Over the past week, veterans’ advocates from across the political spectrum—including Common Defense, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), Disabled American Veterans (DAV), and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW)—have roundly denounced a new bill Republicans are trying to ram through Congress next week. The Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, a 553-page package of over 60 bills hammered out in secret with no Democratic input, was introduced with great fanfare on June 10 by Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Jerry Moran (R-KS) and House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Mike Bost (R-IL). It is touted as improving veterans’ economic opportunities and access to health care.
In fact, with the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, Republicans are reprising the role they played during the lead-up to the PACT Act, the long-overdue bill providing needed care and benefits for veterans who’d suffered from toxic exposures. In cynical fashion, they are now championing a bill they originally opposed, disguising their effort to fulfill the Project 2025 intention to dismantle the VA health care system and reduce veterans’ benefits. This bill is a “poison pill,” DAV National Commander Coleman Nee proclaimed. “A grateful nation should never try to balance its budget on the backs of the men and women who sacrificed so much for our freedom.”
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The bill’s centerpiece, and its bait, is the Major Richard Star Act, which has widespread support because it remedies a deep injustice known as the “wounded veteran tax,” which affects 54,000 veterans. The bill would allow combat-injured veterans to simultaneously collect their full military retirement pay and VA disability compensation if they were medically retired prior to completing 20 years of service. The act is named after Maj. Richard Star, a combat engineer who developed lung cancer due to exposure to burn pit smoke in both Iraq and Afghanistan and had to choose between collecting military retirement pay or disability compensation, when in fact he should have gotten both after his terminal diagnosis.
Republicans had multiple opportunities to support passage of this bill and refused every one. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) blocked it in October 2025; Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) quashed it in March 2026; and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) twice prevented a vote on the bill last week, despite 79 co-sponsors and more than enough support for it to pass.
Now Republicans have suddenly embraced it. Why this sudden turnaround? Because they’ve found a clever way to offset its price tag that will allow them to deny millions of veterans access to health care and benefits that they were promised.
Robbing Veterans to Pay Veterans
As Kayla Williams, an Iraq War veteran and senior policy adviser at VoteVets, explains, the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act “pits groups of disabled veterans against one another, steals from future generations of veterans, and is a stealth way of implementing some of the Project 2025 goals of cutting our benefits and privatizing VA.”
In this bill, Republicans would offset the Star Act’s ten-year cost of roughly $58 billion by reducing or totally denying disability compensation for two conditions—tinnitus and obstructive sleep apnea—which are respectively the number one and number five most prevalent service-connected conditions in the veteran population.
This is Project 2025 made law. The Heritage Foundation playbook explicitly called for “significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants” as a top VA priority. As the Prospect has previously reported, to justify cutting benefits, anti-government ideologues and media allies such as The Washington Post have penned books and articles arguing that conditions like tinnitus and sleep apnea are subject to fraudulent claims, may have little connection to military service, and aren’t really all that serious.
In fact, toxic noise from gunfire, aviation, and ships is so prevalent in the military that three million veterans are service-connected for tinnitus. Far from being a minor irritant, tinnitus is strongly associated with mental health conditions. Glenn Graham, a retired VA neurologist who served 14 years as deputy national director of neurology, told the Prospect, “Tinnitus is associated with impaired speech comprehension and hearing loss which can affect employability and social interactions. It is associated with increased risk of depression, social isolation, and sleep disorders.”
Ending or reducing disability benefits for tinnitus would be a particularly cruel blow to veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which produced an epidemic of ear ringing and hearing loss that was supposed to have been prevented using earplugs the Pentagon provided troops. Unfortunately, as a lawsuit against manufacturer 3M exposed, the DOD never verified the earplugs’ effectiveness. If the bill passes, tens of thousands of service members who wore defective earplugs would now suffer the dual injustice of living with hearing damage caused by government negligence—and losing the benefits meant to compensate them for it.
Obstructive sleep apnea is commonly associated with blast exposure and traumatic brain injury and is twice as prevalent among veterans as in the general population. “Patients with sleep apnea frequently experience chronic headaches and daytime somnolence,” Graham explains. “The disorder may adversely impact cognitive functioning, employability and quality of life. Further, sleep apnea is associated with a variety of serious medical conditions, including hypertension, heart disease, and stroke.”
While committed to passage of the Major Richard Star Act, veterans groups are enraged by this latest Project 2025–inspired gambit that offloads the cost onto 1.5 million veterans, both future claimants and those seeking re-evaluation of existing ratings. John Kamin, deputy director of government relations at Common Defense, warns of the structural danger this bill represents. “The disability rating system was designed to be driven by medical evidence, never treated as a bargaining chip for political purposes. The nation made a covenant with veterans. If Congress now begins to legislate ratings, it’s not a question of whether more will be cut next, but which ones.” Kyleanne Hunter, CEO of IAVA, stated it succinctly: “Congress should not set the precedent that earned disability compensation can be reduced whenever lawmakers need an offset.”
