Trump Is 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.”

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).

Senior policy analyst Suzanne Gordon and labor activist Steve Early detail the Trump administration’s not-so-secret plan to dismantle veterans’ disability benefits. Read the full piece in The American Prospect.