Under current law, a group of combat-injured service members who were medically retired before serving 20 years cannot collect their military retirement pay and their VA disability compensation in full at the same time. One is offset against the other, dollar for dollar. A bipartisan bill in Congress would erase that offset for roughly 50,000 of them, restoring on average about $1,200 a month in pay they earned but currently forfeit. The proposal has drawn some of the widest support in Congress, yet it remains a bill, not a benefit, and the money stays offset until it becomes law.
The offset the bill would erase
The measure is the Major Richard Star Act, introduced in the 119th Congress as H.R. 2102 in the House with a companion, S. 1032, in the Senate. It targets a rule that reduces military retirement pay by the amount of VA disability compensation a retiree receives. For most retirees the reduction has already been undone, but a specific category of combat-injured veterans is still caught by it.
The gap grows out of how an earlier fix was written. A program called Concurrent Retirement and Disability Pay ended the offset for career retirees who completed 20 or more years of service, letting them collect both retirement pay and disability compensation. That concurrent-receipt rule did not extend to service members medically retired under Chapter 61, the section of law covering disability retirement, when they had fewer than 20 years in uniform. So a veteran forced out early by a combat wound can still see retirement pay clawed back against disability pay while a longer-serving peer keeps both.
A partial workaround already exists for some of these veterans through Combat-Related Special Compensation, a separate payment tied to combat-related disabilities. But that program restores only a portion of what the offset takes and carries its own eligibility rules, so it does not deliver the full concurrent receipt that 20-year retirees receive. The bill would close the remaining gap directly rather than layer another partial fix on top of the existing one.
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Who the roughly 50,000 veterans are, and the $1,200 at stake
The people the bill would reach are combat-related medical retirees: service members whose injuries ended their careers before the 20-year mark and who now have their retirement checks reduced by their disability compensation. Estimates place the affected population near 50,000, with some counts running closer to 54,000, and the group is defined by that combination of a combat-related disability and a short-of-20-years medical retirement.
For those veterans, the average amount restored would run about $1,200 a month, though the figure varies with rank, years served, and disability rating. Because the offset currently reduces retirement pay by the exact amount of disability compensation, the veterans hit hardest tend to be those with the highest disability ratings, whose larger compensation cancels out a correspondingly larger slice of their retirement check. The change would not create a new benefit so much as stop subtracting one earned payment from another, letting a combat-injured retiree keep both the retirement pay tied to service and the disability compensation tied to the injury. For households living on a fixed income, restoring more than a thousand dollars a month is a substantial shift.
The Senate version, S. 1032, mirrors the House language, so passage would require both chambers to clear the same concurrent-receipt expansion and the president to sign it. Nothing in either bill changes a veteran’s pay until that happens.
Why record cosponsorship has not produced a law
The bill’s obstacle is not popularity. The House version, H.R. 2102, had gathered roughly 334 cosponsors by early June 2026, well past a majority of the chamber, and supporters pursued a discharge petition to force the measure to the floor over leadership’s schedule. That petition needs 218 signatures to succeed and had collected roughly 203, leaving it short of the threshold that would compel a vote.
Cost is the recurring friction. Ending the offset for tens of thousands of retirees adds federal spending, and under budget rules that price tag has to be reckoned with, which is a large part of why a broadly supported bill has not been scheduled for a floor vote or folded into the year’s defense authorization. Sympathy for combat-injured veterans has not, on its own, cleared the procedural and fiscal hurdles.
The measure is named for Major Richard Star, an Army combat veteran who pushed for the change before dying of a service-connected cancer, and its backers have leaned on that story to build the lopsided cosponsor count. Even with that momentum, the provision was left out of the annual defense authorization bill that typically carries military-pay changes, removing the most reliable vehicle for enacting it this year. Advocates argue the delay only compounds a hardship the government already acknowledged when it lifted the offset for longer-serving retirees two decades ago.
The result is a proposal that would deliver a concrete, calculable raise to a defined group of wounded veterans yet still sits in committee limbo. Until the House and Senate pass identical text and it is signed, the roughly $1,200 a month remains an offset rather than a payment, and the veterans it describes continue to forfeit part of what two separate systems say they earned.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team.
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