

Have you been told your PTSD rating is about to change? Tell me who said it and when.

Leave a comment

Sources

• VA proposed rule, Schedule for Rating Disabilities: Mental Disorders, 87 FR 8498 (Feb. 15, 2022), including proposed Note (2) to 38 CFR 4.130

• 38 CFR 4.130, current text

• Unified Agenda entry for RIN 2900-AQ82, Fall 2025 (earlier editions, Spring 2022 through Spring 2025, on reginfo.gov)

• 2026 Unified Agenda, FR Doc. 2026-16603 (Aug. 14, 2026), entry 109

• VA interim final rule, Evaluative Rating: Impact of Medication, FR Doc. 2026-03068 (Feb. 17, 2026)

• VA rescission of the interim final rule, FR Doc. 2026-03940 (Feb. 27, 2026)

• Regulations.gov docket VA-2026-VBA-0067: 20,593 comments on the interim final rule, 20,355 posted by February 26, 2026

• Jones v. Shinseki, 26 Vet. App. 56 (2012)

• HadIt community thread, “AQ81 Proposed Rule Change for Mental Disorders” (May 1 to 2, 2022)

• Putting Veterans First: Is the Current VA Disability System Keeping Its Promise?, S. Hrg. 119-189, at 11, 31 (Oct. 29, 2025)

• Daniel M. Gade, written statement to the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (Oct. 29, 2025)

• Craig Whitlock, Lisa Rein and Caitlin Gilbert, “How some veterans exploit $193 billion VA program, due to lax controls,” The Washington Post (Oct. 6, 2025)

• VA Schedule for Rating Disabilities; Evaluation of Residuals of Traumatic Brain Injury, 73 FR 54693 (Sept. 23, 2008)

• Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, Pub. L. 105-178, sec. 8202 (1998), as amended by Pub. L. 105-206, sec. 9014 (1998)

• 38 CFR 3.400, effective dates; 38 CFR 3.155, intent to file

• 38 U.S.C. 1103; 38 U.S.C. 1155; 38 U.S.C. 5901; 5 U.S.C. 801

• VA letter to the author, May 1, 1998, summarizing the June 16, 1993 denial and the November 11, 1997 reversal (on file with the author)

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor.

Last verified: September 21, 2026

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Brothers and Sisters - After almost 30 years running HadIt.com, I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting. What started as just me trying to help a few veterans navigate these treacherous waters has grown into a massive community. We’ve built a defense against predatory claim sharks and the privatization of the VA. Here is a look back at the last 30 years of our shared fight.

The VA claims system has changed a lot over the last three decades. As HadIt.com approaches its 30th anniversary, our history really tells the story of that evolution. When I founded this platform on January 20, 1997, as a disabled Navy veteran and PTSD survivor, my only goal was to break down the walls of secrecy between the VA and individual claimants. Today, our community is standing strong against complex, legislative threats trying to privatize the system we rely on.

What began as a grassroots peer network has grown right alongside all of you. It’s expanded into this Substack, Tbird’s Quiet Fight, and allowed me to partner with the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI). This milestone is about the 30-year evolution of veterans helping veterans, how we forced the system to listen, and how we are still defending our rightful compensation today.

Fighting the Darkness: Why HadIt.com Started

To really understand what this community has accomplished, you have to remember what the VA claims process was like back in the 1990s. It was a paper-bound nightmare. Claimants were kept in the dark, facing extreme processing delays. During that time, the system was flooded with new claims—like the surge of Hepatitis C infections among Vietnam-era veterans. Before the internet, we had no independent way to research BVA case law, understand the rating schedules, or build a real legal strategy.

We were strictly reliant on navigating the maze completely alone or hoping a physical VSO rep had the time to help us. I realized this lack of transparency was actively harming us. So, on January 20, 1997, I launched HadIt.com under the simple belief that “Knowledge Is Power.”

For decades, we tried different ways to keep the lights on, even transitioning into a non-profit for a while. But after struggling to secure enough funding and staff, I transitioned it back to a traditional LLC so I could keep it running myself. I’ve always wanted this space to be free from corporate capture. That’s why, on February 2, 2026, I announced that HadIt.com is officially 100% ad-free for everyone. The site is funded directly by me, your vital community contributions, forum and Substack subscriptions, and merchandise sales.

Remarkably, throughout its nearly 30-year history, HadIt.com has operated entirely as a “one-woman shop.” I don’t have a dedicated staff. Every bit of growth and impact we’ve had has been driven simply by me learning hard lessons and sharing that knowledge directly with you.

Giving Veterans the Tools to Win

From the start, HadIt.com was different from other internet forums. We kept a strict, no-nonsense focus on the legal and medical mechanics of the VA system. We built specific sub-forums and archives to tackle the hardest parts of disability law. This is how we empowered each other:

• Independent Medical Opinions (IMO) & Nexus Strategies: We taught veterans how to bridge the gap between their current diagnoses and their in-service events. We broke down what civilian doctors needed to put in Nexus letters and DBQs to actually win a claim against the VA’s adversarial exams.

• Case Law Search Tools: We figured out how to search past BVA and Court of Appeals decisions, allowing lay veterans to cite legal precedents and force regional offices to follow federal regulations.

• Evidentiary Archives: We hosted real, declassified documentary evidence for specific military operations—like the Iran War 2026 archive for blast overpressure claims—so veterans wouldn’t get denied just because the VA said there was a “lack of in-service documentation.”

• The “Ask The Geeks” Initiative: When the VA transitioned to electronic portals like eBenefits, we were right there providing technical support so our older and severely disabled veterans wouldn’t get left behind.

Even the academic world took notice. The William & Mary Law Review cited us as a vital resource for veterans navigating the appeals process, and law clinics use our forums to find long-lost “battle buddies” for lay witness statements.

Safeguarding Our Own

As the VA system got more complicated, predatory industries swooped in to exploit vulnerable veterans. We didn’t just educate; we actively protected our own.

Eradicating the “Claim Sharks”

You all know about the unaccredited “claim sharks”—the highly unethical companies charging illegal, exorbitant fees to “help” with disability claims. On HadIt.com, we don’t tolerate them. We actively purge posts promoting non-accredited providers, cutting off their marketing and keeping our site a safe haven. It’s a commitment to veteran protection that I carry over to my work investigating these sharks with VHPI experts like Paul Sullivan.

The 2015 “Rules of Behavior” Fight

We also haven’t been afraid to take the VA head-on. Back in 2015, during the rollout of the VBMS electronic claims system, the VA tried to force veterans’ attorneys to sign “Rules of Behavior” that stripped away client confidentiality.

While the big VSOs quietly went along with it, independent advocates saw the danger. We used HadIt.com to amplify the legal challenges brought by veterans’ rights attorneys. We took the fight to the court of public opinion, and the grassroots pressure forced the VA Compensation Director to publicly reverse the policy and protect our attorney-client privilege.

Taking the Fight to the Policy Level

As the veteran population changed and the Global War on Terror generation merged with our Vietnam-era veterans, the political attacks on the VA shifted. Conservative think tanks started aggressive campaigns to dismantle the VA’s direct-care infrastructure and target our disability compensation to save the government money.

I realized that helping veterans with individual claims wasn’t going to be enough if the very foundation of the VA was being legislatively dismantled. That’s why I launched Tbird’s Quiet Fight. I wanted a place to share the parts of this journey that go deeper, focusing on truth, resistance, and the systemic threats we face. It’s raw. It’s real. And it’s 100% me. This work led to my partnership with the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI), where I collaborate with analysts like Suzanne Gordon to expose the threats against the VHA.

The 2025 SVAC Hearing and the Attack on Presumptives

The biggest target on our backs right now is “presumptive” service connections. For decades, veterans exposed to combat toxins faced impossible burdens of proof. It took the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act and the PACT Act to legally force the VA to presume our illnesses were caused by our toxic deployments.

But organizations pushing the Project 2025 mandate have targeted these presumptions for total elimination, claiming veterans are being improperly compensated. If they roll these back, millions of veterans will lose their financial compensation and their VHA healthcare eligibility.

This reached a boiling point on October 29, 2025, during a Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing that was weaponized by a sensationalized Washington Post hit piece. They tried to paint the compensation system as full of exaggerated claims, arguing that disability benefits “trap veterans in a disability identity” and incentivize idleness.

We fought back hard. On Tbird’s Quiet Fight and VHPI, we tore apart their statistics: “Take 25 years of claims data, find the worst outliers, ignore 6.9 million legitimate beneficiaries, and boom—you’ve got your fraud narrative.” Even the VA Inspector General testified there is no evidence of mass fraud among veterans. And to anyone who says disability compensation steals our purpose: my compensation provided the vital stability I needed to build platforms that have helped hundreds of thousands of you secure your legal rights.

The Privatization Threat Map

In February 2026, I put together the definitive “VA Privatization Threat Map” for VHPI. It aggregates 14 different threats to show exactly how they are sabotaging the VA. They are intentionally starving the VA of operational capacity—cutting 40,000 staff, stripping union rights, and blowing $37 billion on a failed electronic health record system.

They are manufacturing a crisis to create an “Excuse Factory,” which gives them the political cover to route $48 billion out of the VA and into private Community Care.

Why Community Care Hurts Your Claims

Working with the VA’s own “Red Team” roundtable, we proved that runaway community care spending is an existential threat. But more importantly for us, pushing veterans into the private sector actively destroys your ability to win disability claims:

• Nexus Documentation: VA clinicians are trained to document how your injuries connect to your military service. Private doctors diagnose and treat, but they don’t know how to build the legal evidentiary bridge required by a VA rater.

• DBQs: The VHA uses standardized Disability Benefits Questionnaires. Private community providers don’t, meaning your outside medical records will likely lack the highly specific legal language you need to win your claim.

• Military Culture: VA doctors understand the connection between deployment trauma, toxic exposure, and secondary conditions. Private doctors have no mandatory training in military sexual trauma or toxic exposure history.

When legislators force you out of the VA, they are destroying the evidentiary pipeline you need to secure your medical documentation. Treating the private sector as our only option will just result in massive claim denials down the road.

We Keep Marching On

The last 30 years have proved one thing: when veterans get together and share information, we can beat massive bureaucratic red tape. We built the roadmap to help hundreds of thousands of veterans win their rightful benefits.

But the failures of the VA are no longer just passive incompetence—they are active, ideological sabotage. This is the work I love, and I’m deeply grateful to serve. If in some small way this community has helped even one brother or sister, then it’s a success.

Thank you for being part of HadIt.com and The Quiet Fight. The battles continue, but together, we’ll keep marching on — one veteran helping another.

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Last verified: July 23, 2026

For press and advocates: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

Image generated with AI (Google Flow). Illustrative only.

THE GIST: The White House Office of Management and Budget issued a formal policy statement on H.R. 9237 the day before the House floor vote. It praises the bill’s combat-injured retiree fix and says nothing at all about the sleep apnea and tinnitus rating cuts everyone else is fighting over. What it does object to are two provisions almost nobody outside the bill’s own text has been talking about: restored class-action authority for veterans at the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and a records dispute touching executive privilege. The class-action piece has a 30-year history worth knowing before you decide what the objection actually means.

What a Statement of Administration Policy Actually Is

Before a major bill reaches the House floor, the Office of Management and Budget typically issues a short position paper stating whether the President supports it, opposes it, or supports it with concerns. It is not a veto threat and it is not binding, but it is a real signal of where the executive branch plans to spend political capital before a bill reaches a presidential signature. Silence on a provision in a SAP usually means the Administration is not planning to make that provision a fight. Objections listed in a SAP usually mean the opposite: those are the terms that get negotiated before the bill is final.

What the Document Says

The Statement of Administration Policy on H.R. 9237, dated July 15, 2026, credits the bill with advancing the President’s priorities on veterans’ health care access, VA infrastructure, and support for combat-injured servicemembers. It specifically calls out the concurrent receipt fix for combat-disabled retirees as something the Administration appreciates.

It also states plainly that no final budget score for the bill existed at the time of writing, one more confirmation that the $57 billion and 1.5 million figures driving the sleep apnea and tinnitus fight come from a VA analysis, not a Congressional Budget Office score.

Then it raises two objections. In its own words, the Administration has concerns with provisions related to the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and separately with a dispute over documents it considers

“protected by executive privilege.”

Section 108, the provision rewriting disability ratings for sleep apnea and tinnitus, the one provision that has consumed nearly every column inch of veterans’ press coverage on this bill, does not appear anywhere in the document.

What the CAVC Provision Actually Does

H.R. 9237’s Section 105 gives the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims new supplemental jurisdiction over claims that share common questions of law or fact with a certified class action, when a claimant asks the court for class certification. To understand why that matters, you have to know how little of this has ever actually been available to veterans, and how recently even that changed.

For 29 of the last 30 years, it was not available at all. Congress created the CAVC in 1988, and for nearly three decades afterward the court held it had no authority to certify class actions of any kind. One veteran, one case, every time, no matter how many other veterans were caught in the exact same VA error. That changed only in 2017, when the Federal Circuit’s decision in Monk v. Shulkin reversed decades of the CAVC’s own precedent and recognized that the court had inherent authority, under the All Writs Act, to certify classes after all.

What happened next tells you how narrow the opening really was. By 2021, veterans’ attorneys had filed roughly 84 class certification motions at the CAVC. Only three were ever certified. But the few that succeeded reached staggering numbers of people: a certified class in Beaudette v. McDonough forced VA to notify more than 400,000 veterans that its Family Caregiver Program had been wrongly denying them their right to appeal. Godsey v. Wilkie and, later, Gladney-Chase v. Collins each certified classes of more than 10,000 veterans stuck in unreasonably delayed BVA appeals. Wolfe v. Wilkie certified a class over emergency medical care reimbursements that VA itself estimated could affect nearly 600,000 veterans and cost billions of dollars, though VA fought to avoid paying it.

