I spent eleven years around men and women who came home with a ringing in their ears that never stopped and a body that forgot how to sleep without gasping for air. If you’ve served, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Tinnitus and sleep apnea aren’t glamorous injuries. They don’t come with a Purple Heart. But they are the two most commonly rated disabilities in the entire VA system, and Congress is currently negotiating a bill that would gut compensation for both.
The bill in question — bundled into a larger package called the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act — sounds, on its name alone, like something no elected official could vote against. That’s usually the first sign something in Washington needs a closer look.
Buried inside the package is a provision that would strip the standalone 10% disability rating currently given for tinnitus, reclassifying it instead as a mere “symptom” of an underlying condition like hearing loss or traumatic brain injury rather than a condition worthy of its own compensation. It would also replace the standard 30% rating for sleep apnea with a new sliding scale based on “treatment effectiveness” — meaning a veteran successfully using a CPAP machine to manage a service-connected condition could see their compensation cut precisely because the treatment is working. Disabled American Veterans and the Veterans of Foreign Wars have both come out against the proposal. Forty-seven senators, according to Military.com, have publicly opposed the sleep apnea and tinnitus provisions specifically. The VA’s own analysis, cited by DAV, estimates the changes could reduce future disability payments by as much as $57 billion over the next decade and affect up to 1.5 million veterans.
Here’s the part that should matter most to readers in Milwaukee and across Wisconsin: this isn’t an abstract Washington fight. Wisconsin is home to roughly 300,000 veterans, a disproportionate number of whom served in combat roles where hearing damage and sleep-disrupted breathing are almost universal outcomes of the job. Artillery, small arms fire, generators running through the night in forward operating bases — these aren’t incidental exposures, they’re the baseline environment of military service. The idea that a veteran who did what his country asked of him should now watch his benefits shrink because the VA found a cheaper way to categorize his injury isn’t fiscal responsibility. It’s a shell game.
What makes this bill particularly cynical is what it’s bundled with. Tucked into the same package is the Major Richard Star Act, a long-overdue and genuinely good piece of legislation that would let veterans with fewer than 20 years of service collect both disability compensation and retirement pay simultaneously — closing a gap that has unfairly penalized medically retired veterans for years. Lawmakers are using a popular, deserved benefit as cover to fund it by clawing back money from a different group of veterans. That’s not tradeoff, that’s triage by accounting trick, and veterans deserve better than being pitted against each other to balance a budget line.
I want to be clear about something, because UNJ doesn’t do partisan theater: this isn’t a Republican problem or a Democrat problem. The offset language originated in negotiations that involved lawmakers from both parties trying to find “pay-fors” inside a package everyone wanted to pass. That’s exactly the kind of bipartisan failure that deserves scrutiny regardless of which side proposed it first. When both parties would rather quietly shrink a benefit than have an honest conversation about veteran healthcare funding, accountability journalism doesn’t get to pick a side to protect.
There’s a practical path forward here, and it starts with separating the bills. The Major Richard Star Act has broad, genuine bipartisan support on its own merits and should be able to pass as a standalone measure without needing to be financed by cutting hearing and sleep-related disability ratings. Wisconsin’s congressional delegation — on both sides of the aisle — should be hearing from veterans and their families before this package reaches a floor vote. Groups like DAV and VFW have made it simple to contact your representative directly through their advocacy portals, and Wisconsin veterans service organizations, including the county veterans service offices that exist in every county in this state, can walk any veteran through exactly how this proposal would affect their specific rating.
I came home from deployment able to hear a pin drop in a quiet room and unable to sleep through a full night without waking up short of breath. Neither of those things ever fully went away. I got compensated fairly for both, and that compensation didn’t make me whole, but it acknowledged what the job cost me. That acknowledgment is the whole point of the VA disability system. Strip it down to save money on the backs of the people who already paid the highest price, and you haven’t fixed the VA’s budget problem. You’ve just moved the debt onto veterans who have no lobbyist as powerful as their own testimony.
Call your representative. Tell your story if you’re a veteran carrying either of these diagnoses. This is still early enough in the process that veteran voices, not just veteran service organizations, can still shape the outcome.
Marcus Hart is a combat veteran, journalist, and founder of The Urban News Journal.