Dan Crenshaw Has a Staff. He Should Use Them.
The 30 percent that isn’t in the rating schedule
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).