Then in 2022, the Federal Circuit shut most of that back down. In Skaar v. McDonough, the court ruled that only veterans who already had a final Board of Veterans’ Appeals decision, inside a narrow 120-day appeal window, could count toward the minimum number of people needed to certify a class in the first place. Since most veterans raising the same issue are still waiting on a decision, not holding a final one, this rule excludes almost everyone who would otherwise qualify. Five of the twelve Federal Circuit judges dissented from letting that ruling stand, warning it would strip veterans of a tool that let a single case resolve hundreds of others at once.

Here’s the part that changes how I read the White House’s objection. Five weeks before H.R. 9237 was introduced, the National Veterans Legal Services Program testified to the Senate in support of a separate bill, the Veterans Appeals Efficiency Act, whose entire purpose is to reverse Skaar and restore the CAVC’s authority to count veterans with pending, not just final, claims. Section 105 of H.R. 9237 reads like the House side of that exact same fight, asking Congress to restore what the CAVC already used successfully between 2017 and 2022, rather than granting some untested new power, the version of this authority that produced a 400,000-veteran notification order and put VA on the hook for a potential multibillion-dollar judgment in Wolfe.

Read that way, the Administration’s objection looks less like an abstract separation-of-powers concern and more like a preference for keeping VA’s exposure to class-wide liability as narrow as Skaar currently leaves it. That is still an inference on my part, the SAP does not explain its own reasoning, but it is a considerably more specific one than I could offer before I found this history.

Nobody else traced this back to a Senate hearing five weeks before the bill existed.
Paid subscriptions fund the digging that finds things like this before anyone else does.

What the Executive Privilege Line Might Be About

This is the harder one to pin down, and I want to be direct about the limits of what I know. Section 105 requires VA to report to Congress on several sensitive internal matters: patterns in Board of Veterans’ Appeals remands, instances where adjudicators failed to comply with Board remand orders, and a study identifying issues where the VA Office of General Counsel has issued inconsistent legal opinions. Any of those could plausibly be the source of an executive privilege objection, since all three involve internal deliberative material the executive branch sometimes treats as privileged from congressional demand.

I have not found a public statement identifying exactly which requirement triggered this specific objection. Treat this section as a flagged question, not a settled answer, until either the White House or a committee clarifies it.

Why This Matters More Than It Looks Like It Should

Neither of the Administration’s two objections is the fight veterans’ organizations are having in public. VFW, DAV, and IAVA are fighting over Section 108. The White House is fighting over court jurisdiction and document access. Those are two entirely different battles happening inside the same 600-page bill, and only one of them is visible to the veterans who will actually live with the outcome.

If the eventual path to a presidential signature runs through narrowing the CAVC provision or resolving the privilege dispute by handing over less to Congress, veterans lose a class-relief tool for systemic errors and Congress loses some of its own ability to see what is actually happening inside VA’s adjudication process. That is a real cost, even if it never shows up in a monthly compensation check the way Section 108 does.

And here is the part worth sitting with: the institutional fight, the one over court authority and document access, is the one getting attention from the people with the most leverage to change the bill before it becomes law. The fight over whether veterans should fund their own benefits is not.

Share this everywhere, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, your veteran group chats.
Somebody needs to see what’s actually in this bill before it’s too late to matter.

Somebody needs to see what’s actually in this bill before it’s too late to matter.Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Related reporting: Why Are Veterans Paying For Their Own Benefits?, the full ledger of what H.R. 9237 takes from veterans to pay for what it gives.

Sources for verification:
Statement of Administration Policy, H.R. 9237, Office of Management and Budget, July 15, 2026: whitehouse.gov
H.R. 9237 full bill text, Section 105 (CAVC jurisdiction, Board reporting requirements) and Section 108 (disability rating changes): govinfo.gov
H.R. 9237 status and rule history: rules.house.gov
NVLSP testimony to Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on S.1992, the Veterans Appeals Efficiency Act, December 10, 2025: nvlsp.org
CRS Legal Sidebar, “An Army of Many: Veterans’ Benefits Class Actions in the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims”: congress.gov

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Last verified: July 23, 2026

For press and advocates: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

THE GIST: H.R. 9237 is being sold as the most comprehensive veterans package in years, and parts of it deserve that. But the same bill pays for a chunk of its own generosity by cutting future disability ratings for sleep apnea and tinnitus, tripling a VA home loan fee, and charging newly eligible Guard and Reserve borrowers extra just to use a benefit other veterans get for less. None of that money came from the general fund. It came out of other veterans’ pockets. Every veteran should see the whole ledger before their VSO tells them how to feel about it.

What’s Actually In This Bill

The headline provisions are real. The Major Richard Star Act ends the “wounded warrior tax,” letting roughly 54,000 combat-disabled retirees keep both military retirement pay and VA disability compensation instead of one offsetting the other. The Love Lives On Act lets surviving spouses remarry without losing Dependency and Indemnity Compensation, and there’s caregiver support, suicide prevention funding, and claims processing reform tucked into the same 62-bill package. Veterans service organizations have wanted most of this for years, which is exactly why the funding mechanism stings so much when you actually read it.

Nobody’s press release gets around to explaining how it’s paid for. So here’s the part they left out.

Follow the Money

Sleep apnea currently rates 50 percent automatically for anyone using a CPAP machine. Section 108 changes that math entirely, tying the rating to how well treatment works, which can drop a veteran to 0 or 10 percent even while they’re still using the machine every night. Tinnitus loses its standalone 10 percent rating too, only compensable going forward if it’s riding along with something else, like hearing loss. VA’s own estimate puts the damage at $57 billion less in compensation over 10 years, touching as many as 1.5 million future claimants who haven’t filed yet.

Then there’s a fee increase almost nobody outside a handful of mortgage trade outlets has bothered to connect to this fight. Section 104(b) takes the fee on an Interest Rate Reduction Refinance Loan from 0.50 percent to 1.42 percent, which on a $300,000 loan turns a $1,500 charge into $4,260, an extra $2,760 out of pocket before you even count what happens if it gets financed into the loan itself. The fee for assuming someone else’s VA-backed loan doubles too, and the bill removes the 10-year sunset that would have let these increases expire on their own eventually. The Mortgage Bankers Association told the House this “would create even greater challenges for veteran homeowners.” To be fair, veterans who already carry a service-connected disability rating are generally exempt from these fees no matter what this bill does. But that leaves a large group of veterans without a rating, plus other non-exempt borrowers, footing this particular bill.

The one that got under my skin the most while I was writing this is Section 104(c). It genuinely expands VA home loan eligibility to Guard and Reserve members with as little as 14 days of qualifying training service, going all the way back to September 11, 2001, which is a real fix for people who should have had this access twenty years ago. Then it charges those same newly eligible borrowers an extra percentage point above the standard funding fee, roughly $3,000 more on that same $300,000 loan than an already-eligible veteran pays for the identical product.

Concurrent receipt, the actual centerpiece of this whole bill, only applies to retirees whose disability is officially combat-related, straight from Congress’s own summary of the text. A veteran medically retired with an equally severe disability that just doesn’t happen to be combat-related, and there are plenty of those veterans, doesn’t get a dime from this provision even though their situation looks identical on paper to the one Congress just fixed.

Surviving spouses get something too, a temporary DIC bump equal to Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment plus one extra percentage point, running for three increases before it stops. It’s a real improvement, just not the parity survivor advocates have spent years pushing for under the Caring for Survivors Act. Pass this smaller version now and Congress may never feel pressure to pass the bigger one later.

Somebody Chose This

Look at where all five of those dollars come from. Not one of them traces back to the general Treasury. Every bit of it comes out of the veteran and military community itself, future disability claimants, veterans refinancing their homes, newly eligible Guard and Reserve members, and disabled retirees stuck on the wrong side of a combat-related line that VA and DoD will now spend years arguing over case by case.

Congress had an entire federal budget available to work with, and this is what they picked anyway.

A mortgage broker who works with VA loans, Carlos Scarpero of Edge Home Finance, described it to a trade publication more bluntly than any advocacy group has managed:

“basically using the funds from one side to pay for the other side.”

Scarpero has no stake in veterans’ politics one way or the other. He just processes these loans for a living, and even from where he sits, the shape of it is obvious.

Nobody made Congress structure it this way. The Major Richard Star Act could have gone through the ordinary budget process like everything else Congress funds, competing for its share the same way any federal priority does. Instead, someone decided to make it revenue-neutral inside the veteran community, which tells you something about how certain lawmakers actually think about earned benefits, less like an obligation the nation owes and more like a line item they can move money around inside of, so long as a press release is ready to explain who came out ahead.

None of This Is New

Somebody fought for every benefit a younger veteran takes for granted today. The GI Bill did not write itself into law out of gratitude. Agent Orange presumptive conditions showed up decades after Vietnam veterans came home, only after years of veterans organizing, testifying, and refusing to let VA pretend the exposure never happened in the first place. Burn pit presumptive conditions under the PACT Act needed a hunger strike on the Capitol steps and a Senate vote that failed once before it finally passed the second time. Veterans did that work, mostly on behalf of other veterans who hadn’t even filed a claim yet.

Whether the sleep apnea and tinnitus changes are medically defensible is a real debate, and reasonable people land on different sides of it. But that’s a separate question from the one underneath this whole fight, which is whether this generation of veterans is going to let Congress treat “fund new benefits by cutting other veterans’ benefits” as an ordinary, repeatable move. Once that precedent gets set, it doesn’t go away when this particular bill is finished. It just becomes the template for whatever comes next.

Every decade of veterans before us protected what the next decade would eventually need, and that habit is the actual reason any of us have what we have right now, not sentiment about it. Somebody has to keep doing that. It falls to whoever is paying attention after this news cycle ends, and that’s usually us, the people who already know what a rating number means to somebody actually living inside the condition it describes.

The Question Nobody Has Answered

One thing is settled. Section 108(c)(2) says the revised rating criteria “may not serve as the basis for reducing, discontinuing, or otherwise adversely affecting compensation that was in effect” before enactment, so existing ratings really are protected, straight from the statute itself.

Here’s what’s genuinely unclear. A veteran already rated for sleep apnea or tinnitus files a claim to increase that rating after this law takes effect. Which schedule applies? An increase claim is its own claim type under normal VA practice, adjudicated under whatever criteria is current at the time it’s decided, which puts this squarely in a gap the statute never addresses. One reading treats the existing rating as a floor you can’t be dropped below, though you’d still have to clear the new, tighter criteria to climb any higher. A different reading keeps the whole disability under the old schedule for any future action that touches it. I have not found anyone, in Congress, at VA, or across any VSO, who has worked through this in public. If this applies to you, ask your VSO directly whether they have an answer before you file anything. If they don’t, take the question to your representative.

Worth knowing too: as of July 15, 2026, the White House’s own policy statement on this bill confirmed there’s still no final Congressional Budget Office score attached to any of this. The $57 billion and 1.5 million figures everyone keeps citing come from a VA analysis, not CBO, which doesn’t make them wrong, VFW and DAV reached the same number independently, but it does mean the figure hasn’t gone through the government’s own scorekeeper yet.

Related reporting: The White House Didn’t Fight for Sleep Apnea Ratings. Here’s What It Fought For Instead., on what the Administration’s policy statement actually objects to in this bill, and it isn’t Section 108.

Related reporting: Dan Crenshaw Has a Staff. He Should Use Them., a fact-check of Rep. Crenshaw’s claims about this same bill.

Sources for verification:
H.R. 9237, Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, full bill and official summary: congress.gov
VFW statement on Section 108 offsets: issuevoter.org
VA home loan funding fee increase, Section 104(b): Mortgage Professional America
Mortgage Bankers Association objection letter: HousingWire
NAMB statement on fee increase: National Mortgage News
Section-by-section analysis, Title I: free-range-advocate.com

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Last verified: July 23, 2026

For press and advocates: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

THE GIST: Rep. Dan Crenshaw tweeted that the VFW is “self-serving” for opposing a bill that cuts disability ratings for sleep apnea and tinnitus, and claimed losing a limb in combat was rated lower than sleep apnea is now. The vote he is reacting to really happened. The 40 percent floor for a below-the-knee amputation is real. But his 30 percent comparison does not match the VA’s own rating schedule, then or now, and the bare percentage he is using to make his point is not what most amputees actually collect. Congress pays Crenshaw’s staff to get this right. Nobody did.

What He Said

On July 16, 2026, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), a retired Navy SEAL who lost his right eye to an IED in Helmand Province in 2012, posted a tweet accusing the Veterans of Foreign Wars of teaming up with Democrats to hurt combat wounded veterans and surviving spouses. His target was H.R. 9237, the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, a 62-bill package built around the Major Richard Star Act, which would allow concurrent receipt of disability pay and military retirement for combat-injured retirees. To help pay for it, the bill rewrites how VA rates sleep apnea and tinnitus going forward.

Crenshaw argued sleep apnea should not be a ratable condition at all, then reached for a comparison to make his case land harder:

“losing a limb in battle was rated at 30% when I was leaving service.”

He left the Navy in September 2016. I checked what the rating schedule actually said that year, and what it says now. It does not say what he says it says.

