More than 50,000 combat-injured military retirees stand to receive thousands of additional dollars each year if Congress passes the Major Richard Star Act, a bipartisan measure that would end a decades-old rule forcing these veterans to choose between full military retirement pay and full VA disability compensation. The bill, designated H.R. 2102 in the House and S.1032 in the Senate, has been folded into a broader legislative package called the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act. But a recent procedural attempt to advance the measure in the Senate was blocked, leaving its path forward uncertain even as support spans both parties.
The offset that costs combat-injured retirees twice
Under current federal law, military members who retire under Chapter 61 with a combat-related disability but fewer than 20 years of service face a dollar-for-dollar reduction in their retired pay when they also receive VA disability benefits. The Congressional Research Service details this exclusion in its concurrent receipt analysis, explaining that the Concurrent Retired and Disability Pay program, known as CRDP, was designed to let retirees collect both streams of income but only applies to those who served at least 20 years. Veterans medically retired before that threshold, often because their injuries made continued service impossible, lose a portion of their retirement for every dollar of disability pay they receive.
The practical result is that a service member forced out at 15 years due to wounds sustained in combat receives less total compensation than a peer who served 20 years without injury. The Major Richard Star Act targets that gap by removing the years-of-service restriction for Chapter 61 retirees with combat-related disabilities. The Congressional Budget Office published a cost estimate for H.R. 2102, drawing on data from the Department of Defense Office of the Actuary to quantify how many Chapter 61 retirees would newly qualify.
Bipartisan backing and a blocked Senate vote
The bill has attracted cosponsors from both parties in each chamber. The Senate companion, S.1032, lists bipartisan sponsors on its official status page. The House version appeared in a prior Congress as H.R. 1282 during the 118th session, according to its legislative record, but never reached a floor vote. Advocates hoped that bundling the measure into the larger Take Care of America’s Veterans Act would give it stronger momentum this time.
That strategy hit a wall when Senate Republicans blocked a request by Senator Richard Blumenthal to pass the bill with a defense-related pay-for. The Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee press office cited more than 50,000 combat-injured military retirees affected by the offset. The blockage did not kill the legislation outright, but it stalled the fastest available procedural route and pushed the debate back into committee-level negotiations.
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