Vienna, Austria—The piece below was authored by Gregory Cromwell, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army, Retired. The piece touches on controversial legislation currently pending in Congress pertaining to major changes to VA benefits. Greg is a South Dakota UOCAVA voter, resident of Austria, and Member of the Democrats Abroad Global Veterans and Military Families (VMF) Caucus.
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Washington can always find the money to start a war. It seems much less interested in finding money to care for the Veterans the wars leave behind.
That’s the real story buried in the fight over the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act. The bill bundles more than 60 pieces of Veteran legislation, including the long-overdue Major Richard Star Act, which would finally let combat-injured Veterans collect both their military retirement pay and their VA disability compensation without an offset. However, the problem is how the Republican-controlled Congress proposes to pay for it: by rewriting part of the VA’s disability rating schedule so that a future generation of Veterans receives less. Some Veterans get the benefits they’ve earned while Congress pays for them by quietly taking benefits from other Veterans who haven’t even filed their claims.
The Veterans of Foreign Wars called this out, and Rep. Mike Bost, the Illinois Republican who chairs the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, responded by calling the VFW’s campaign “dangerous political rhetoric” and asking the organization to stand down. It shouldn’t. The VFW isn’t an outside agitator; it was chartered by Congress over a century ago and it’s made up of the Veterans this bill is supposed to support, and it has every right to say so when it thinks Congress is breaking a promise to them. The VFW is right to call this what it is, and a committee chairman’s response should be to answer the substance, not to ask the messenger to pipe down.
The precedent this sets
Regardless of which benefit happens to be on the chopping block this time, every Veteran has reason to worry. Once Congress accepts that Veteran care can be funded by cutting future Veteran care, there’s no principled place to stop. This time it’s one disability rating formula. Next time it’s a different one, a different group of Veterans who are politically easier to overlook because their injuries aren’t the ones in the headlines this cycle. The specific line item isn’t really the point. The point is that “pay for Veterans by taking from Veterans” becomes an accepted way of doing business, pitting Veterans against each other for a share of a pie that Washington has simply decided not to grow while not even batting an eye when it comes to increasing the defense budget.
We’ll fund the war. Just not the aftermath.
The money is obviously there if the administration wanted to use it for Veteran care. Instead, the Trump administration wants roughly $500 billion more for defense next year, much of it to restock missiles and interceptors burned through in its haphazardly planned war with Iran. Congress is debating that request the way it debates any big-ticket item: how much, how fast. Nobody’s asking whether the money exists.
That’s the pattern. Weapons get funded without much of a fight. The people who operate the weapons get told the money isn’t there unless we cut other Veterans’ spending. But the cost of caring for Veterans isn’t a surprise — it’s the price of the wars we choose to fight, and it always comes due. If Congress can fund the hardware for wars, it should fund the care for the Veterans those wars produce, instead of billing the cost to other Veterans.
Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration are not facing a budget constraint. They’re making a choice — and it’s time they owned it, instead of asking Veterans to quietly foot the bill themselves.
Greg Cromwell is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who served 34 years as both an enlisted soldier and an officer. Over the course of his Army career, he had multiple overseas assignments, including deployments to Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is currently living in Vienna, Austria.
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