The Vote Was Real

Give him this much. On July 16, the House took up a motion to recommit H.R. 9237, which would have sent it back to committee. It failed, 210 to 211. Three Republicans voted with 207 Democrats to try to recommit it. That is a documented fact, on the record at the Clerk of the House. Describing that vote as a small handful of Republicans siding with Democrats is accurate.

What it is not is the reason the bill stalled. Leadership pulled the final passage vote separately, days later, because they did not have the votes to pass it as written. Crenshaw’s tweet blends two different procedural events into one grievance. The vote count is Tier 1 fact. The story he built around it is not.

The Number That Does Not Hold Up

Under the VA’s amputation rating schedule, 38 CFR 4.71a, the floor for a below-the-knee leg amputation “at a lower level, permitting prosthesis” is 40 percent. It has been 40 percent since long before Crenshaw joined the SEAL teams. A leg lost above the knee runs 60 to 80 percent. Hip disarticulation is 90 percent. There is no level of major limb loss, arm or leg, that has ever rated at 30 percent under the current schedule structure, in 2016 or today.

I pulled VA’s own historical rate tables to check the dollar comparison at the moment Crenshaw actually left service, not just today’s numbers. In September 2016, a veteran alone with a single below-the-knee amputation, rated 40 percent plus the SMC-K add-on that single-limb loss triggers, collected $690.59 a month. Sleep apnea’s automatic 50 percent rating paid $836.13 a month, roughly $146 more. Run the same math with 2026’s rates and the gap is proportionally the same: $935.71 versus $1,132.90.

In other words, the comparison Crenshaw is drawing did not favor limb loss when he left the service either. If he wants to argue sleep apnea is overrated relative to combat amputation, the bare numbers from his own era do not back him up.

Notice the Word “Combat”

Read the tweet again. Not “veterans.” Not “disabled veterans.” “Combat wounded veterans and surviving spouses.” That phrase is doing work, and it is worth naming what it does.

VA disability compensation has never required a firefight. Service connection under 38 CFR 3.303 covers anything that arose in the line of duty: an IED in Helmand Province, a training accident on a flight line stateside, or years of documented noise and shift-work exposure. Combat status changes some presumptive pathways, burn pits and Agent Orange among them, but it has never been the gate VA law requires for a claim to be legitimate.

Tinnitus is the single most common service-connected condition in the entire VA system, and it did not get there from firefights. It comes from training ranges, sonar rooms, and flight decks. Sleep apnea in the veteran population tracks closely with exactly the kind of occupational exposure Brittinay Shaw described in a widely shared LinkedIn thread on this same fight: years of an aircraft maintainer husband rotating between day and swing shifts, wrecking his circadian rhythm on a schedule the military assigned him, not one he chose.

Crenshaw is a combat wounded veteran, and nobody is disputing what happened to him in Helmand Province. But a standard that only counts combat injuries as real would also gut training deaths, toxic and burn pit exposure claims, and military sexual trauma claims, none of which come from a firefight, all of which VA law has always treated as equally service-connected. That hierarchy is not in the statute. He is the one importing it.

Nobody Stays at the Floor

Here is the part that actually matters if you want the whole picture instead of a talking point. A veteran does not typically live on that 40 percent number. I went looking for a real case in the Board of Veterans’ Appeals record, and found one from a Vietnam veteran whose right leg was amputated below the knee in 1968 (Docket No. 91-37 400). He was rated 40 percent at discharge, same as the current floor. By 1990, VA raised the amputation rating itself to 60 percent, the maximum for that limb, because his stump kept breaking down and ulcerating. Separately, and explicitly, VA connected a low back disorder to the amputation, calling it “proximately caused by” the altered way he had to walk on a prosthesis. That back rating climbed to 40 percent. Add PTSD, and the combination left him unable to work. VA paid him at the full 100 percent rate through Total Disability based on Individual Unemployability.

That is not a rare outlier. VA’s own rehabilitation research service has published that osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, and back pain are three of the most common secondary complications from the compensatory stress of walking on a prosthesis, with contralateral hip pain showing up in nearly a quarter of veterans with amputations, and close to 30 percent in below-knee amputees specifically. National survey data on veteran amputees puts phantom limb pain above 80 percent and residual stump pain above 65 percent. Every one of those is a separately ratable condition layered on top of the amputation itself.

The honest comparison is not “40 percent for a leg versus 50 percent for sleep apnea.” It is a bare floor that almost nobody actually stays at, against a flat, automatic 50 percent that most sleep apnea claims simply receive and stop there. Crenshaw picked the number that made his point. He did not pick the number that describes what actually happens to combat amputees.

The Part I Cannot Let Go

We pay for Dan Crenshaw’s staff. He has researchers, committee counsel, and a full Congressional Research Service at his disposal, paid for by the same taxpayers who fund the VA benefits he is arguing about. That is not a small ask. It is the baseline job requirement. I do not think it is too much to expect a sitting member of Congress to check a rating table before he compares it to another one in public, especially when the comparison is the entire premise of his argument.

I do not know where Crenshaw got his 30 percent figure. I checked the schedule from his era and from today, and it is not in there. If he has a source for it, I will run a correction the same day I see it. Until then, the number is wrong, and it was wrong when he posted it.

Sources for verification:
Roll Call Vote 249, H.R. 9237, motion to recommit, U.S. House of Representatives, July 16, 2026: clerk.house.gov
38 CFR 4.71a, Schedule of ratings, musculoskeletal system: ecfr.gov
VA Compensation Rates, effective 12/1/14-12/1/15: benefits.va.gov
VA Special Monthly Compensation Rates, effective 12/1/14: benefits.va.gov
Current VA Compensation and SMC Rates: va.gov
BVA Docket No. 91-37 400 (1994), below-the-knee amputation, secondary low back, PTSD, TDIU: va.gov/vetapp94
VA Rehabilitation Research & Development Service, secondary physical conditions review: rehab.research.va.gov

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Last verified: July 23, 2026

For press and advocates: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

AI-generated image: an antique ledger book with military medals and coins on one page, a torn dollar bill and folded flag on the other.

The Gist

• Sen. Jerry Moran is the lead Senate sponsor of H.R. 9237’s companion bill, S. 4744, which funds the Major Richard Star Act by cutting future sleep apnea and tinnitus ratings.

• In 2013, Congress cut military retiree COLA by 1% as a budget offset. Moran’s own office says he opposed it.

• In 2014, Moran sponsored a bill to reverse that cut, saying Congress shouldn’t “balance our budget on the backs of our veterans.”

• Rep. Jennifer Kiggans personally led 55 House Republicans in a 2023 letter calling the mere suggestion of a VA funding tradeoff “dishonest and shameless.” She’s now a cosponsor of H.R. 9237, which contains an actual one, written into the bill’s text.

• Neither is a new opinion of mine. Both are their own words, on the record, twelve and three years apart.

He Fought This Fight Before. Now He’s Running the Other Side.

Last week I wrote about the arithmetic nobody in Congress wants to say out loud: the Pentagon gets $153.3 billion with no offset, and veterans get a bill that cuts future sleep apnea and tinnitus ratings to pay for the Star Act. That piece was about the math. This one is about two names on the bill, and what they said the last time Congress tried this exact move.

Start with Jerry Moran. He chairs Senate Veterans’ Affairs. He’s the lead Senate sponsor of S. 4744, H.R. 9237’s companion bill, the one Bost said he and Moran “worked hard” to make “paid-for.”

In December 2013, Congress cut military retiree COLA by one percent a year as a budget offset, the Bipartisan Budget Act. Moran’s own Senate office, in a later press release, states plainly that he opposed it. The American Legion called it what it was at the time: retirees “singled out to make up the shortfalls in the DoD budget.”

Two months later, Congress partly reversed the cut. Moran wasn’t satisfied. His office’s statement on the fix: “Although the Omnibus corrected some of the reductions irresponsibly included in the budget agreement, the measure does not protect all veterans and their families from cuts to their COLA benefits.” He sponsored the Keeping Our Promise to Our Military Heroes Act to finish the job.

That’s the same Jerry Moran, twelve years later, as the lead Senate sponsor of a bill that funds one group of veterans by cutting future ratings for another. I’m not going to tell you that’s hypocrisy. I’m telling you it’s the same man, the same mechanism, opposite side, and you should know that before September.

Now Jennifer Kiggans. In May 2023, during the fight over the Limit, Save, Grow Act, she personally led 55 House Republicans in a letter to VA Secretary McDonough. Her word for the claim that the bill risked a 22% cut to VA funding: “dishonest and shameless.” Her letter’s own language: “nowhere in this bill is it indicated that the VA budget would be cut.” She voted YEA on that bill, which capped topline discretionary spending without an explicit VA exemption. PolitiFact later rated a nearly identical claim from Rep. Mike Bost “Mostly False,” citing the same OMB estimate Kiggans’s letter dismissed.

Whatever you think of that argument in 2023, notice what’s different in 2026. Kiggans is now a cosponsor of H.R. 9237, a bill that doesn’t require anyone to infer a possible funding effect from a topline cap. Section 108 says, in the bill’s own text, that future tinnitus and sleep apnea claimants’ ratings get rewritten to help pay for the Star Act. In 2023, even the suggestion that a bill might cost veterans something was “dishonest and shameless.” In 2026, she’s cosponsoring one that does it on the page.

I’ll leave you to decide what to call that. I’m just telling you what they said, and when, and pointing you at their own words to check it yourself.

The bill comes back around September, per Speaker Johnson’s own timeline. When it does, these are two of the names that will be asking for your vote of confidence on “paid-for.” Now you know what they said the last time this fight happened.

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About This Publication

Tbird’s Quiet Fight is independent investigative journalism focused on VA policy, veteran benefits, and government accountability. Published by the founder of HadIt.com, one of the oldest veteran-run VA claims communities online (est. 1997).

Tips and sources: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com (encrypted options available on request)

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

The Gist

• The Pentagon got $153.3 billion in deficit-financed money last year. No offset required.

• Congress is trying to pay for a veterans benefits bill (H.R. 9237) by cutting future disability compensation for sleep apnea and tinnitus instead.

• There’s still no CBO score confirming the veterans’ offset math even works, and the White House admitted as much in writing the day before the vote.

• A real alternative existed: fund it with existing defense money instead. Republicans blocked it, 4 to 8.

• The bill got pulled from the House floor on July 16th after a veteran-led pressure campaign. Expected back around September.

Here’s the arithmetic nobody in Congress wants to say out loud in the same sentence. Math’s a bitch, so Congress just doesn’t talk about it.

The Pentagon got $153.3 billion last year. Deficit-financed. No offset. No cuts anywhere else to pay for it. Congress just... spent it, and moved on.

Veterans are getting a bill that cuts disability compensation for sleep apnea and tinnitus (conditions that put money in the pockets of 1.5 million people who broke their bodies for this country) to pay for benefits some of those same people already earned. And it still might not add up.

Same Congress. Same year. Same tool. Two very different sets of rules.

What “paid for” means when it’s the Pentagon

The Department of War (that’s its name now, per Executive Order 14347, September 2025) asked Congress for $1.5 trillion for FY2027. A 44% jump. The largest single-year defense increase since the Korean War.

Of that, $1.15 trillion is the normal kind of money: appropriated, debated, voted on. The other $350 billion was supposed to come through a second reconciliation bill. As of this week, that ask is on life support. Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Mitch McConnell said the quiet part out loud back in June: “I think it’s safe to conclude there will not be another reconciliation bill.” Appropriations Chair Susan Collins agreed. So did the top Democrat on the subcommittee. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, who chaired the Budget Committee and was steering the process before his death this month, isn’t around to push it anymore.

So the $350 billion might not happen. Fine. Let’s talk about the $153.3 billion that already did.

That’s what Congress handed the Pentagon last year through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: reconciliation, party-line, no Democratic votes needed. Shipbuilding: $29 billion. Munitions: $25 billion. Air and missile defense, including the Golden Dome program: $24 billion. Nuclear forces: $10.8 billion. No committee report walked through where the money would land, the way appropriations bills normally require. Just a number, and a plan the Pentagon wrote itself, after the fact, that took seven months to produce.

Nobody asked how it would be paid for. Nobody had to. Reconciliation bills don’t require an offset the way ordinary spending does. That’s the entire point of using one.

The trick nobody’s talking about

Here’s what pisses me off.

CBO didn’t just wave the OBBBA reconciliation bill through. It scored it. Officially. The verdict: $3.4 trillion added to the deficit over ten years. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a real, calculated violation of the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act, the law that’s supposed to force automatic spending cuts when Congress blows a hole in the budget this size.

A violation that big should have triggered roughly $120 billion in automatic, across-the-board cuts to federal programs in 2026 alone. Medicare’s protected: sequestration there is capped at 4%. Everything else wasn’t supposed to be.

So what happened? Congress couldn’t write a waiver directly into the reconciliation bill. The Byrd Rule blocks that, and it would’ve needed 60 votes in the Senate to survive a challenge. In the Navy, if you can’t account for a piece of gear, you don’t get to just erase it from the logbook and call it inventoried. Congress did exactly that with $3.4 trillion. Instead, in November 2025, Congress passed a completely separate law and used it to wipe both PAYGO scorecards down to zero. Not “we decided the debt was worth it.” Not “we’re voting to waive the consequences.” Just: the ledger that would have recorded the violation got erased. OMB confirmed it in January: balances zero, no sequestration required.

Read that again. The deficit is real. CBO said so. The law that’s supposed to punish it fired blanks because Congress reached into the paperwork and deleted the number that would have pulled the trigger.

That’s the actual double standard. Not “defense doesn’t need an offset and veterans do.” Both are supposed to follow the same rules. One side got caught in violation and made the violation disappear on paper. The other side is being told, right now, this week, that benefits have to be cut to keep the math honest.

