Trump Is Coming for Veterans' Disability Benefits

[Celerity]

The administration falsely alleges that many former soldiers are cheating the system.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/08/trump-coming-for-veterans-disability-benefits/



On October 29, a disabled Navy veteran and blogger named Theresa Aldrich, who keeps other former service members informed about developments at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), tuned in to what seemed to be a routine session of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee (SVAC). The hearing had an innocuous title, “Putting Veterans First,” and SVAC members invited a panel of witnesses to discuss the question “Is the Current VA Disability System Keeping Its Promise?” Instead, Aldrich discovered, it was a Republican response to a four-part series in The Washington Post, which accused veterans of bilking the taxpayer out of billions of dollars. Little of the ensuing discussion focused on any needed improvements in the VA disability system, as opposed to just echoing the sensational claims of the Post—that there is an epidemic of veterans defrauding the disability system. All of this, she warned her readers, would “set the stage to cut benefits for 6.9 million veterans.”

The Republican committee members’ star witness was Daniel Gade, a retired Army lieutenant colonel whose leg was amputated after combat injuries suffered in Iraq. The former Department of Veterans Services commissioner from Virginia (and failed Republican Senate candidate in the state) co-authored a 2021 book called Wounding Warriors: How Bad Policy Is Making Veterans Sicker and Poorer with former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Huang. In it, they argued that the “flood” of new disability claims we have seen over the past two decades is not due to two decades of forever wars. Instead, they assert, the system encourages “veterans to be sick and then we wonder why we have so many sick veterans.” VA disability ratings, Gade and Huang insist, have been “misapplied to mental health disorders like PTSD, which have been repeatedly demonstrated to improve with effective therapies.”

As Gade testified, “For too long, you’ve been told that the best way to care for veterans is to shovel billions of taxpayer dollars into their pockets; this approach has resulted in a veteran class that is sicker, more marginally employed, and more suicidal than ever.” He insisted that “by paying veterans to be sick, we create more sick veterans, separated from meaningful lives of purpose—and we deepen our suicide crisis.” Worse still, he said, “the compensation system traps veterans in a disability identity, teaching them to chase a 100% rating as proof of honor or source of validation. 9 of the top 10 conditions for newly rated veterans are easily exaggerated or totally unverifiable.” The VA also compensates for—and the health care system treats—conditions that have no relationship to their military service but are a normal result of the aging process. Why should veterans who have hypertension or obesity get taxpayer-funded care and money because they’ve gotten “old and fat”? “CALL YOUR SENATORS,” Aldrich urged veterans. “They’re questioning whether compensation should exist for anything short of total incapacity. And they’re using a decorated, disabled veteran to sell it.”

Opening Salvo

Aldrich is correct: This is a second front in the conservative war on the Department of Veterans Affairs, the second-largest federal agency. As the Prospect has reported in detail, over the past decade, Republicans in Congress have been fighting—and too often winning—on their first front, namely the campaign to privatize the VA-run Veterans Health Administration (VHA). Until now, however, the veterans disability system—operated by the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA)—has been a sacred cow for politicians of all stripes on Capitol Hill. If anything has united Republicans and Democrats, it has been that combat veterans and other former service members who sustained injuries or illnesses while serving in uniform deserve compensation. Alas, no longer. Nearly seven million American veterans currently receive VA payments for service-related physical or mental health conditions that left them partially or totally impaired; among them are 1.3 million men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. In FY2025, their total compensation and pensions was $195 billion.

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