On July 14, we sent an open letter to the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs; today, we sent a follow-up here.

The House is expected to vote this week on H.R. 9237, the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, under a closed rule that permits no amendments. Before it does, every veteran should understand one document that almost nobody is talking about.

The Unified Agenda is the federal government’s public list of the regulations every agency is preparing.

On the 2026 agenda, the Department of Veterans Affairs lists rulemaking RIN 2900-AQ72 at the final rule stage. That rulemaking, first proposed in February 2022, would evaluate tinnitus as a symptom of an underlying condition instead of a standalone disability, and would rate sleep apnea by how well treatment works instead of whether a veteran needs it.

It is the same as Section 108. The legislation would accelerate updates proposed in 2022 to the VA’s rating schedule.

The reductions to tinnitus and sleep apnea ratings are not a new idea Congress invented to pay for the Major Richard Star Act.

They are a rulemaking that has been grinding through the VA for four years, now sitting one step from publication. The cuts were coming either way. What Congress is actually choosing this week is not whether to make them. It is which instrument makes them. And that choice matters more than the cuts themselves.

Here is the difference. A regulation must go through public notice and comment, and this one did. Veterans, medical experts, and every major service organization filed opposition, including organizations now endorsing the bill. A regulation can be struck down in court if it is arbitrary or unsupported by the record. A regulation can be disapproved by Congress under the Congressional Review Act. A regulation can be revised or withdrawn by this VA Secretary or any future one.

Those are the checks the law gives veterans against a bad rule.

A statute has none of them. No court can review it for arbitrariness. No Congressional Review Act resolution can touch it. No future Secretary can fix it. Only a future Congress can undo it, against all the inertia of enacted law.

Section 108 takes a rating change that veterans could still fight, and locks it where veterans cannot fight it.

And it does this for exactly one reason: a regulation cannot be counted as savings to pay for a bill, but a statute can.

The pay-for does not fund the Star Act. It launders a rule into a statute so a scorekeeper can credit 57 billion dollars drawn from veterans who have not yet filed their claims. Meanwhile, if the VA publishes its rule anyway, those savings never attach to this bill at all. Congress would have written permanent cuts into federal law and bought nothing with them.

What does this mean in practice? Under current rules, a veteran who needs a CPAP machine is generally rated at 50 percent. Under Section 108, a future veteran whose CPAP works is rated at zero. Tinnitus, the most common service-connected condition in the entire system and a signature wound of blast exposure, loses its standalone rating unless it rides on another compensable condition. Veterans already rated are protected. The bill’s authors made sure the people who can vote today lose nothing, and the people still deploying tonight carry the cost.

There is one more thing at stake, and it is bigger than these two conditions. The law extends what the Supreme Court has called a special solicitude to veterans. When a veterans statute is ambiguous, courts resolve the doubt in the veteran’s favor, because Congress is presumed to legislate for veterans’ benefit. Section 108 would be the first modern statute whose express mechanism cuts one class of veterans’ future benefits to fund another’s. Once that law exists, the presumption has a counter-example, and every future fight over veterans’ benefits inherits it. The rating schedule stops being an earned entitlement and becomes a ledger that must net to zero, where every improvement arrives with the same question attached: which veterans will pay for it?

We support this package. We support the Star Act. We support the blast overpressure provisions we helped fight for. And we ask the Senate, the last body that can amend this bill, to strike Section 108, fund the Star Act through the defense committees where the obligation was born, and leave the rating schedule in the reviewable process the law built for it.

The cuts may come. Let them come by an instrument veterans can still challenge, not one they cannot.

Take action: Find and contact your two Senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm Contact the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Members: https://www.veterans.senate.gov/members

Chairman Moran: https://www.veterans.senate.gov/contact-chairman

Ranking Member Blumenthal: https://www.veterans.senate.gov/contact-ranking-member

Read the rulemaking record yourself: RIN 2900-AQ72 at reginfo.gov