Meanwhile, on the veterans’ side of the building

H.R. 9237, the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, has some genuinely good sections wrapped around a genuinely ugly offset. Sixty-plus bipartisan provisions. The Major Richard Star Act, which finally lets combat-disabled retirees keep both their retirement pay and their VA compensation, something 336 House members and 79 senators have supported for years. Survivor benefit fixes. Caregiver reforms.

And Section 108: new sleep apnea and tinnitus rating criteria that cut future disability compensation for roughly 1.5 million future veterans to pay for the rest of the package.

House VA Committee Chairman Mike Bost defended the trade-off to the Rules Committee in June like this: “When Congress passes legislation, it has a responsibility to pay for it.” He called it “a basic good-government principle.” He said he and Senate VA Chairman Jerry Moran worked hard to put forward something paid-for, unlike Democrats pushing the Star Act alone through a discharge petition with no offset attached.

Fair enough, as a principle. Except Bost has never said one public word about the $153.3 billion in unpaid-for defense reconciliation money. Neither has Moran. And here’s the thing: I don’t think that’s hypocrisy exactly. Bost chairs House Veterans’ Affairs. He’s not on Armed Services or the defense appropriations subcommittee. Moran chairs Senate VA and sits on Appropriations, but not the Defense subcommittee either. Neither man has a formal reason to weigh in on the Pentagon’s books.

But that’s exactly the problem. The “everything must be paid for” principle gets invoked, forcefully, on the file where it costs veterans something and buys the sponsor political cover. It goes silent on the file that’s more than two-and-a-half times larger in raw dollars (not even counting the $1.5 trillion request behind it), where the people who do have jurisdiction (Rep. John Garamendi, Sen. Tim Kaine, Rep. Ken Calvert) are the ones raising the alarm, not the veterans’ committee chairmen.

The “cut” isn’t even new. It’s a filing cabinet.

Here’s what almost nobody covering this bill has said plainly: VA doesn’t need H.R. 9237 to cut sleep apnea and tinnitus ratings. It already has the authority. Has had it the whole time.

Federal law, 38 U.S.C. 1155, requires the VA Secretary to periodically readjust the disability rating schedule “in accordance with experience.” Section 501(a) gives him broad rulemaking power to do it. He doesn’t need Congress. He never did.

VA proposed exactly this rewrite back in February 2022, under the Biden administration. Federal Register, 87 FR 8474. Sleep apnea would lose its automatic 50% rating for anyone on a CPAP machine, replaced with outcome-based tiers running from 0% to 100%. Tinnitus would lose its standalone rating code entirely, folded into whatever underlying condition supposedly causes it. Over 2,600 people commented. The comment period closed in April 2022.

That rule has been sitting there for four years. It’s still not final. VA’s own timeline now points to April 2027.

So what is H.R. 9237 actually doing? It’s not authorizing a new cut. It’s grabbing an administrative process that was already moving on its own timeline, writing it into statute, and using VA’s own projected savings to make a separate, unrelated bill (one that actually costs money) look deficit-neutral on paper.

And the numbers might not even work

“Look at the math” is a fair thing to ask for. So let’s actually do it.

VA says its own rule change saves $57.1 billion over ten years. That figure comes from VA’s own Regulatory Impact Analysis: VA scoring the savings of VA’s own proposed rule. Not GAO. Not CBO. Not anyone with a reason to push back on the number.

CBO, meanwhile, did score the Major Richard Star Act by itself, back in March. Its verdict: $78.1 billion in new mandatory spending over 2026 to 2036. Sixty-three billion of that comes from eliminating the 20-years-of-service requirement for concurrent receipt. Another $13 billion from expanding Combat-Related Special Compensation.

Read those two numbers next to each other. $57.1 billion in self-reported savings. $78.1 billion in independently scored cost, for one provision out of dozens in this bill. Nobody has published a comprehensive CBO score for the Star Act plus the Love Lives On Act plus the Sharri Briley and Eric Edmundson Act plus everything else stacked into this package. Congress.gov lists exactly zero CBO cost estimates for H.R. 9237, full stop, as of this writing. Even the White House admits it. In its own Statement of Administration Policy issued the day before the floor vote, OMB wrote: “a final score for the bill is not yet available.”

That didn’t stop the House from moving it to the floor under a closed rule: a rule that explicitly waives every point of order a member could otherwise raise, including one over a missing cost estimate. The rule passed 215-211 on July 14th.

It almost didn’t matter enough. Two days later, Rep. Chris Deluzio, an Iraq War veteran, moved to send the bill back to committee, a last-ditch attempt to kill it. The motion failed by one vote, 211-210, after Rep. Victoria Spartz flipped at the last minute to save it. And then, having survived that, the bill got pulled anyway. Leadership didn’t have the votes to actually pass it. Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters the holdup was “misinformation.” Not the sixty thousand messages sent to Congress in two weeks. Not the veterans who flew into Washington on a few days’ notice. Misinformation. Call it whatever you want. The floor procedure built to prevent anyone from forcing a fight over the math got sidestepped anyway, not because leadership won an argument, but because they didn’t want to find out what happens when you make people vote on it.

There was another way. It got voted down 4 to 8.

This actually happened.

Back in June, at the Rules Committee, Rep. Mark Takano offered an amendment. Strip out the sleep apnea and tinnitus cuts entirely. Fund the Major Richard Star Act instead using defense money already sitting in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the same reconciliation law that gave the Pentagon its $153.3 billion with no offset attached.

Use defense reconciliation money to pay for veterans, the same way Congress used defense reconciliation money to pay for defense.

Republicans on the Rules Committee voted it down, 4 to 8.

That’s not a hypothetical I’m constructing. It’s in the official record: House Report 119-707. A specific, recorded chance to fund a benefit everyone in this fight claims to support, using money that already exists, without cutting a single veteran’s disability rating. Voted down along party lines before it ever reached the House floor.

DAV made the same argument directly to Congress: waive pay-as-you-go rules for this legislation, the group pointed out, the same way Congress has routinely waived them for other priorities. IAVA formally opposed the bill outright over the financing mechanism. A separate coalition led by the American Legion, representing MOAA, Wounded Warrior Project, and roughly 20 other organizations, ultimately supported advancing the bill anyway, but even they flagged the pay-for as unresolved, warning Congress that if VA finalizes its rating change on its own regardless of this bill, the savings would revert to the Treasury instead of being reinvested in veterans.

But the alternative was on the table. Documented. Rejected.

What this actually is

Not a both-sides story. Not “Washington is broken, everybody’s to blame.” That framing lets everyone off the hook.

This is a specific, traceable choice, made by specific people, on the record. The Pentagon’s $153.3 billion moved without an offset, without a fight, and when the accounting caught up with it anyway (when CBO scored a real $3.4 trillion deficit increase), Congress didn’t debate whether that was worth it. It deleted the ledger. Veterans were told the offset was non-negotiable, the math was settled, and a closed rule made sure nobody could ask otherwise on the floor.

Outside the floor, it didn’t hold. VFW National Commander Carol Whitmore put it plainly: “We stopped Congress from taking a dangerous step today. It’s never been done before. We’re not about to let it start.” Sixty thousand messages in two weeks. Veterans in the building from thirty states on a few days’ notice.

I’ve spent thirty years watching VA and Congress do this dance. Agent Orange. Gulf War illness. Burn pits. The excuse was always the same: too expensive, needs more study, can’t prove the exposure caused it. Veterans waited years, sometimes decades, while cost got used as the reason to say no.

This bill tried a new move in an old game. Instead of just delaying, they built the “no” directly into the bill’s own text: pay for it by taking something away from the next guy who hasn’t even filed his claim yet. This time, it didn’t work. Not yet, anyway.

The War Department doesn’t have to prove its math adds up. Veterans do, even though it’s the War Department’s own wars that put them on VA’s rolls in the first place. We’re five months into active combat in Iran right now. The same department asking for a blank check is, at this exact moment, manufacturing next year’s disability claims. It still won’t be the one asked to pay for them.

It’s not over. Whitmore says it comes back in a few weeks. Johnson himself put a rough date on it: September. Either way, when it comes back, remember what already happened once. The Pentagon’s number never had to survive a fight like this one. Veterans’ did, and for one day, that fight actually held.

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Make the Call

A phone call takes two minutes. Congressional offices tally every one. If enough people call about the same issue in the same week, staffers flag it for the member. That’s how priorities get made.

Who to call:

• Your own U.S. Representative and Senators: they work for you. Find yours here.

• Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL), Chairman, House Veterans’ Affairs Committee: (202) 225-5661

• Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), Chairman, Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee: (202) 224-6521

• Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), sets the floor schedule: (202) 225-2777

• Capitol Switchboard (connects to any member): (202) 224-3121

Script 1: If you’re a veteran or military family member

“Hi, my name is [NAME] and I’m a [veteran / military spouse / family member of a veteran] in [STATE]. I’m calling about H.R. 9237, the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act.

The Pentagon got $153.3 billion in deficit-financed money last year with no offset required. This bill pays for the Major Richard Star Act by cutting future disability compensation for sleep apnea and tinnitus instead, and there’s still no CBO score proving the numbers even add up.

I’m asking [MEMBER NAME] to fund the Major Richard Star Act using existing defense reconciliation money, the same way Congress funded the Pentagon, not by cutting future veterans’ disability ratings.

I’d like to know [the Congressman’s / the Senator’s] position on this. Thank you.”

Script 2: If you’re a concerned citizen

“Hi, my name is [NAME] and I’m a constituent in [STATE]. I’m calling about H.R. 9237, the veterans benefits bill that was pulled from the House floor this week.

This bill pays for a popular veterans’ benefit expansion by cutting disability compensation for future veterans with sleep apnea and tinnitus, while the defense budget got $153 billion with no offset at all last year.

I’m asking [MEMBER NAME] to support funding the Major Richard Star Act without cutting other veterans’ benefits, and to insist on a full CBO score before this bill comes back for a vote.

Thank you for your time.”

Why calls matter more than emails:

Congressional offices rank constituent contact by perceived effort and urgency. Here’s how they actually process what you send:

• Phone calls get logged in real time by issue and position (for/against). A staffer marks it in their system the moment you hang up. When a member asks “what are people calling about this week,” your call is in that count. High volume on a single issue in a short window triggers a staff briefing. This is the most effective single action you can take.

• Personal emails (not form letters) get read, categorized, and usually receive a response, but they sit in a queue. Most offices process constituent mail in batches. Your email might not get logged for days. It still counts, but it doesn’t create the same real-time pressure as a ringing phone.

• Form emails and petitions (pre-written “click to send” campaigns) get the lowest weight. Offices batch-count them. They know you clicked a button. It’s better than silence, but staffers treat one personal phone call as worth more than dozens of form emails.

• Letters to the editor in your local paper punch way above their weight. Congressional offices have staff assigned to clip and track local media mentions of their boss. One published letter is perceived as representing 100+ constituent concerns, because it’s public, it influences other voters, and it can get picked up by larger outlets.

• Op-eds in local or regional papers get flagged immediately and often become talking points in internal staff briefings.

The most effective combination: Call first. Follow up with a personal email. Then write a letter to the editor. Each one escalates the pressure through a different channel.

Tips:

• You don’t need to be an expert. You just need to be a constituent.

• If you get voicemail, leave the message. It still gets counted.

• Call during business hours (9 AM to 5 PM Eastern) for the best chance of reaching a staffer.

• Be polite, be brief, and state your ask clearly.

• If a staffer asks follow-up questions, it means they’re taking notes. That’s good.

Current Watch List

Bill Status What It Does Position H.R. 9237 / S. 4744 Floor vote pulled 7/16/26; expected back per Speaker Johnson’s own estimate around September Funds Major Richard Star Act and 60+ other veterans provisions by cutting future sleep apnea/tinnitus disability ratings (Section 108)WATCH: support Star Act, oppose Section 108 offset as written

Track bill status: Congress.gov

Go Deeper

Write a Letter to the Editor (10 minutes, worth 100 phone calls in perceived impact)

Most local papers accept 150-200 word letters. Mention your representative by name. State your veteran status if applicable. Stick to facts from this article: the Pentagon’s $153.3 billion moved with no offset last year; this bill still has zero CBO score, confirmed by the White House’s own Statement of Administration Policy; and there was a real, documented alternative (Takano’s amendment to use existing defense money) that Republicans on the Rules Committee voted down, 4 to 8.

Find your local paper’s submission page or email the opinion desk directly. Tips:

• Localize it, mention your rep by name and your nearest VA facility

• Keep it under 200 words

• Editors prioritize veteran voices on veteran issues

• Don’t submit the same letter to multiple papers simultaneously

Contact Your VSO

If you’re a member of VFW, DAV, American Legion, VVA, IAVA, or any other Veterans Service Organization, contact your local chapter and ask what their position is on this issue. VSOs have lobbying power. Use it.

Share This Article

Forward it. Post it. Print it. The veterans affected by these decisions often can’t amplify their own stories. You can.

About This Publication

Tbird’s Quiet Fight is independent investigative journalism focused on VA policy, veteran benefits, and government accountability. Published by the founder of HadIt.com, one of the oldest veteran-run VA claims communities online (est. 1997).

Tips and sources: founder@hadit.com (encrypted options available on request)

Support this work: Subscribe to TQF | Support HadIt.com

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor.

