Up to 1.5 million veterans who receive disability compensation for conditions like tinnitus and sleep apnea could see their monthly payments reduced under a House Republican bill designed to save $57 billion over ten years. The legislation, H.R. 9237, known as the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, bundles those rating-schedule cuts with the long-sought Major Richard Star Act, which would expand concurrent receipt of military retirement and disability pay. The pairing has triggered sharp opposition from Senate Democrats and raised questions about whether disability reductions are being used to finance benefit expansions elsewhere in the package.
Disability cuts tied to concurrent-receipt expansion in H.R. 9237
The bill draws on a VA rulemaking effort, identified by regulatory identification number RIN 2900-AQ72, that was first published in the Federal Register on February 15, 2022. That proposed rule would update the VA’s rating schedule for respiratory, auditory, and mental health conditions. Under the changes, tinnitus would be evaluated as a symptom of an underlying hearing condition rather than as a standalone disability, and sleep apnea ratings would shift to reflect treatment responsiveness. Both changes would lower the disability percentages assigned to many current recipients, directly cutting their monthly checks.
Supporters of H.R. 9237 argue that Congress should align statutory benefits with the VA’s own effort to modernize how it evaluates disabilities. The bill text, summarized on the House Rules Committee site, ties implementation of the new rating criteria to a decade-long savings target, with those savings then recycled into other veterans’ programs. Veterans’ advocates counter that what the VA framed as a technical update becomes, in legislative form, an explicit budget-cutting tool, because Congress is counting on lower payments to existing beneficiaries rather than merely adjusting future awards.
The Congressional Budget Office has scored the Major Richard Star Act, designated H.R. 2102, with cost estimates covering fiscal years 2026 through 2036. That expansion would allow combat-injured veterans to collect full military retirement pay alongside VA disability compensation, ending a longstanding offset that forces retirees rated below 50 percent disabled to give up a dollar of retirement for every dollar of disability pay. The cost of eliminating that offset runs into tens of billions of dollars over the scoring window. By packaging the rating-schedule cuts alongside the concurrent-receipt fix, the bill appears structured so that savings from lower disability payments help absorb the price tag of the Star Act expansion, keeping the combined measure closer to budget neutrality.
Senate Democrats and the VA’s own framing clash over impact
Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Democrats released a statement directly opposing what they described as a Republican plan to cut disabled veterans’ benefits. Their press release ties the House legislation to the same VA draft rule, RIN 2900-AQ72, and frames the package as trading one group of veterans’ benefits for another. According to Senate Democrats, using reductions in disability compensation to pay for concurrent receipt amounts to pitting combat-injured retirees against veterans whose primary disabilities are hearing loss, tinnitus, or respiratory and mental health conditions.
The VA, for its part, has described the rating-schedule updates as modernization rather than austerity. In its own public statements on RIN 2900-AQ72, the agency said it was proposing updates to the rating schedule for respiratory, auditory, and mental disorders to reflect current medical understanding. VA officials have emphasized that the rulemaking process includes opportunities for public comment and that any final regulation would apply prospectively, but they have not directly addressed how congressional use of the same framework for statutory cuts could affect current beneficiaries.
The scale of potential impact is large. According to VA research, tinnitus is the single most common service-connected disability, with millions of veterans receiving compensation for ringing or noise in the ears. Sleep apnea is similarly widespread among post-9/11 veterans, often linked to deployments, weight gain after service, or co-occurring conditions such as PTSD. Any reduction in the rating percentages for these two conditions alone could ripple across a substantial share of the disability rolls, especially among younger veterans who rely on monthly payments to supplement low wages or bridge gaps in employment.
Critics warn that the bill’s structure could set a precedent in which future benefit expansions are routinely “paid for” by trimming other parts of the disability schedule. Veterans’ service organizations have historically opposed that approach, arguing that each cohort of veterans earned its benefits independently. They also note that the rating schedule already lags behind medical science in some areas, and that modernization should not be synonymous with cost-cutting.
Backers of H.R. 9237 respond that without offsets, major expansions like the Major Richard Star Act may never clear budget hurdles. They contend that aligning tinnitus and sleep apnea ratings with more objective medical criteria would curb what they see as overcompensation for relatively mild symptoms, freeing up resources for veterans with more severe, combat-related injuries. That argument, however, depends on Congress accepting that some currently service-connected conditions are being paid at too high a level, a premise that many veterans and their advocates reject.
As the bill moves through the House and faces resistance in the Senate, the core dispute is less about the concept of concurrent receipt than about who bears the cost of paying for it. For now, veterans’ groups are pressing lawmakers to de-couple the Major Richard Star Act from any disability cuts, while Senate Democrats have signaled they will not support a package that reduces compensation for tinnitus, sleep apnea, or other conditions to finance gains for a different subset of veterans. The outcome will determine whether modernization of the VA rating schedule proceeds as a neutral technical update or as a vehicle for some of the largest disability benefit reductions in years.
