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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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The Gist

The VA claims system has a documentation problem that has existed since Vietnam and has never been fixed. Veterans come home, years pass, conditions worsen — and when they try to file, the records that would prove what happened to them are gone. I wasn’t going to let that happen to veterans of Operation Epic Fury.

Thirty-four days into OEF2026, I built epicfury.hadit.com — a real-time evidence archive that documents every confirmed event in the theater, sourced against a strict tier hierarchy, and mapped directly to 38 CFR diagnostic codes. Named casualties serve as Living Anchors: if you were in the same unit, same base, same date, you can anchor your proof of location to that record.

There’s also a critical acronym conflict that is going to cause widespread improper denials if the veterans community doesn’t address it now. OEF2026 is not OEF. OEF is Afghanistan. Every VSO, every veterans law attorney, and every advocate reading this needs to know that.

This is a one-veteran mis…

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AI-generated image. Created with Google ImageFX.

THE GIST

• Five members of Congress wear veterans as a costume. Ballcaps at VFW halls. Flight jackets at air bases. Floor speeches soaked in sacrifice. Their voting records tell a different story.

• Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) cosponsored the Major Richard Star Act in 2021 — publicly, in a Memorial Day column. In October 2025, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he single-handedly killed it on the Senate floor.

• He blocked it twice in one day. First the bill. Then a guaranteed single vote.

• Three months before the block, he voted to strip funding protections for the PACT Act he’d reluctantly voted for in 2022.

• His office later acknowledged “inequities” the bill was designed to fix. Tonya Star, widow of the veteran the bill was named after, died in 2024 — in tears, Blumenthal told the Senate, because another Congress …

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AI-generated image. Research and analysis: Tbird's Quiet Fight · tbirdsquietfight.com

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A follow-up to VA Bypassed Congress to Strip Veterans of Their Rights

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THE GIST

What’s happening: The administration has used the phrase “Warrior Ethos“ in at least four major policy documents — an executive order, the 2026 NDAA, the 2026 federal budget, and Pentagon directives under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Each time the phrase appears, veterans receive less.

The pattern: “Warrior Ethos” is doing the same work the dependency narrative did a decade ago. The words are different. The math is the same.

The evidence: EO 14296 promised housing for up to 6,000 homeless veterans. The 120-day action plan it required was never submitted. The 2026 NDAA invoked “Warrior Ethos” while cutting IVF coverage for military families. The 2026 budget used the phrase while cutting the VA workforce and non-defense programs.

The bottom line: This administration wants veterans to be Spartans. Here’s what Sparta actually looked like.

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THE GIST

Veterans pushed back hard on the Ingram medication rule, and Collins blinked in 48 hours. That felt like a win. It wasn't — not completely. While everyone was arguing about ratings, Collins quietly field-tested something far more dangerous: a blueprint for overriding federal courts without going through the process that makes oversight possible. The rule is halted. The blueprint is intact. And next time, he'll do it slower.

Everyone is celebrating. I get it. Ten thousand comments in 60 hours. VSOs mobilized. Collins backed down in two days. Veterans showed up and the system responded.

Now let me tell you what actually happened.

Collins didn't lose. He ran a test. And it worked.

The Real Story Wasn't the Rule

The rule was a problem. But it was a visible problem — one that produced an immediate, visceral reaction because veterans understood exactly what it meant for their wallets. Stop taking your medication or lose your rating. That's a gut punch. It got people moving.

What it also d…

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Even as a kid I was what he called hardheaded. I call it tenacious. I keep at it till I achieve my goal or I realize on my own that I need to readjust. On my own. That part matters.

I’ve come a long way from a 650 square foot tract home in a little town outside of St. Louis. I remember walking home from school one day, my usual route, past the Mayor’s house, past the Kroger’s, then across the tracks to my subdivision. And it hit me — I just crossed the tracks. The Mayor’s house is on the other side. That must mean I come from the wrong side of the tracks.

Seemed fitting.

I’m 69 now and if you’ve read any of my stories you know I should have been dead a long time ago. A beat-up kid with no prospects who barely survived getting out of my father’s house. I served my country honorably in the US Navy for eight years and would have made it a career if disability hadn’t ended it.

But God or the Uni…

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The Gist

HR 6047 cleared the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee on February 12, 2026, on a near party-line vote. The funding mechanism that charges disabled veterans rated 10–70% a fee on VA loan refinances? Still in there. The bill now heads to the full House. There is no Senate version. August 1, 2026 is the effective date. The clock is ticking.

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