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

For Press and Advocates

Story tips or collaboration:

• Tbird (TQF / HadIt.com): ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com

Congressional oversight contacts:

• House Veterans’ Affairs Committee: (202) 225-9756 | veterans.house.gov

• Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee: (202) 224-9126 | veterans.senate.gov

• House VA Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee: veterans.house.gov/issues

Investigative journalists covering VA/veteran policy:

• Suzanne Gordon, American Prospect

• Jasper Craven, American Prospect

• Nikki Wentling, Stars and Stripes

• Leo Shane III, Military Times

• Quil Lawrence, NPR

• Abbie Bennett, Military.com

Veteran advocacy organizations:

• VoteVets

• Vietnam Veterans of America

• Disabled American Veterans (DAV)

• Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA)

• National Veterans Legal Services Program

• Veterans Legal Clinic, Harvard Law

Government watchdog resources:

• VA Office of Inspector General

• Government Accountability Office, Veterans

• Federal Register, VA Notices

• USAspending.gov (track federal contracts and grants)

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A ribbon that says benefits, and scissors that say otherwise. (AI-generated illustration.)

A rose by any other name smells as sweet.
A cut by any other name still bleeds.

June 26, 2026. They were a floor vote from passing it this week. Then they pulled it.

The rule was set on June 23, closed, no amendments, Section 108 sealed inside where no member could stand up and move to strike it. The vote was expected the week of June 22. It never came. House Republicans gaveled out for the week without calling it up, the floor frozen by a separate standoff over the SAVE Act even as opposition from Democrats, the VFW, DAV, and federal unions stacked up.

Do not mistake a stall for a stop. The bill is not dead. It comes back the week the floor reopens, the Senate companion behind it, and the cut is still buried on page sixty. Here is what is in it.

THE GIST

A bill named the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act hands combat-injured retirees one overdue benefit, then pays for it by rewriting how VA rates the two conditions veterans claim most: sleep apnea and tinnitus. That rewrite is Section 108, about sixty pages in. It is not a new idea from Congress. It is VA’s own proposed rule, the one the agency could not finish through four years of rulemaking, now written straight into law where no comment period, no court, and no future Secretary can undo it. Veterans already rated are protected. The bill is paid for by the ones who have not filed yet.

Two veterans, one throat

Picture two veterans with the same throat. Both have obstructive sleep apnea from the same war. Both sleep strapped to the same CPAP machine VA prescribed. The only thing separating them is a calendar.

The first filed last year. Under the rules on the books today, needing that machine earns her a 50 percent rating, worth $1,132.90 a month for a single veteran. The second files the day after this bill becomes law. Same throat, same machine, same war. His rating is 10 percent, or zero if the machine works well enough. The gap is more than a thousand dollars a month, for the rest of their lives, and the only variable is the date on the form.

That is Section 108. It sits two-thirds of the way into a 554-page bill (official text at congress.gov) with a name that tells you not to read it, and it is the quiet engine that pays for the part Congress wants on the marquee.

The bill did not have to exist. The day before this package rolled out, House Democrats filed a discharge petition to force a clean, standalone vote on the Major Richard Star Act, the very benefit now being used to sell everything stapled to it. The Star Act had the votes. It was about to move. Twenty-four hours later it surfaced instead as the centerpiece of an omnibus, with the cut to sleep apnea and tinnitus attached to its back. The Star Act never needed this bill. This bill needed the Star Act.

And the Star Act stapled into this package is not even the clean one. Rep. Raul Ruiz of California, who cosponsored the discharge petition for the standalone bill, points out that this version carries a cap the clean bill does not, so some of the combat-injured retirees it is named for still could not collect their full retirement and disability together. The bait is a discount on the bait.

The rule they could not pass

Section 108 is not something Congress invented. It is VA’s own rule.

The agency proposed this exact change in a notice of proposed rulemaking published February 15, 2022. Veterans pushed back hard in the comment period. VA went quiet, floated a revised version in September 2024, and still has not finalized it more than four years later. Read Section 108 against that proposed rule and it is the same schedule, almost line for line: zero percent when asymptomatic, 10 percent when treatment gives incomplete relief, 50 or 100 only when treatment fails or you cannot use it, 100 reserved for end-organ damage.

A rule that cannot survive the front door is being walked in through the back. Put it in a statute and the comment process that stalled it no longer applies, a future Secretary cannot reverse it with a pen, and a court has far less room to question it. They could not pass the rule. So they put it in a bill you would never read.

Why tinnitus and why sleep apnea

They did not pick at random. They picked the highest-volume claim and the highest-dollar claim in the system.

VA’s own Annual Benefits Report for fiscal year 2025 puts tinnitus first: 3,583,295 veterans carry it, and 287,138 more were granted it in that one year. Ending the standalone 10 percent rating closes the door on roughly a quarter-million new tinnitus claimants every year, each told zero where the rules today say ten. Sleep apnea brings the dollars: 763,763 service-connected ratings, the largest respiratory condition after allergic rhinitis, most at the 50 percent CPAP level Section 108 pushes toward 10 or 0.

Here is the part that should stop you cold. The marquee benefit, the Star Act in this bill, costs about $11 billion over ten years and reaches roughly 54,000 combat-injured retirees. The cut that pays for it has been scored three different ways:

• $38 billion by the bill’s own boosters (Americans for Prosperity)

• Up to $57 billion by VA itself, hitting as many as 1.5 million veterans

• At least $60 billion by the committee’s ranking member

Pick any of those numbers. The cut is three to five times the benefit it is sold as funding. It does not offset the Star Act. It dwarfs it, and it bankrolls the entire 60-bill package on the backs of future tinnitus and sleep apnea claimants. The most expensive thing in this bill is the cut.

Yes, your rating is safe. Here is the catch.

Be clear about what this does not do, because the other side will try to catch you overstating it. If you already hold a rating for sleep apnea or tinnitus, Section 108 does not cut it. The bill says so, and the proposed rule said the same. Anyone telling current ratees their checks are about to shrink is wrong, and saying so out loud is how you keep your credibility.

Now the catch. The protection covers the rating you hold today. The new criteria govern every claim filed after the law takes effect. So the veteran at 50 percent who later files for an increase, or who gets called back for a reexamination and lands back in the system, is standing in the new world, not the old one. The bill protects the rating in effect. It does not promise that protection survives the day you ask for more. That question is not answered in the text, and it is the one veterans should be asking out loud.

Help, paid for by hurt

One group of veterans gains here, and another pays. The combat-injured retirees who finally get full concurrent receipt deserve it, and have for years. But the bill funds them by taking it out of the next generation of tinnitus and sleep apnea claimants, the cohort with no rating to grandfather and no lobby in the hearing room. The VFW said it plainly in opposing the bill: future disabled veterans should not be made to bear the cost of expanding benefits, because earned compensation is an obligation of the nation, not a piggy bank to be raided through offsets. Cutting tinnitus and sleep apnea is not a benefit to veterans. It is a benefit to some veterans, billed to others who have not walked in the door yet.

Written to be unreadable

This is how something this big moves without a fight. Not by lying. By being unreadable.

The committee’s own one-pager lists about twenty benefit bills by name, then disposes of the cut in a single sentence at the bottom:

The Take Care of America’s Veterans Act is fully offset by codifying a bipartisan change to VA’s ratings schedule.

That is the only mention. It never says Section 108. It never says tinnitus or sleep apnea. It never says who loses what.

Then came the last lock on the door. On June 23 the Rules Committee cleared the bill for the floor under a closed rule, which means no member can offer an amendment, including one to strip Section 108. A 554-page bill, a cut buried two-thirds in, set to reach the floor in a form that cannot be touched. The left will call the whole thing an attack on veterans, the right will call it overdue reform, and almost nobody on either side will read to Section 108 and tell you what it changes for the veteran filing next month. That is the job here, and it is why a veteran-run outlet has to be the one to do it.

It does not stop at 108

Section 108 is the cut you can see. It is not the only thing worth watching.

• Section 601 lifts VA’s community-care access standards into statute and bars VA from counting its own telehealth when it decides whether it can see you in-house, which steers more care outside the VA.

• Section 603 adds a new factor to community-care eligibility: whether a veteran “would abstain from seeking such care if required” to use the VA, paired with language that the call must stay “driven by clinical need.” Critics, including Paralyzed Veterans of America, read it as turning a veteran’s preference to skip the VA into a key that unlocks private care.

• Section 674 rebuilds VA’s innovation office into a payment-model engine that can change benefit scope “as may be necessary to carry out an approved model,” and orders a review of community care against Medicare “best practices.”

Russell Lemle and Suzanne Gordon laid out that privatization arc in The American Prospect this week. This piece is the companion to theirs: they mapped the destination, this one walks the machinery.

This did not come out of nowhere

If Section 108 feels like it appeared from thin air, it did not. It is the last step in a sequence that played out in public, on the record, over three years. You do not need a secret meeting. You need a calendar.

• 2023. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 calls in writing for an accelerated, budget-office-cleared rewrite of the rating schedule to produce “significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants,” while leaving existing ratings in place. Cut the future, protect the present. That is the architecture of Section 108.

• October 6, 2025. The Washington Post runs a series casting the disability system as bloated and gameable, with one piece arguing VA pays more for sleep apnea than for some lost limbs.

• October 29, 2025. Three weeks later, the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee holds a hearing. Daniel Gade, a longtime critic of the compensation system, testifies that it “robs veterans of purpose and dignity” and that “only in the VA system are flat feet and tinnitus a disability.” A senator floats a commission to study cutting ratings. The chairman promises more to come.

• June 10, 2026. The bill arrives, cutting the exact two conditions the Post questioned and Gade named, in the exact “future claimants” structure Project 2025 prescribed.

You do not have to prove coordination to report what it is: a documented progression from blueprint to narrative to hearing to bill, each step sourced, each pointing the same way. The honest question, and it stays a question, is whether the series and the hearing were the softening-up or whether four things lined up by chance. What is not in question is that the people pushing VA privatization see this as the finish line. Concerned Veterans for America, the Koch-funded group that has argued for it for years, praised the bill as one that would “finish the job.” When the opponents call it Project 2025 made law and the funders call it finishing the job, the only disagreement is whether that is good news.

(Full disclosure: I covered the October 29 hearing here at the time, in “The Alarm Bell.” This bill is what that hearing was building toward.)

We are still making veterans

Let me be plain about where I stand, because TQF does not hide it.

I do not support any veterans’ package that makes veterans pay for veterans’ benefits.

Not this one, not a better-written one, not a future one with a friendlier name. The cost of keeping the country’s promise to its wounded belongs to the country. If Congress cannot fund a benefit without cutting another veteran’s compensation, the problem is the budget, not the veteran.

And the timing should make every member who votes for it flinch. This spring the United States fought a war. Operation Epic Fury, the campaign against Iran, ran from late February into the spring, and by Central Command’s own count it killed at least 13 service members and wounded about 400 in action. Those 400 are not a statistic. They are the next claimants. Blast and acoustic trauma are the textbook causes of ringing ears and the traumatic brain injuries that bring on sleep apnea. The troops hurt in that war will file for the exact two conditions Section 108 rewrites, and because their claims land after this bill takes effect, they get rated under the cut, not under the rule that protects the veteran who filed last year.

A sitting congressman said it more bluntly. At the June 25 press conference, Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania said the bill “stabs those serving right now in the back,” many of them in uniform for this spring’s war, only to be rated under the cut when they come home and file.

The VFW’s executive director, Ryan Gallucci, put the same point in plain terms:

Anybody who’s on active duty now, anybody who was injured in Kuwait from Iranian drones, anyone working on a flight line or on an aircraft carrier right now would be subject to it when they get out of the military.

Sit with that. We are still making wounded veterans, by the hundreds, and the ink on this bill is not dry. In the same season, Congress is lowering what their wounds will be worth, steering their care toward private networks, and leaving the VA they will lean on to thin out. More casualties in the front door, smaller ratings waiting for them.

The money to avoid all of it exists. Blumenthal already said where: the $1.7 trillion Military Retirement Fund could cover the roughly $11 billion Star Act without touching a single disability rating. Congress did not run out of money. It picked who pays. It picked the veteran who has not filed yet, and the 400 who came home from this spring’s war and will.

What comes next

The defenders will point to a medical rationale, and one exists on paper: VA argued in 2022 that sleep apnea should be rated on how well treatment works, and that tinnitus is a symptom rather than a disease of its own. Those are real arguments. They are also old arguments, unchanged since 2022, and they could not carry the day through four years of the process built to weigh exactly that kind of evidence. No new medicine showed up in 2026. A package that needed an offset did.

That is the deeper danger, bigger than two diagnostic codes. The rating schedule is supposed to be medical. Congress handed it to VA on purpose, so a condition and its compensation would be set by clinical evidence, not by a vote. This bill breaks that wall, writing specific rating percentages into statute as an offset to pay for something else. John Kamin, deputy director of government relations at Common Defense, told The American Prospect that the system was designed to run on medical evidence and was never meant to be a political bargaining chip. Then he named the real stakes:

It’s not a question of whether more will be cut next, but which ones.

Kyleanne Hunter, CEO of IAVA, said it in plainer words:

Today it’s tinnitus and sleep apnea. Tomorrow it could be PTSD, migraines, toxic exposure conditions, or any other disability that becomes a tempting budget target.

Once a rating is a line in a budget instead of a medical finding, no rating is safe.

Remember how this started. A clean Star Act vote was a day away when this package landed on top of it. The benefit and the cut were never one thing. They could be pulled apart, and someone already tried. At the Rules Committee on June 23, Takano moved to throw out the 554-page package and pass the Star Act on its own, funded with Defense dollars already on the books. It was voted down. The choice to keep the cut bolted to the benefit is not an accident of drafting. It was put to a vote and made on purpose.

