The Department of Veterans Affairs this week issued a public notice announcing some changes in how it evaluates disability ratings. The administration has been finding ways to shortchange veterans since Donald Trump retook office last year, and the VA’s new rules for determining disability ratings, which are how the government determines what kind of benefits veterans receive, appears to be yet another way to erode care for the men and women who have served the nation.
The new rules, which went into effect on an interim basis on Tuesday, open the door for the VA to slash earned disability ratings from veterans in two major ways, breaking from years of established U.S. law on workers’ compensation.
First, the VA can now take medication into account when rating a disability. For example, tinnitus, or ear ringing, is one of the most common conditions for which the VA assigns a disability rating. Under the new rule, if the VA says aspirin or painkillers reduce your tinnitus, they can lower your rating or refuse to rate it at all.
Second, the VA can factor a veteran’s earning capacity into a disability rating. If the VA determines that a veteran is employed, it can deny disability or pension payments entirely. It’s a cruel and arbitrary change. If you give a leg for your country, you should be compensated for it, whether you work a job that requires use of the leg or not.
VA disability ratings are a government acknowledgement that military service led to a permanent condition that affects quality of life and long-term earning capacity. They are given on a percentage scale. One veteran could be rated 100 percent permanently disabled, for example, while another can be rated at 10 or 20 percent for minor injuries or ailments. The percentage determines monthly pay, health care priority, housing and caregiver programs, and other benefits. It is not unemployment assistance. It is indemnity for harm incurred in service.
For generations, VA disability compensation has followed the same legal logic as workers’ compensation. The compensation is for the injury itself, independent of how well you may be able to manage it. This was codified in U.S. law by Ingram v. Collins, a 2025 case brought against VA Secretary Doug Collins in which the court ultimately ruled that when a VA disability rating rule does not explicitly mention medication, the VA must evaluate the veteran’s condition as it is, without the assistance of medication. The decision was designed to protect veterans from losing benefits regardless of whether they followed medical advice. The new rule announced this week explicitly mentions the need to “minimize the negative impact” of Ingram v. Collins.
Before the new policy was announced this week, the VA rated conditions based on their underlying severity over time, not whether medication temporarily reduced symptoms or whether the veteran was employed. A veteran could work and still receive compensation because the payment recognized the existence of the service-connected injury. Tinnitus, PTSD, asthma, and chronic pain were evaluated on medical impairment and functional impact in daily life, while separate programs handled inability to work.
The VA claims the new rule does not represent any significant change in policy. “This regulation simply formalizes VA’s longstanding practice of determining disability ratings based on Veterans’ service-related disabilities and any medications they are taking to treat those disabilities,” VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz said in a statement to Rolling Stone.
Veterans groups see it differently.
“For years, courts held that VA could not reduce ratings based on the effects of medication, requiring evaluation of a veteran’s true functional impairment when evaluating a service-connected disability,” Veterans of Foreign Wars said in a statement. “This new rule reverses that standard, directing examiners to rate disabilities as they present, including the impact of medication, and to disregard unmedicated baseline severity.”
VFW National Commander Carol Whitmore added that while “VA has authority to amend the rating schedule, it must do so without adversely affecting veterans.”
Coleman Lee, national commander of veterans group DAV, wrote in a statement that the group is “extremely disappointed and alarmed by VA’s decision to issue an Interim Final Rule today that could potentially reduce disability compensation for millions of disabled veterans” and that the “new regulation would allow VA to reduce disability compensation ratings for veterans who take medications to control their conditions or reduce their symptoms.”
The VA rewriting the rules on disability ratings, like many of the department’s actions since Trump retook office, is in line with Project 2025, which called for a number of measures that would negatively impact health care and other benefits for veterans. “Efforts to expand disability benefits to large populations without adequate planning have caused an erosion of veterans’ trust in the VA enterprise,” Brooks T. Tucker wrote in the notorious right-wing policy manifesto. In fact, the opposite is true.
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are already trying to restrict veteran care through bills that seek to redirect funds from the VA to outside private providers. The disability rating changes, however, are a back-door way for the administration to continue to turn the screws on veterans without congressional authorization.
The new rule changes could drastically change the way the VA decides compensation and disability claims, which accounts for over 50 percent of the VA’s overall budget. As Trump calls for a historic $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027 (which Congress supports) while racking up a multi-trillion-dollar budget deficit, it seems once again that veterans will be the ones paying the price so billionaires and trillionaires can get their tax breaks.
First Appeared on
Source link
Leave feedback about this