COWAC on the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, the VSO landscape, and the case for freeing veterans law reform from PAYGO

Cohort of Overpressured Warfighters Action Council (COWAC) · Position Statement

The Take Care of America’s Veterans Act (H.R. 9237 / S. 4744) has done something rare: it has united the veterans service organization community around a single objection while dividing it on what to do about it.

That split is relevant to the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 (Pub. L. 111-139) budget rule that forces Congress to cut one group of veterans to keep its promise to another.

The landscape: near-consensus on the wound, disagreement on the remedy

Almost no one defends Section 108 on the merits.

Strike the cut, keep the package. The Disabled American Veterans has called Section 108 a “poison pill” lodged inside a bill carrying priorities it has fought for years to advance the Major Richard Star Act, special monthly compensation increases, caregiver expansion. Its position is surgical: remove the cut, pass the rest. COWAC’s position concurs with this approach generally.

Oppose the bill as drafted. The Veterans of Foreign Wars has taken the more categorical line, opposing the Act as written because it asks future disabled veterans to finance today’s benefits by trading away compensation for tinnitus and obstructive sleep apnea, conditions the VFW rightly notes are common to combat polytrauma. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America contends if earned compensation can be cut whenever lawmakers need an offset, no rated condition is safe in the future.

Pass it to capture the savings. A smaller number, including the American Legion, argue for passage on the theory that the Department of Veterans Affairs intends to finalize the same tinnitus and sleep-apnea reductions through rulemaking regardless and that legislating them at least directs the resulting savings toward veterans’ bills rather than back to the Treasury.

Beneath the tactics is a shared conviction, stated most plainly by those with the least to gain from saying it. When Senator Blumenthal pressed for the Star Act, he called the care of veterans “a cost of war.” When Republicans blocked it over the offset, he answered that the nation should not demand an offset to keep a promise it already made. The VFW’s national commander said the same. So did the Military Officers Association of America: passing the Star Act, it wrote, is a cost of war.

That principle is the real center of gravity in this debate.

The trap: PAYGO turns veterans against veterans

COWAC noted its position on June 11, 2026, that Section 108 is wrong on its own terms:

A bill that funds the study of blast injury (Sections 310–311) while cutting compensation for two of its hallmark signs argues against itself. But it would be incomplete to treat Section 108 as an isolated error. It is a symptom.

Section 108 exists because roughly nine to twelve billion dollars over ten years has been the estimated cost of retired pay offset elimination that would occur in the Major Richard Star Act. The requirement to offset its cost has been the Congressional hurdle that all other future-facing veteran-favorable legislation has to overcome.

Statutory Pay-As-You-Go rules require new direct spending to be paid for, dollar for dollar, or trigger automatic cuts elsewhere. Veterans’ disability compensation and concurrent receipt are direct spending. So when Congress moves to right one injustice, PAYGO hands it a menu of pay-fors, and the path of least resistance runs through the benefits of other veterans.

An unacceptable path that pits veterans against veterans.

As long as veterans’ law reform must be financed from within the veterans’ account, every advance for one cohort becomes a bill presented to another. The next generation of blast-injured claimants, the very population Sections 310–311 are meant to protect, is simply among the next group holding the invoice.

As written and applied to future Title 38 U.S. Code amendments, the PAYGO rules will make every future generation of veterans take from the prior generation to fund improvements

COWAC’s position

COWAC’s ask is therefore two-part, and the second half is the one that matters most.

First, strike Section 108(a) and (b). The tinnitus and sleep-apnea reductions should not be enacted, and certainly not before the Task Force that the same bill creates has issued a single finding on how blast-linked conditions ought to be evaluated.

Second, and more fundamentally, Congress should stop treating earned veterans’ benefits as an offset to be raided.

The durable fix is to remove veterans’ benefits legislation from the PAYGO offset requirement, a targeted exemption, not a repeal of the Pay-As-You-Go Act as a whole.

Congress already possesses this tool. It routinely designates specific measures as exempt from the PAYGO scorecard; it has done so before for costs the nation chose to treat as obligations rather than options. Recognizing the compensation of service-connected injury as a cost of war, scored as the war itself is scored, would dissolve the zero-sum choice that produced Section 108 in the first place.

Where an offset is genuinely required by the politics of a given bill, it should be found outside the veterans’ account. Senator Blumenthal’s proposed Department of Defense pay-for is one model; there are others. What should end is the reflex of funding veterans by cutting veterans.

Conclusion

A framework that finances blast-injury recognition by cutting compensation for blast-injury symptoms is self-defeating for the exact reform agenda this bill advances elsewhere. Freeing veterans’ law from PAYGO for veterans is the only appropriate conclusion under which recognition can proceed without being paid for out of their own benefits.