Here is where it stands. This is still a bill, not a law. It cleared the Rules Committee under a closed rule, then Republicans pulled it from the floor this week without calling the vote. The stated reason was a separate fight over the SAVE Act that froze every House vote. The timing, with opposition piling up, was its own kind of answer. The bill is not dead. It comes back the week the floor reopens, with the Senate companion, S. 4744, behind it. Nothing has changed for a single veteran yet, and it does not have to. The ask is simple enough for a postcard:

• Pass the Star Act on its own.

• Fund it honestly.

• Leave the rating schedule to medicine.

The window to say so is now, while it is stalled, not after it comes back.

TAKE ACTION

The issue: Section 108 of H.R. 9237 would rewrite VA’s sleep apnea and tinnitus rating criteria for all future claims, using the same schedule VA has been unable to finalize through rulemaking since 2022.

The ask: Under the closed rule, no House member can amend Section 108 out on the floor; the only vote they get is yes or no on the whole package. So the ask is direct: vote no on H.R. 9237 as written, and bring the Major Richard Star Act as a clean, honestly funded bill. In the Senate, where the package still has to move, strip Section 108 or fund the Star Act from the Military Retirement Fund instead. The clean bill is closer than it looks. As of late June the discharge petition to force a standalone Star Act vote was reported five signatures short of the 218 needed, and members are pushing to clear it by unanimous consent. Ask your representative to sign the discharge petition, and your senators to pass the Star Act by unanimous consent.

Call script (veteran): “I am a veteran in [state]. I support the Major Richard Star Act, but not this way. I am asking [Member] to vote no on H.R. 9237 as written and pass the Star Act as a clean bill. Do not pay for one benefit by cutting sleep apnea and tinnitus ratings for the veterans who come after me.”

Call script (citizen): “I am a constituent in [state]. Please ask [Member] to vote no on H.R. 9237 as written and pass the Star Act on its own, without cutting future veterans’ disability ratings to fund it.”

Who to call. Your own representative and two senators first. They answer to you as a constituent, which is what makes the call land.

• US Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121. Ask to be connected to your representative, or to either of your senators, by name.

• Find your House member: house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

• Find your senators: senate.gov/senators

The committees writing this bill:

• House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs: Chairman Mike Bost (R-IL) and Ranking Member Mark Takano (D-CA), 364 Cannon House Office Building. Reach any member through the Capitol Switchboard, (202) 224-3121.

• Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs: Chairman Jerry Moran (R-KS) and Ranking Member Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Room SR-412. Committee line (202) 224-9126; Chairman’s office (202) 224-2074.

• Tip line: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com

About this publication: Tbird’s Quiet Fight is independent investigative journalism on veterans’ policy, law, and the systems meant to serve those who served. It is written and edited by Theresa Aldrich, a Navy veteran and founder of HadIt.com. No agency, command, or institution signs off on it.

AI disclaimer: I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

AI-generated illustration: a federal government press release on a stainless steel forensic examination table, marked with red ink and numbered evidence markers, evoking the article's autopsy of the May 11, 2026 VA infrastructure press release. Generated with Google Flow / ImageFX.

The Gist

VA announced $596 million in Q2 FY2026 infrastructure improvements on May 11, 2026. The administration’s own concurrent paperwork tells a different story.

• The same administration says the count of new VA facilities since January 20, 2025 is both “35” (press release) and “25” (White House 365 Wins fact sheet, three months earlier).

• The backlog reduction percentage from the same administration in the same six-month window is 70%, 63%, 60%, or 57%, depending on which document you read.

• The Q2 project list VA linked contains 536 projects and zero attached dollar amounts.

• VA cut 29,000 employees in eight months while a federal district court injunction blocked the formal RIF. The administration routed around the injunction through hiring freeze, deferred resignations, and attrition.

• PACT Act enrollment is declining year over year. The administration credits itself for statutory growth from a 2022 law expanded in 2024.

• Oracle EHR program: 16 of 18 GAO recommendations not fully implemented, a new $32.7 billion cost estimate not shared with GAO, over $12 billion already obligated.

• Secretary Doug Collins began his VA tenure simultaneously serving as acting head of two federal agencies that investigate his own department.

This article cites twenty-nine primary federal documents. The administration’s own paper is where the contradictions live.

The Department of Veterans Affairs put out a press release on May 11, 2026. It announced “nearly $600 million in infrastructure improvements” approved during the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, and credited the Trump administration with opening “35 new VA health care facilities” since January 20, 2025.

Three months earlier, on January 20, 2026, the White House published its “365 Wins in 365 Days” fact sheet marking the first anniversary of President Trump’s return to office. That document credited the same administration with opening “25 new VA healthcare clinics” since January 20, 2025.

Same administration. Same period. A ten-facility gap between two of its own concurrent communications.

That is where this autopsy starts. Not with a hostile critic’s claim, not with a leaked document, not with an investigative reporter’s source. With the administration’s own paper, side by side with the administration’s own other paper.

The $596 million headline rests on top of a fact sheet that contradicts the facility count, a project list with no dollar amounts, four different backlog reduction percentages, a workforce cut achieved by routing around a federal court order, a PACT Act enrollment claim that runs the wrong direction, an Oracle electronic health record program with sixteen unimplemented GAO recommendations, and a Secretary whose first weeks in office included acting headship of the federal agency that polices ethics violations inside his own department.

The press release is roughly 700 words. The contradicting paper trail is twenty-nine primary federal documents long.

Who actually authorized the facilities?

The press release credits the Trump administration with opening “35 new VA health care facilities” since January 20, 2025. The same administration’s White House fact sheet says 25. Both numbers misattribute the authorship.

VA major medical facility leases require specific Congressional authorization under 38 U.S.C. 8104 and 40 U.S.C. 3307. The timeline from authorization to a facility opening for patients runs five to ten years for major construction, two to five years for smaller capital leases. VA’s own FY 2026 Construction and Long-Range Capital Plan documents this process.

Facilities opening in 2025 and 2026 were authorized between roughly 2017 and 2023. That means the actual authorizing administration was Trump 1 (2017-2020) or Biden (2021-2024). Not Trump 2.

The largest tranche of those authorizations is in one law. The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our PACT Act of 2022 (P.L. 117-168), signed by President Biden on August 10, 2022, authorized 31 veterans’ medical care and research facilities in 19 states. Sections 701 through 707 of the PACT Act handled the authorizations and appropriations.

In June and July 2025, 18 of those 31 PACT Act facilities required reauthorization due to updated cost estimates. All four required congressional committees, the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, voted to reapprove them. The facilities were originally authorized under a law signed before the current administration took office, by a president defeated in the 2024 election.

Trump 2 did not pass the PACT Act. Trump 2 did not authorize a single one of the 31 facilities the PACT Act funded. Trump 2’s own FY 2026 budget request proposed cuts the Senate VA Committee questioned in May 2025. The facilities opening on this administration’s watch were authorized, funded, designed, and constructed by predecessors.

The Secretary is cutting ribbons on buildings other people built.

The “35 new facilities” claim and the “25 new clinics” claim do not just contradict each other on the count. They both misattribute the authorship.

Four different percentages for the same backlog

Look at the backlog numbers.

The May 11, 2026 press release leads with a 70% reduction. On February 23, 2026, VA’s own news service announced that the backlog had dropped under 100,000 for the first time since 2020, citing a 63% reduction. On November 18, 2025, VA News announced a 57% reduction. The White House “365 Wins” fact sheet of January 20, 2026 cited 60%.

Four federal documents. Four different percentages. Issued by the same administration in roughly a six-month window.

The numbers may describe different baselines and different windows. That is the problem. If the administration cannot keep its own backlog reduction figure consistent across its own concurrent press releases, what survives of the May 11 claim is “a number that sounds large.”

Now look at how the reduction was achieved.

On January 14, 2026, the Government Accountability Office testified before the House Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs that VA continues to base decisions on veterans’ disability claims, in part, on outdated criteria. The GAO testimony (GAO-26-108844) documents that VA’s earnings-loss calculations rely on labor market data from 1945. That is not a typo. Nineteen forty-five. GAO also found that VA has updated medical criteria for only 11 of 15 body systems since 2009.

In April 2026, the VA Office of Inspector General released a Review of Automated Decisions for Veterans’ Service-Connected Death Claims (Report 25-00153-47). The review found that automated decision models VA uses to process Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC) claims bypass standard scrutiny protocols. The report documents improper payments and PACT Act compliance violations resulting from the automation.

The 70% reduction is partly the work of automated models that don’t apply the protocols those models were built to apply, operating on top of regulatory criteria still anchored to the labor market a World War II veteran would have come home to.

That is “faster.” It is not “accurate.”

$596 million, 536 projects, zero attached dollar amounts

Now the headline number itself.

The press release links a Q2 FY2026 Non-Recurring Maintenance Project Awards list. The PDF is 19 pages. It contains 536 individual project line items spread across 70 to 80 VA medical centers. Every line item names the project and the station. Not one line item lists a dollar figure.

$596 million is announced. Zero of the 536 projects in the supporting PDF state how much money they received.

The press release frames the FY26 NRM appropriation as “the largest NRM dollar amount in the history of VA,” echoing the framing in VA’s own FY 2027 Budget in Brief. That framing may be accurate, or it may not. The supporting documentation does not permit verification at the project level. A reader who wants to know whether a specific VA medical center got $50,000 or $50 million for the elevator project listed on page 7 has no way to answer that question from the linked PDF.

The 536-project list does answer one question. Fifty-five of the projects are tagged “EHRM Infrastructure Upgrades” or similar EHR-related work. EHRM is the VA Electronic Health Record Modernization program, the Oracle Health rollout that has been the subject of three Government Accountability Office reports and four VA Office of Inspector General reports over the past five years. EHRM work appears in the Q2 list at facilities including Columbus, Albany, Bath, and roughly fifty other sites.

Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, the original Oracle EHR pilot site and the location of every major OIG finding on EHR safety, care coordination, and information security, appears in the Q2 list. Its projects are not tagged EHRM. Multiple secondary VA medical centers carry the tag. The site that defined what is wrong with the EHR rollout does not.

The PDF is consistent on this point. It catalogues 536 projects. It funds none of them on paper. It tags many sites with EHR upgrades, including some that have never been Oracle deployment sites. It does not tag the original pilot site as receiving EHR work, in a quarter when the program is reportedly accelerating.

Capital expansion as a headline. A project list as the source of truth. The two do not check.

The workforce cut and the court order that did not stop it

A new hospital wing is a building. A staffed wing is health care. The press release announces buildings while the administration cuts the people inside them.

On July 7, 2025, VA News announced the department was on pace to reduce total VA staff by approximately 30,000 employees by the end of fiscal year 2025. Headcount went from roughly 484,000 employees on January 1, 2025, to 467,000 by June 1, 2025, with the department projecting another 12,000 reductions by September 30, 2025.

The reduction was announced as having “eliminated the need” for a department-wide reduction in force, which VA had previously been considering at a scale of up to 15% of staff.

Here is what is missing from that announcement: the reason VA did not need to issue formal RIF notices to achieve the cuts.

On May 22, 2025, Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a 51-page preliminary injunction in AFGE v. Trump, Case 3:25-cv-03698-SI. The injunction blocked Executive Order 14210, the order directing federal agencies to plan large-scale reductions in force, from being implemented at 21 federal agencies. The Department of Veterans Affairs was on the named list.

Judge Illston’s opinion opens with a statement of constitutional principle that does not require a law degree to understand:

“Presidents may set policy priorities for the executive branch, and agency heads may implement them. This much is undisputed. But Congress creates federal agencies, funds them, and gives them duties that, by statute, they must carry out. Agencies may not conduct large-scale reorganizations and reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates, and a President may not initiate large-scale executive branch reorganization without partnering with Congress.”

The Supreme Court stayed the preliminary injunction on July 8, 2025, expressly declining to rule on the legality of any specific agency RIF or reorganization plan. The Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction and remanded the case on September 19, 2025. The district court issued a new preliminary injunction order on December 17, 2025. The case is ongoing.

For seven weeks, May 22 through July 8, 2025, Judge Illston’s injunction was the operative federal law on VA’s ability to conduct large-scale RIFs.

By July 7, 2025, the day before the Supreme Court stayed the injunction, VA had already announced it had achieved a 17,000-employee reduction since January, and was on pace for another 12,000 by September 30. The mechanisms VA used were not RIFs. They were a federal hiring freeze, deferred resignations, retirements, and normal attrition.

The administration did not defy the May 22 injunction. It routed around it. The cuts the court blocked at the front door were achieved at the back door through mechanisms the order did not reach.

On February 3, 2026, the VA Office of Inspector General published a Healthcare Facility Inspection of the VA Indiana Healthcare System in Indianapolis (Report 25-00207-36). Among its findings: the hiring freeze had destabilized the facility’s operations to the point where Human Resources specialists and program analysts were trained on the job to stock surgical supplies in the operating rooms.

HR specialists stocking surgical supplies so the operating rooms could function. That is what 29,000 fewer employees buys.

In May 2026, the administration announces $596 million in capital improvements to the physical plant. The workforce required to operate the physical plant is being reduced through mechanisms the federal courts have repeatedly examined. The press release announces the buildings without mentioning what is happening to the staffing inside them.

PACT enrollment is going the wrong way

The administration credits itself with PACT Act enrollment growth. The data the administration publishes itself shows the opposite trend.

