Project 2025 would cut benefits for disabled veterans

Project 2025, the right-wing roadmap for a potential second Trump presidency, could be disastrous for veterans. The plan, written by dozens of former President Donald Trump’s administration officials, includes harsh steps to curtail benefits and programs for veterans.

The playbook’s chapter on the Department of Veterans Affairs calls for ensuring “political control of the VA” on day one by replacing civil servants with political appointees. It says the next Republican administration in the White House should rescind VA directives that mandate the provision of abortion services, which it calls “a medical procedure unrelated to military service that the VA lacks the legal authority and clinical proficiency to perform.”

It proposes rescinding any clinical policy directives “that are contrary to principles of conservative governance,” beginning with abortion services as well as gender-affirming care, though its authors don’t specify exactly what those principles are.

“On reproductive health care, the project does seek to ban the use of public funds to facilitate reproductive health care and abortion for active service members, and that does strip away critical health care for millions of women and further pushing them away from serving in the military, potentially,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonpartisan legal services group that works to expose corruption in the executive branch.

This provision is part of a larger agenda within Project 2025 to strip away what remains of abortion rights in the United States after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022 overruled the affirmation of a national right to abortion. Project 2025 suggests erasing the word “abortion” from federal laws, using the archaic Comstock Act of 1873 to ban the mailing of abortion medication, restricting the use of contraception, and requiring federal agencies to collect data on those receiving abortion care.

The playbook argues that the next Republican administration in the White House should make plans to curtail veterans’ disability benefits.

The VA assigns veterans a disability rating for disabilities caused or aggravated by active duty service, ranging from 10% to 100% in increments of 10%. Veterans with a disability rating receive tax-free benefits.

Project 2025 suggests reducing those benefits. It states that the next Republican administration should speed up a review of disability rating criteria in order to save money while preserving benefits for future claims.

The legalese in the document belies the truth of the plan, according to Michael Embrich, a former policy advisor to the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs: “They would go through every veteran who’s been rated, who currently gets their veteran’s — what they call benefit compensation check every month, and they would say, Hey, we want to take a look and see if you still have tinnitus. And if they determine you don’t, they want to take your benefit away, which is kind of unheard of.”

Revising disability ratings for future claimants would mean many disabled veterans wouldn’t get benefits at all, and the plan’s stated goal of “preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants” would allow them to cut benefits even for veterans who have already completed their service and are receiving benefits that they have rightfully earned and rely on, Embrich said.

“It would kind of be like going to people who who get Medicaid or Medicare or Social Security, and saying, OK, so we don’t think you should get this anymore, so we’re just going to take you from you for an arbitrary reason that we’ve determined as the federal government at this point,” Embrich said.

Naveed Shah, political director of the progressive veterans group Common Defense, said it’s already a difficult and tiring process for veterans to access disability benefits.

“Many veterans who apply are frequently denied and have to go through multiple applications in order to just get the basic care that they need,” Shah said.

He said there should be verification prior to approving disability benefits in order to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse, but Project 2025’s plans go far beyond what is reasonable.

“When people join the military, raise their right hand, they write a blank check payable to the United States for any amount up to and including their life,” he said. “So there is no cost that’s too great to care for those veterans when they get back from serving our country.”

Other plans in the playbook stipulate the firing of 75% of federal employees in four years, potentially causing 300,000 veterans who work for the federal government to lose their jobs, Embrich said. He noted that it would reclassify civil service employees as political appointees, allowing the president in a new Republican administration to fire them at will.

“It should be incredibly alarming to every veteran, whether they receive veterans benefits or not, because it really is an all-out assault on veterans,” Embrich said. “And on the flip side of that, something that’s not mentioned once, is what is that going to do to national security? Why are people going to join the military if they see the way that veterans are treated in this country by the federal government? Where’s the incentive?”