House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Advances Veteran Benefits Expansion Bill
Updated May 26 2026: The House of Representatives has approved the Veterans Benefits Expansion Act. As you’ll read below, this Act is intended to increase financial support for Gold Star families and severely injured veterans. It also expands VA loan options for Guard/Reserve members. You can learn more about the House version of this act, or read the text below, which is preserved here for archival purposes.
House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Advances Veteran Benefits Bill
The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs has advanced H.R. 6047, the Sharri Briley and Eric Edmundson Veterans Benefits Expansion Act. This bill still requires a full House vote, and if enacted, the bill will increase benefits for catastrophically injured veterans and their families and change refinancing rules for housing programs.
The bill, if passed into law, would increase the VA Special Monthly Compensation payout for the most severely wounded veterans. Former service personnel who live with major service-connected injuries may be eligible for the VA benefit if they have a qualifying condition.
Those include, but are not limited to:
- Blindness
- Limb loss
- Paralysis
- Traumatic brain injuries.
To qualify, veterans must require around-the-clock assistance with daily living. The bill raises this compensation by approximately $10,000 annually.
The bill would also increase Dependency and Indemnity Compensation. The surviving spouses and dependents of service personnel receive this monthly payout if the service member died in the line of duty or succumbed to injuries rated as 100% service-connected. This adjustment helps families offset the loss of household income.
>> Never miss benefits news and updates that are important to you. Sign up today to receive the MyMilitaryBenefits newsletter free to your inbox.
Paying for the Benefits
House committee members seemed split over how to pay for the increased benefits. To comply with federal budget-balancing rules, the package uses funding offsets to cover the spending. One example? The bill, as originally written, expands VA home loan eligibility to National Guard and Reserve personnel who serve 14 days of active duty instead of 90 days.
But the same bill also proposes eliminating the historic VA home loan funding fee exemption for certain veterans with VA disability ratings. Under the proposed bill, anyone with a VA disability rating of 70% or lower who has used their VA loan benefits once would be required to pay the full VA loan funding fee for a “subsequent purchase.”
Some committee members voted against the package due to such funding concerns, objecting to raising the fees on VA home buyers to pay for expanded benefits. Others defended the offsets as a responsible way to fund vital help for severely disabled veterans without increasing the national debt.
Final Outcome
Despite the disagreement over funding, the committee approved H.R. 6047 and the House approved the bill which must be reviewed in the Senate next.
>> Never miss benefits news and updates that are important to you. Sign up today to receive the MyMilitaryBenefits newsletter free to your inbox.
About the author
Editor-in-Chief Joe Wallace is a 13-year veteran of the United States Air Force and a former reporter/editor for Air Force Television News and the Pentagon Channel. His freelance work includes contract work for Motorola, VALoans.com, and Credit Karma. He is co-founder of Dim Art House in Springfield, Illinois, and spends his non-writing time as an abstract painter, independent publisher, and occasional filmmaker.