VA’s PACT Act Performance Dashboard, Issue 54, dated January 23, 2026, reports new VHA enrollee counts by calendar year:

• 2024: 384,839 new enrollees

• 2025: 364,448 new enrollees

• 2026 year-to-date through January: roughly 125,000 new enrollees, tracking the declining 2025 pace

Year-over-year, new enrollment declined by 20,391 between 2024 and 2025. The 2026 trajectory continues the decline, not a reversal.

The PACT Act became law on August 10, 2022, under the previous administration. The statutory expansion of toxic exposure presumptive conditions, the regulatory change that produced the bulk of enrollment growth, took effect on March 5, 2024, also under the previous administration.

Both the law and its largest implementation milestone pre-date the current administration. The growth the current administration claims credit for is statutory growth from a law it did not pass, achieved through a regulation it did not write, that is now declining on its watch.

That is not enrollment growth. That is enrollment decline credited as enrollment growth.

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The $32 billion the press release does not mention

A press release announcing $596 million in VA infrastructure should account for the largest information technology modernization program in federal civilian government. This one does not.

The Government Accountability Office issued GAO-26-108812 on December 15, 2025: “VA Electronic Health Record Modernization: Critical Actions Needed to Support Accelerated System Deployments.” The testimony documents ten new priority recommendations for VA. Of the 18 prior GAO recommendations on EHRM, 16 remain not fully implemented. VA’s new cost estimate for the program is $32.7 billion, with alternative scenarios as high as $37 billion. VA has not shared the new cost estimate with GAO. The program has already obligated more than $12.71 billion in federal funds.

In February 2025, GAO had issued the earlier testimony GAO-25-108091, “Electronic Health Record Modernization: VA Is Making Incremental Improvements, but Much More Remains to Be Done.” Carol Harris, GAO’s Director of Information Technology and Cybersecurity, delivered both testimonies. The “Incremental Improvements” report documented user satisfaction issues and configuration changes still outstanding. It was delivered at the February 24, 2025 House VA Subcommittee on Technology Modernization hearing titled “From Reset to Rollout: Can the VA EHRM Program Finally Deliver?”

The same Subcommittee held a follow-up hearing on December 15, 2025, where Harris delivered GAO-26-108812. Title used again: “From Reset to Rollout.”

The VA OIG record on the Oracle EHR rollout is independently documented. Three Mann-Grandstaff OIG reports were released on a single day, March 17, 2022:

• Report 21-00656-110: Medication management deficiencies after the new EHR go-live.

• Report 21-00781-108: Ticket process concerns. The OIG documented 38,700 tickets generated in five months. Thirty-three percent were closed without resolution.

• Report 21-00781-109: Care coordination deficiencies.

A fourth OIG report from June 2022 (21-03020-168) documented deficits with metrics for the EHR rollout assessment. A fifth OIG report from February 18, 2026 (25-00975-234) documented continued information security findings at Spokane.

David Case, then-Deputy Inspector General, testified before the House Subcommittee on February 15, 2024, that “for more than four years, OIG staff have been” examining the EHRM program. The full transcript of that hearing is part of the public record.

The OIG paper trail is over five years long. The GAO paper trail is over five years long. The Oracle deployment site list is short. The number of OIG and GAO recommendations VA has fully implemented out of the 18 most recent: two.

In May 2025, Secretary Doug Collins appeared before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs for his first hearing as Secretary. The transcript shows him pushing back at Senator Richard Blumenthal: “I will not let you sit here and scare my veterans” about the EHR rollout.

In January 2026, the same Senator and the same Secretary were in the same room for the Senate VA Committee’s hearing on the Restructure for Impact and Sustainability Effort, or RISE, where Collins answered EHR questions differently. The committee record contains his statement that veterans “have every right to be skeptical” about EHR deployments at their facilities.

Eight months between the two statements. The underlying program had not changed. The Secretary’s confidence in defending it had.

A press release announcing capital investment in the physical infrastructure that runs on top of an EHR program GAO has flagged 18 times, OIG has examined for five years, the Secretary himself has acknowledged is grounds for skepticism, and which has obligated more than $12 billion against a $32.7 billion cost estimate not yet shared with GAO. That press release is silent on the EHR program.

Brick and mortar make no medical record.

The narrator: Doug Collins

A press release is only as credible as its narrator. Examine the narrator.

On February 11, 2025, the day after Doug Collins was sworn in as the 11th Secretary of Veterans Affairs, President Trump signed documents naming Collins as acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, replacing recently-confirmed Biden appointee David Huitema. On March 5, 2025, Collins was added as acting Special Counsel at the Office of Special Counsel, the federal agency that protects whistleblowers, including federal whistleblowers reporting wrongdoing inside agencies the Secretary of Veterans Affairs leads.

For approximately seven weeks, the sitting Secretary of Veterans Affairs simultaneously served as the acting head of:

• the agency responsible for executive branch ethics enforcement,

• the agency responsible for protecting federal whistleblowers, and

• the federal department those agencies investigate.

On February 21, 2025, Representative Gerry Connolly, then-Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent President Trump a formal letter opposing the appointments. The letter cited the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 and the institutional independence Congress wrote into OGE’s enabling statute. The letter characterized the dual appointment as “a fundamental conflict of interest that undermines the very purpose of OGE’s institutional independence.”

The Connolly letter is congressional record, on House Oversight letterhead, signed by the ranking Democrat on the committee with oversight jurisdiction. It is not a press statement. It is a formal congressional position.

The day after the OGE announcement, Senator Richard Blumenthal, then Ranking Member of the Senate VA Committee, was quoted in Military Times:

“Barely one week on the job, Doug Collins should have enough on his plate taking the reins of the largest health care system in the country. On top of it being a major conflict of interest for a Cabinet secretary to be tasked with oversight of his own position and agency, all three of these roles are too important for one individual to fill.”

On April 1, 2025, Jamieson Greer succeeded Collins in both acting roles. Collins held the OGE acting directorship for approximately seven weeks. He held the OSC acting role for approximately four. Both ended.

Collins is not currently serving in either oversight role. The credibility question is not about active conflicts of interest in May 2026. The credibility question is about the disposition the first months of his VA tenure established.

The first official act on Collins’s calendar as Secretary of Veterans Affairs was acting headship of the federal agency that polices the federal government’s ethics standards. His first weeks in office included a formal House Oversight letter from a Ranking Member to the President describing his appointment as “a fundamental conflict of interest.” On May 6, 2025, when the Senate VA Committee questioned his confidence in the Oracle EHR rollout, he answered by accusing a senator of scaring veterans. On January 29, 2026, he told the same committee veterans had “every right to be skeptical” about EHR deployments.

These are not inconsistencies of detail. They are inconsistencies of posture. They are documented across federal court filings, congressional letters, hearing transcripts, military press coverage, and the Secretary’s own statements.

The May 11, 2026 press release we are autopsying carries his name.

What the documents say

What the May 11 press release asserts in roughly 700 words is contradicted by twenty-nine primary federal documents. Federal court orders. House and Senate hearing transcripts. GAO testimony. VA OIG audits and Healthcare Facility Inspections. VA’s own concurrent news releases. The White House’s own fact sheet. A congressional letter from a House Oversight Ranking Member to the President.

The specific contradictions:

• 35 new facilities (press release) versus 25 new facilities (White House, three months earlier).

• 70% backlog reduction versus 63% versus 60% versus 57%, all from the same administration’s own concurrent paper.

• $596 million announced, zero of the 536 individual projects identified by dollar amount in the supporting PDF.

• Capital expansion announced alongside a 29,000-employee workforce reduction achieved by routing around a federal court order blocking large-scale RIFs.

• PACT Act growth credited despite the statutory origin pre-dating the administration and the enrollment trend now declining.

• $596 million capital announcement in a quarter when the Oracle EHR program has 16 of 18 GAO recommendations unimplemented, a new $32.7 billion cost estimate not shared with GAO, and over $12 billion already obligated.

• A Secretary whose first weeks in office included acting headship of the agencies that investigate his own department, and whose public confidence in the systems he defends has been documented as situational.

The autopsy does not require interpretation. The documents do the work.

A press release this contradicted, this often, by sources this primary, is not communication. It is performance.

Veterans are entitled to better, and the documents are how they get it.

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What you can do about it

The ask. The Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs has the authority to formally request a written reconciliation. Specifically:

1. A reconciled new-facility count, with the administration’s definition of “new facility” stated explicitly.

2. A backlog reduction figure with the baseline date and the calculation window stated.

3. Project-by-project dollar amounts for the Q2 FY2026 NRM project list.

4. The administration’s specific contribution to PACT Act enrollment, separated from the statutory expansion that took effect March 5, 2024.

These are not policy preferences. They are reconciliation requests for federal numbers the public has been given without supporting detail.

Phone calls

Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs:

• Chairman Jerry Moran (R-KS): (202) 224-6521

• Ranking Member Richard Blumenthal (D-CT): (202) 224-2823

House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs:

• Chairman Mike Bost (R-IL): (202) 225-5661

• Ranking Member Mark Takano (D-CA): (202) 225-2305

Veteran call script

“I’m a veteran. I’d like Senator [or Representative] [Name] to ask VA Secretary Collins for a written reconciliation of the conflicting facility counts and backlog reduction percentages across VA’s own concurrent communications. The numbers in the May 11, 2026 press release do not match the numbers in the White House’s own January 2026 fact sheet. Reconciliation should be in writing and on the public record.”

Citizen call script

“I’m a constituent. I’d like Senator [or Representative] [Name] to formally request that the VA Secretary provide project-by-project dollar amounts for the Q2 FY2026 NRM project list referenced in the May 11, 2026 press release. The PDF VA linked from that press release lists 536 projects, with zero funding amounts attached to any of them. The public is entitled to know how the $596 million was allocated.”

Tip line for sources

If you work at VA, in Congress, at GAO, at OIG, at Oracle Health, or at any contractor with information relevant to this story, secure tips can be sent to ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com. Sources are protected.

About this publication

Tbird’s Quiet Fight publishes investigative reporting on veterans’ policy, benefits, and oversight. It is independent, paid for by readers, and unaffiliated with any agency, contractor, or advocacy organization.

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.

Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).

The Gist:

On April 25, 2026, an armed man breached the outer perimeter of the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner. He was stopped at a magnetometer before reaching the ballroom. Inside that ballroom were the President, the First Lady, and twelve officials in the statutory line of presidential succession, including six of the top seven. The country was sixty days into an undeclared war with Iran whose stated end criterion was a feeling in the President’s bones. There is no public evidence that a designated survivor was identified for the event. There is no federal continuity doctrine that governs the voluntary aggregation of statutory successors at non-official gatherings. There is, however, a 1981 Treasury Department after-action report on the last time a President was attacked at this hotel that warned: “Less favorable circumstances can be easily imagined.” Forty-five years later, those circumstances arrived.

The Sailor on Watch

There is a sailor on watch in the Strait of Hormuz tonight. She does not know when she is coming home. Her ship is in active blockade posture, intercepting Iranian-flagged tankers and screening commercial shipping that has largely refused to risk transit since Iran shut the strait in February. Her chain of command cannot tell her how this ends, because the only person who can tell her, the Commander in Chief, said on Fox News on March 13 that he would know the war was over “when I feel it in my bones.” The American death toll from the war stood at thirteen as of that interview. We do not know how much it will cost the country in blood and treasure, because the administration has declined to ask Congress for a supplemental appropriation to pay for the war and has so far refused to say how much the war will cost.

The sixty-day clock under the War Powers Resolution runs out on May 1. The Trump administration never sought authorization. The Senate has defeated four bipartisan attempts to force a vote, the most recent on April 15 by 52-47, along party lines.

On Saturday night, while that sailor stood her watch, the people who started her war were at a press dinner.

Six of Seven

The Presidential Succession Act of 1947, codified at 3 USC § 19, sets the order. Vice President. Speaker of the House. President pro tempore of the Senate. Then the Senate-confirmed cabinet, beginning with the Secretary of State, in the chronological order their departments were created.

Twelve of the eighteen positions in that line were physically present at the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner at the Washington Hilton on April 25, 2026. Six of the top seven.

The names, drawn from named-attendee reporting in the Associated Press, NBC News, CNN, Newsweek, MS NOW, Reuters, Getty, and Fox News red-carpet coverage:

• Vice President JD Vance

• Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, attending with his wife Kelly

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio

• Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent

• Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth

• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche

• Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum

• Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy

• Secretary of Energy Chris Wright

• Secretary of Education Linda McMahon

• Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin

The seventh in the top seven, the one not in the room, was the President pro tempore of the Senate: Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, age 92. The longest-serving Republican senator in American history. The man who, had a fragmentation grenade, an explosive vest, or a vehicle bomb in the Hilton’s underground parking garage taken the dais and the head table on April 25, would have been sworn in as the wartime Commander in Chief of the United States.

He would have been the oldest person ever sworn in as President, by fourteen years.

Joining the line of succession in that ballroom were the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, in a role from which Trump’s own counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, resigned in March in protest of the war’s stated intelligence basis. The FBI Director, Kash Patel. The EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, whom Trump is reportedly considering nominating to replace Acting AG Blanche. The Office of Management and Budget Director, Russell Vought. The White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who in February told the press that Trump had “a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States.” A March 12 ABC News report citing FBI documents on a possible Iranian threat against California prompted Leavitt to post on X: “TO BE CLEAR: No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did.” Trump’s separate claim that Iran was building missiles capable of striking the United States is, per CNN, not supported by US intelligence.

The dinner was sold out. The room held roughly 2,600 people. The lobby of the Washington Hilton, per the Associated Press, “regularly remains open to other guests during the dinner, and security and screening is typically located closer to the ballroom itself.”

