The War Department Gets a Blank Check. Veterans Get a Bill.
Congress erased a $3.4 trillion deficit from the books. It couldn't erase a bill for sleep apnea and tinnitus cuts.
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.
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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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:
Government watchdog resources:
USAspending.gov (track federal contracts and grants)