Coming for Veteran’s Disability Benefits

In a 2020 “The Atlantic” article, four anonymous sources reported Donald Trump referred to fallen American service members as “losers” and “suckers” during a 2018 trip to France. According to the report, Trump also canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, asking, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” This is not all of his remarks.

In a separate conversation, he called the Marines who died in the Battle of Belleau Wood “suckers” for getting killed. Former White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly (retired four-star Marine general) publicly confirmed Trump made the derogatory comments.

News outlets have corroborated details of the story with their own sources.

I do not envision Tru_p doing the things many of us did while we were serving. Most of us went, did our time, and left after our enlistment was up. Not looking for any parades or salutations. Just honor those of us who never made it back.

Trump has a need to leave our country. He has given nothing in return as many of us have done.

Trump Is Coming for Veterans’ Disability Benefits – The American Prospect

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.

Disability and Care for Veterans

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.

For decades now, the Republican Party has schemed to destroy “welfare” programs, to free up budget headroom for tax cuts for the rich, most recently taking an axe to Medicaid in the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Now, with Donald Trump in the White House, Russell Vought running the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and Doug Collins as VA secretary—with a boost from The Washington Post—they are coming for veterans’ disability benefits.

Preparing the Attack

Two years after publication of Gade and Huang’s Wounding Warriors, Russell Vought, then president of the conservative think tank Center for Renewing America (CRA), contributed to a report that advocated reducing or eliminating benefits to veterans with higher incomes, or who have VA disability ratings lower than 30 percent. CRA also proposed eliminating compensation for veterans whose conditions are not directly related to military service, which, as we will see, would also eliminate VA care for those conditions.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 guidebook for dismantling the administrative state (which Vought helped to shape) also calls for “significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants.” The disability system, it contends, too often compensates conditions that “are tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service.” Project 2025 also targeted the “growth in presumptive service-connected medical conditions pursued by Congress and Veteran Service Organizations, begun with Agent Orange and most recently for Burn Pits/Airborne Toxins,” for elimination.

The word “presumptive” refers to VA policy that does not require that veterans who suffer from some conditions that may arise after discharge have to personally prove the connection between their military service and that particular illness. Instead, thanks in part to pressure from veterans, Congress has financed research that studies the health effects of various toxic exposures, from Agent Orange in Vietnam, to deployment-related PTSD, to burn pit exposures during the war on terror. If the science documents a relationship between a particular exposure and a series of health problems (say Agent Orange and prostate cancer), then the VA is authorized to change its regulations to grant compensation and provide care.

Why Presumptions

As Gulf War veteran and former VA official Paul Sullivan explains, “Without these presumptions, each and every veteran who has developed prostate cancer, for example, would be forced to prove that they received a specific dose of Agent Orange, at a specific place, at a specific time during military service and this would have to be confirmed by military records and a medical opinion specific to that veteran.”

These hard-won “presumptions” are critical to veterans whose illnesses or conditions may not show up for years, even decades, after they leave the military. Jeff Roy is a 77-year-old Marine veteran who served in Vietnam between 1968 and 1969, where he was repeatedly exposed to Agent Orange. More than five decades later, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. “How,” Roy asks, “after 50 years, could I even prove that I was in places, much less at a specific time when I received a specific dose of Agent Orange?”

As we shall see below, even with presumptive conditions there can be disputes with the VA about processing claims, which is why there are not only VBA claims processors but a VA Board of Veterans’ Appeals, and even a U.S. Court of Veterans Appeals, which operate outside the VA.

The Post Critique

In October, Washington Post reporters published the four articles, accompanied by two YouTube videos, to which Aldrich referred in her post. The first article, entitled “How Some Veterans Exploit $193 Billion VA Program, Due to Lax Controls,” was introduced by a lurid graphic in which disembodied hands try to grab a stack of government checks. The writers then claim that veterans are “swamping” the system with frivolous claims for problems like migraines, tinnitus, as well as those that are impossible to verify, like chronic pain and PTSD.

The VA system, they argue, is failing to “keep up with medical advances and changes in the workplace.” The current VA disability system “was designed 80 years ago to provide a safety net for unemployable veterans wounded or injured during World II. Today, the vast majority of disabled veterans under age 65 still work and collect paychecks from full-time jobs, records show.”

Contrasting the VA system

They contrast the VA system with disability programs like state workers’ compensation or the federal Social Security disability system that “help only people who certify that they are incapacitated or severely impaired in their ability to work.”

In their second story, the reporters present accounts of veterans who have committed rampant fraud—pretending they are blind when they can see, or that they are paralyzed when they are videoed doing backflips. “Veterans,” the reporters contend, can easily defraud the government presenting complaints like “depression, back pain, erectile dysfunction and migraine headaches [which] are difficult to confirm with objective medical tests.” Indeed, the reporters assert, the VA doesn’t adequately shepherd taxpayer dollars by rooting out fraud and abuse but is laxly managed and functions as “an honor system” in which VA “claims examiners usually take vets at their word.”

In response, veterans advocates like the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA), and Disabled American Veterans (DAV) challenged these claims. Individual veterans have inundated the Post  with irate comments. But Theresa Aldrich’s media criticism was the best: “Take 25 years of claims data, find the worst outliers, ignore 6.9 million legitimate beneficiaries, and boom—you’ve got your fraud narrative.”

The Wrong Problems

There are two immediate issues with the Post report. First, while no one disputes some cases of fraud, even Trump’s own VA inspector general, Cheryl Mason, testified in the hearing that there is no mass fraud by veterans. Barely containing her fury at the Post articles,

Mason said, “Only 3.7% of our active fraud investigations” involve veteran suspects. In fact, she said, the largest percentage of fraud investigations in VA programs and operations is perpetrated against the VA and veterans. Reports from the Office of Inspector General document far more fraud and abuse committed by private-sector providers, who overbill the government for billions for care provided through the Veterans Community Care Program, as well as by private companies that charge veterans thousands to help them file VA claims (known as “claims sharks”). The attack on the VA disability system largely ignores these realities. (To be fair, the Post did a story on the claims sharks, but it made veterans appear to be their accomplices rather than their victims.)

Why the VA differs

More fundamentally, proponents of broad changes that would dismantle much of the system don’t seem to understand why the VA differs (intentionally) from the model of state workers’ comp programs. VA disability ratings are connected to health care access, or even the complex nature of veterans’ military-related health conditions.

Let us start with the workers’ comp comparison. According to Steve Birnbaum, an attorney who represents injured workers (some of whom have been employed by contractors who work for the Department of Defense) state workers’ comp systems define disability very narrowly. “Workmen’s compensation claims are determined strictly on the basis of the impairment of a worker’s ability to compete in the open labor market. Pain, suffering, and emotional distress are not part of the workers’ compensation system,” Birnbaum said. To get any consideration of those impacts of illness or injury, a worker would have to sue in civil court.