The Reason They Were There

This was the first White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Donald Trump had ever attended as a sitting President of the United States. He skipped 2017. He skipped 2018. He skipped 2019. The 2020 dinner was canceled. He skipped 2025. For nearly a decade, he had treated the dinner as an enemy gathering and made his refusal to attend a public statement.

So why, in the middle of a war, did he come?

He told us himself, three hours after his evacuation, in the White House briefing room. He had come to deliver a speech he had been saving up for a long time. From his own remarks, on camera, after he was rushed off the stage:

“I am ready, willing, and able, and I was all set to really rip it. And I said to my people, This would be the most inappropriate speech ever made, if I said, So I have to save it. I don’t know if I could ever be as rough as I was gonna be tonight. I think I’m gonna be probably very nice. I’d be very boring the next time.”

He came to a press dinner during active wartime, after a decade of public boycott, to deliver what he himself described as “the most inappropriate speech ever made.” That was the purpose for which the line of succession was aggregated. That was the reason the war Cabinet, the men and women whose decisions are killing American servicemembers in undeclared combat, sat in one ballroom on the night of April 25.

To watch Trump rip the press.

That is the gravity of the room. The Secretary of “War,” the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary running the sanctions architecture against Iran, the Energy Secretary responsible for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the supply consequences of the Strait closure, the Director of National Intelligence whose own analysts have publicly contradicted the war’s stated rationale, the Vice President who has called the War Powers Resolution “fundamentally a fake and unconstitutional law,” all in one room. None of them, apparently, said this is unwise. None of them said one of us should be elsewhere. None of them said, with a war on, the country needs us alive more than the President needs us in his audience.

Or if any of them said it, the President did not listen. And they came anyway.

Among them was the Acting Attorney General. Todd Blanche, who served as Trump’s personal defense attorney through the 2024 New York hush money trial and the federal classified documents case, was elevated to acting head of the Justice Department on April 2, when Trump fired Pam Bondi over what news reports described as her insufficiently aggressive prosecution of Trump’s political opponents. He was on day twenty-three of his appointment when he sat in the Hilton ballroom. The Justice Department has not publicly specified whether Blanche serves under 28 USC § 508 or the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and declined to answer Roll Call’s questions about which legal mechanism authorizes his service.

The Hotel

The Washington Hilton is the same hotel where John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan, Special Agent Tim McCarthy, Officer Thomas Delahanty, and Press Secretary James Brady on March 30, 1981.

Three months after that shooting, on July 2, 1981, the General Counsel of the Treasury Department circulated a draft after-action report to Edwin Meese III, then Counsellor to the President. The report, ordered by Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, evaluated “the adequacy of procedures, facilities, and personnel for ascertaining the existence and assessing the seriousness of threats to the President, protecting the President in his public activities, and responding promptly and effectively to this and similar incidents.” The unredacted draft is held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

It found that the Secret Service performed admirably under circumstances that were highly favorable to survival: a single attacker, quickly apprehended, mid-afternoon, weekday, small-caliber weapon, the President at the door of his limousine close to a fully equipped trauma hospital, the wound non-mortal.

And then it offered, in its own words, this warning:

“Less favorable circumstances can be easily imagined.”

The Treasury Department put that sentence in writing in 1981. It identified procedural deficiencies and called for “the establishment of new protective procedures.” Forty-five years later, the lobby of the Washington Hilton still remains open to other guests during the WHCA dinner. The screening still sits at the door of the ballroom, not at the perimeter of the building. A 31-year-old tutor with a shotgun, a handgun, and four knives walked in.

The Doctrine That Wasn’t

The federal government has a written, classified, multi-tiered policy framework for the continuity of constitutional government in the face of catastrophic events. It is named, dated, and accessible. Presidential Policy Directive 40, signed July 15, 2016, is the controlling National Continuity Policy. It is operationalized by the Federal Continuity Directives, FCD-1 and FCD-2, both updated August 12, 2024. Together they govern how federal agencies preserve essential functions and command authority during a wide spectrum of mass-casualty scenarios.

The directives are exhaustive on facilities. They mandate geographic dispersion of continuity locations. They require that “Heads of Category I and II HQ organizations” identify orders of succession that include “at least one individual who is geographically dispersed from the Organization Head and other individuals within the order of succession.” They define Emergency Relocation Groups and Devolution Emergency Relocation Groups. They specify primary, secondary, and tertiary continuity sites on separate power and telecommunication grids.

They are, in their entirety, silent on the aggregation of the actual statutory successors at non-official gatherings.

The doctrine assumes that bureaucratic continuity is the question. The doctrine does not address the assembly of the human beings the bureaucracy is meant to continue. There is no provision in PPD-40, FCD-1, FCD-2, or any unclassified successor directive that says: officials at the top of the constitutional chain of presidential succession should not all be at the same private dinner during an active war.

That gap is not an oversight. It is a chosen silence. The federal continuity policy framework was rebuilt twice in the post-9/11 era, once in 2007 under Bush and again in 2016 under Obama, with full knowledge that decapitation events targeting the senior civilian leadership were the foundational threat the framework existed to address. And neither version included a binding provision against the kind of aggregation that occurred at the Washington Hilton on April 25, 2026.

The doctrine has a hole in it. The hole has the exact shape of a press dinner.

The Designated Survivor That Wasn’t

There is a customary safeguard that fills the doctrinal hole on a small number of occasions every year. It is called the designated survivor. The Cold War-era practice, used publicly since 1984, removes one person in the line of succession from the room during the State of the Union and presidential inaugurations and places them in a secure, undisclosed location with continuity communications and a protective detail. According to the Congressional Research Service, the practice is not codified in any federal statute, in the Code of Federal Regulations, or in the Constitution. It is, in CRS’s own words, an “executive custom.”

The custom is applied because everyone with operational responsibility for it understands that gathering the constitutional command authority in one room is a bet the country cannot afford to lose. The custom exists precisely because the law did not anticipate this need.

There is no public evidence that a designated survivor was identified for the April 25, 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

White House daily schedules do not mention one. Pool reports do not mention one. The press briefing on April 26 did not mention one. The Acting Attorney General, the Acting White House Chief of Staff, the Secretary of “War,” the Vice President, all of whom appeared in the Brady Briefing Room flanking the President in the hours after the incident, were either in the ballroom or in the secure holding area inside the Hilton when the shots were fired. Whoever the designated survivor would have been, if there was one, has not surfaced in any reporting available to the public as of this writing.

This is the question: was the customary safeguard applied or not?

If it was applied and the designated survivor remains unnamed because the White House has chosen not to disclose, that itself is publishable as a refusal of transparency about the most consequential continuity decision the executive branch makes. If it was not applied, then on the night six of the seven top successors were in the same ballroom in the middle of a war, the customary safeguard that has stood since 1984 simply was not used.

Either way, the question demands an answer the White House has not provided.

The Eighteen-Month Warning

On October 17, 2024, the Department of Homeland Security published the final report of the bipartisan Independent Review Panel on the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt against then-candidate Donald Trump. The four panelists were Mark Filip, former Deputy Attorney General; David Mitchell, longtime law enforcement officer; Janet Napolitano, former Secretary of Homeland Security; and Frances Townsend, former Homeland Security Advisor.

The report’s findings, in the panel’s own words:

“The Secret Service does not perform at the elite levels needed to discharge its critical mission... The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complacent, and static even though risks have multiplied and technology has evolved... The Secret Service as an agency requires fundamental reform to carry out its mission. Without that reform, the Independent Review Panel believes another Butler can and will happen again.”

The panel set deadlines. Butler-specific reforms were to be implemented no later than March 31, 2025. Broader reforms were to be implemented by the end of 2025.

On July 13, 2025, on the one-year anniversary of the Butler shooting, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released its own final report under Chairman Rand Paul. The committee found that the Butler attempt was the result of a “cascade of preventable failures.” It found that “lack of structured communication was likely the greatest contributor to the failures” of July 13, 2024. It found that the former Secret Service Director, Kimberly Cheatle, had given false testimony to Congress about whether resource requests for the Butler rally had been denied. They had been.

And the Senate report documented this: as of one year after Butler, the Secret Service had implemented twenty-one of the forty-six recommendations from independent and congressional oversight bodies. Six employees had been disciplined with suspensions ranging from ten to forty-two days without pay. Twenty-five recommendations remained pending.

Twenty-five recommendations remained pending the night Cole Tomas Allen breached the perimeter at the Hilton.

The current Secret Service Director, Sean Curran, in his post-incident statement on April 25, called the response a demonstration that “our multi-layered protection works.”

The Independent Review Panel had a phrase for the precise scenario that played out on April 25, 2026, eighteen months before it played out. Their phrase was “another Butler.” It arrived.

What Is Owed

Ask any servicemember on watch tonight whether they signed up to fight and bleed and possibly die in an undeclared war whose end criterion is a feeling in the President’s bones. They cannot answer you in the way you want them to, because the oath they swore was to the Constitution, not to the man who currently sits in the office. So they stand watch. They run intercepts in the Strait. They sleep in shifts on bases that have already been hit by Iranian retaliation. They wait. They are good at waiting because we asked them to be good at it. They will continue to be good at it, because that is what the country has asked of them, and they will keep their end of the bargain even when the country has not kept its end.

Here is what the country owes them in return.

It owes them a Commander in Chief who acts like the country is at war when the country is at war. It owes them a Cabinet that does not aggregate at a press dinner during their war. It owes them an Acting Attorney General who is not the President’s former personal defense attorney serving on day twenty-three of his appointment, in a position the Justice Department will not publicly explain the legal basis for. It owes them a constitutional chain of succession that is not all in one ballroom on one night to hear the President insult the journalists who cover them. It owes them a Secret Service that has implemented the reforms an independent panel and the United States Senate told it to implement.

It owes them a republic that takes its own continuity seriously enough to keep one of its statutory successors out of the room. Even one. Even on a slow night. Even when there is no specific threat. Especially when there is.

None of that was true on the night of April 25, 2026. The President came to a press dinner he had boycotted for a decade in order to deliver a speech he himself described as “the most inappropriate speech ever made.” His Cabinet came with him. The Speaker of the House came with his wife. The line of succession sat in one room. The White House has not said whether a designated survivor was named. The hotel lobby remained open to other guests. A 31-year-old tutor walked in.

If he had been carrying what a more capable person, or a coordinated cell, or the next person trying this would carry, instead of a shotgun and a handgun and four knives, the country would have woken up on April 26 with Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, ninety-two years old, sworn in as the wartime Commander in Chief of the United States in the seventh week of an undeclared war whose previous Commander in Chief had said it would end when he felt it in his bones.

The Acting Attorney General, who was at the dinner, called the night a success story. The Director of the Secret Service called it a demonstration that “our multi-layered protection works.” The President used it to argue for building a new ballroom at the White House.

The sailor in the Strait of Hormuz tonight does not know any of this. She is on watch.

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What You Can Do

This is a continuity-of-government failure. It is also a transparency failure, and Congress has the tools to address both.

Call or write your Senator and Representative. The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Ask for your senator or representative by name. The questions to ask:

• Was a designated survivor identified for the April 25, 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner? If so, who? If not, why not?

• Will the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hold an oversight hearing on the continuity-of-government posture during the April 25 incident, including the absence of any binding doctrine governing the aggregation of statutory successors at non-official events?

• Will the House Oversight and Accountability Committee request the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel memorandum authorizing Todd Blanche’s service as Acting Attorney General, including the legal basis under either 28 USC § 508 or the Federal Vacancies Reform Act?

• What is the implementation status of the twenty-five remaining recommendations from the post-Butler oversight reports as of April 25, 2026?

Specific committees worth calling directly:

• Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee: (202) 224-4751

• House Oversight and Accountability Committee: (202) 225-5074

• House Judiciary Committee: (202) 225-3951

• Senate Judiciary Committee: (202) 224-5225

If you are a journalist or researcher, the agencies holding the operational records are:

• The White House Military Office, for any continuity-of-government policy applicable to non-official events.

• The United States Secret Service Office of Protective Operations, for the operational security plan, advance site survey, and threat assessment generated for the April 25, 2026 dinner.

• The Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, for the legal authorization memorandum on Acting Attorney General Blanche.

• The Department of Homeland Security FEMA National Continuity Programs office, for any internal policy memoranda or interagency working group records on principal aggregation risk.

FOIA requests cost the news media nothing for the first one hundred pages of duplication and no search or review fees, under 5 USC § 552(a)(4)(A)(iii). Public-interest fee waivers are available on request.

About This Publication

Tbird’s Quiet Fight is independent investigative journalism focused on VA policy, veteran benefits, and government accountability. Published by the founder of HadIt.com, one of the oldest veteran-run VA claims communities online (est. 1997).

Tips and sources: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com (encrypted options available on request)

Support this work: Subscribe to TQF | Support HadIt.com

For Press and Advocates

Story tips or collaboration: Tbird (TQF / HadIt.com): ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com

Congressional oversight contacts (continuity and Secret Service jurisdiction):

• Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee: (202) 224-4751 | hsgac.senate.gov

• House Oversight and Accountability Committee: (202) 225-5074 | oversight.house.gov

• House Judiciary Committee: (202) 225-3951 | judiciary.house.gov

• Senate Judiciary Committee: (202) 224-5225 | judiciary.senate.gov

Government watchdog resources:

• Government Accountability Office

• Federal Register

• DHS Office of Inspector General

• DOJ Office of the Inspector General

Theresa Aldrich “Tbird,” Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983 to 1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, founder of HadIt.com. Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute.

I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor.

Last verified: April 26, 2026.