Not all veterans service organizations are opposed. The American Legion makes the point that the Trump administration is changing disability ratings on its own, and that those savings should be applied to giving wounded veterans what they deserve rather than going elsewhere in the budget. “We agree that, in an ideal world, future veterans should not pay for healthcare and benefits expansions,” said Dan K. Wiley, national commander at the American Legion, in a statement. “It simply does not reflect the political environment that exists today.”
VA press secretary Quinn Slaven categorically denied that the VA is imminently planning any such disability rating modification, and added that given the impact involved, any such proposal would need to undergo significant changes before being finalized.
The bill also funds increased benefits for catastrophically injured veterans and surviving family members by saddling half a million active-duty service members and veterans with higher VA home loan refinancing fees, totaling up to $4 billion over the next decade. When the home loan surcharge was first floated last December, DAV’s position was unambiguous: “DAV firmly opposes all rules or statutes that require veterans benefit increases to be ‘paid for’ by cuts to other veterans benefits.”
Ransacking the VA
Stripping veterans of earned compensation is damaging enough. But the legislation would also hasten the dismantling of the VA system veterans depend on, adopting provisions from the Critical Access for Veterans Care Act that would eliminate prior authorization to seek rural private-sector care. The provision’s chief sponsor, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), made no bones about his intentions: “We can’t let the VA itself determine whether a veteran is qualified to receive local care … I don’t believe we have an obligation to sustain the bureaucracy.”
The VA’s role as coordinator of care was specifically mandated by the VA MISSION Act of 2018. Eliminating it through this act, said Morgan Brown, national legislative director of Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA), “prevents VHA [the Veterans Health Administration] from performing its critical role in managing veterans care … Uncoordinated care … would most certainly lead to rapidly rising costs and draining off resources needed for VA direct care.”
Cramer’s bill also creates wasteful overlap of health care effort, with dire consequences. Of the Critical Access Hospitals named in his bill, 845 sit within 40 miles of a VA facility. If prior authorization is abolished, VA clinics in those areas would lose patient volume and funding. Specialized programs shrink. Facilities close. Veterans with service-connected conditions depend on VA expertise that most civilian providers can neither replicate nor replace. Once those programs are gone, so is the choice to use them.
Another section of the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act goes even further. For the first time, it would permit veterans to bypass the VA system and seek care in the private sector by deliberately “abstaining” from using the VA—with no clinical justification required. This provision violates the intent of the VA MISSION Act, which stated that a referral to the private sector was not permitted “solely based on convenience or preference of a veteran.” This guardrail ensured some long-term viability of the VA health care system. The Take Care of America’s Veterans Act would violate that core agreement, prompting an exodus that will accelerate VA health care cuts already under way.
These are frontal assaults on the VA. No health care system or insurer in the U.S. or internationally could survive if any patient, anytime, for any grounds could go out of network, with the system footing the bill. That’s a reason Williams lambasted the bill as “screw[ing] over generations of veterans to come.” Concerned Veterans for America, one of the leading Koch-funded organizations strongly pushing for VA privatization, however, declared that the bill would “finish the job.”
In 2024, a “Red Team” panel was convened by the VA to evaluate whether the MISSION Act’s Veterans Community Care Program was succeeding in delivering high-quality, timely, conveniently located care to veterans. As the Prospect previously reported, the Red Team’s answer was an unequivocal “no.” Indeed, its conclusion could be applied to the current Bost/Moran legislation that would accelerate VA privatization by opening the floodgates to private-sector care and defunding both VA in-house care and benefits. In its published report, the Red Team authors stated that without a course correction, mass closures of VA clinics or certain services could ensue, “eliminating choice for the millions of Veterans who prefer to use the VHA direct care system for all or part of their medical care needs.”
Along with this dire warning, the Red Team also proposed reforms which would save $230 billion over a decade, more than enough to fund improvements to veterans’ health care and benefits. Atop their list were furnishing direct inpatient care to veterans when that option is medically appropriate and available, and providing more geriatric and extended care in-house.
Just yesterday, the VA Office of Inspector General issued a report finding that hundreds of thousands of ineligible veterans are being improperly approved for community care annually, and that the VA “could have potentially avoided spending … $1.7 billion in monetary benefits over a full fiscal year on community care if schedulers had consistently made accurate eligibility determinations.”
As Republicans try to ram through this bill, members of Congress could pick up the OIG and Red Team reports to show that there is a way to provide veterans with the benefits and services they need, and to pay for it without, as VFW National Commander Carol Whitmore put it, “send[ing veterans] the invoice.”
