As a Multiple Launch Rocket System crewman, my husband Brandon served the U.S. Army faithfully from 1993 to 2001. In his line of duty, he was regularly exposed, without protection, to many harmful physical conditions and chemicals. Upon his honorable discharge, he was found to have several service-connected injuries. As a result, he has received disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) since 2020.
Now, between the new Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director and a troubling proposal from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), veterans like him who receive disability benefits could be in danger of losing them to the harmful and unethical practice of means-testing that treats earned compensation as charity, ignores the contractual obligation of the U.S. government, and should never be considered as a tactic for decreasing American debt.
Means-testing is a method used to decide whether families should receive certain federal or state benefits. Commonly used in welfare programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, once called “food stamps”), families must report wages and other income to be considered eligible. If the government determines they have the “means” to pay for their necessities, like housing or food, they don’t get the benefit.
Current VA guidelines for disability benefits do not include financial eligibility requirements. Benefits are a direct result of a service-related illness or injury. Introducing means-testing redefines disability compensation as need-based welfare rather than earned compensation. But disabled veterans are not needy beggars on the dole, and they shouldn’t be treated like it.
Access to veterans benefits is an important issue everywhere. About 6% of the U.S. population has served in the armed forces. The rate of service is even higher in rural areas, and the proportion of rural veterans with service-related disabilities is also disproportionately high.
In Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2025 to 2034, the CBO is proposing means-testing veterans’ benefits as a cost-saving measure. In its proposal, households making more than $135,000 per year would have their benefits phased out: The more they make, the less disability they would get. Now that Russell Vought is the director of the OMB, America is inching closer to demanding disabled vets be broke to get their VA disability.
Vought is also a lead author of Project 2025, president of the Center for Renewing America, and believes that disabled veterans should not be compensated for negative health effects caused by exposure to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The alignment of the CBO proposal and the confirmation of Russell Vought are ominous premonitions for veterans’ disability that should not be ignored.
Proponents of means-testing argue that it would reserve resources for the most financially vulnerable and help curb government spending while also improving the deficit. The CBO claims that limiting disability benefits for wealthier veterans could save billions of dollars. The suggestion that “wealthier” veterans should not receive full compensation fails to acknowledge the contractual obligation between them and the U.S. Government; that when they sign up to serve, they are told they’ll be taken care of.
The cost-saving claim of the CBO also ignores the fundamental nature of disability compensation—that it is a payment for service-related injuries, not a poverty relief measure. Not only that, but the bureaucratic costs to assess and monitor veterans’ financial status would create inefficiencies and potential delays in benefit distribution to an already beleaguered VA beset by recent threats to cut around 80,000 workers from the department.
Others may argue that $135,000 is a king’s ransom of an income, but veterans with moderate or high incomes may also have cost of living expenses that means-testing fails to consider. As I work on my master’s degree in science writing, our two youngest children are in college, and we care for elderly parents, our household expenses are not insignificant.
According to 2023 Statista numbers, there are almost five million disabled U.S. military veterans, and roughly two million of them are Appalachian residents. How many of our kin folk make a good living while taking care of family, putting kids through college, or helping aging parents and may be affected by harmful means-testing? Encouraging financial success among veterans should be the goal, not penalizing them for achieving it.
Means-testing veterans’ benefits is harmful and unethical. All disabled veterans have earned their disability through service and sacrifice. U.S. military veterans fought for American ideals and dreams. They should get to live them, too.
Christy White lives in East Tennessee.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Christy White lives in East Tennessee.
