House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Advances Veteran Benefits Expansion 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.
House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Advances Veteran Benefits Bill
The bill, if passed into law, increases 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.
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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. The legislative package now heads to the full House floor for a vote. These benefits have not yet been signed into law; this is an ongoing story.
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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.
