An Open Letter to the VA and the Trump Administration

By Dan Hollaway

This originally published in Dan’s Substack.

There is a tendency in modern politics to talk about veterans as if they are a cost center.

A budget line. A liability column. A moral obligation to be minimized or managed. That is a profound misunderstanding and an insult to those who have served this nation.

There is also a tendency in all of government to respond to criticism and complaints from the people as mere misunderstandings, as if we just don’t get it. There is a total lack of transparency marked by refusal to directly engage, all while making unilateral decisions without the consent of Congress or the People.

Let us be clear: veterans are not a burden on the Republic. They are a national asset, the foremost national asset, forged under pressure, disciplined by structure, trained in leadership, and tested in consequence. There is no school, training, or experience on earth that better prepares men and women.

The question is not whether we can afford to invest in veterans. The real question is whether we can afford not to.

When we invest in veterans in healthcare, education, employment transition, and long-term support, we are not merely honoring sacrifice. We are strengthening the economic engine, stabilizing communities, and reinforcing the foundations of national security.

Veterans have earned more than bureaucratic responses to real concerns about policies decided without their consent.

This is not sentiment. It is an economic strategy that has served America well.

The Current Controversy: Process Matters

Before Investment, There Must Be Trust

Before we talk about investing in veterans, we need to talk about trust.

Recently, the Department of Veterans Affairs issued an amendment to its disability compensation evaluation process. The ruling states:

“Specifically, this amendment clarifies that veterans should be compensated for the actual level of functional impairment they experience and, therefore, that the ameliorative effects of medication should not be estimated or discounted when evaluating the severity of a veteran’s disability at the time of the disability examination.”

At first glance, that sounds technical, even reassuring. It appears to say that disability ratings should reflect the real functional impairment a veteran experiences, rather than some imagined worst-case scenario if medication were removed.

But here is the deeper reality.

Medication is not a cure. Treatment is not restoration. It is a lifelong struggle that affects every facet of a veteran’s life.

Let’s take something concrete: a traumatic brain injury.

A TBI does not “get better” in the way a broken arm heals. You do not wake up one morning and discover your cognition has been restored to factory settings. What happens instead is adaptation. You reorganize your entire life around the injury. You create systems. You write everything down. You manage stimuli. You structure sleep obsessively. You control diet. You avoid environments that overload you. You craft a life that mitigates the damage.

The injury remains.

The struggle remains.

The compensation strategies become your new normal.

From the outside, someone might say, “He’s functioning fine.”

But that functioning is built on constant vigilance and a lifetime of recalibration.

Limiting someone’s compensation because their treatment is “working,” because they have disciplined themselves into managing their disability, is just about the dumbest proposal imaginable. It punishes responsibility. It penalizes resilience. It treats adaptation as recovery.

There is a difference between mitigation and healing. Veterans understand that difference better than most. Anyone who’s lived this life would know how ignorant this policy is, because they’d have organized their entire lives around mitigation. In fact, an appeals court decided exactly that.

The VA’s response to this uproar is that they’re simply “clarifying” a long-existing policy, as if simply codifying stupidity somehow absolves this asinine ruling.

This is, of course, no excuse at all. It’s also not entirely true. In Ingram v. Collins, a recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, the court held that your so-called “longstanding approach” is incorrect. While the court allowed this sidestepping action by the VA for some bizarre reason, it is a fundamentally wrong way of handling lifelong injuries sustained in service to this country.

Instead of respecting a common-sense ruling that benefits veterans, the VA decided to take the court’s incorrect leniency and unilaterally create a new regulation, without public debate, without Congressional consent, and without asking a single veteran. Why? Because it might be too much work.

You see, application of the court finding “could be applied broadly to over 500 separate diagnostic codes, requiring re-adjudications of over 350,000 currently pending claims. This in turn would overburden VA’s claims adjudicatory capacity.”

We’re sorry for using the court of appeals system to appeal your process, overturn it, and force people to do their job. Our bad.

No thought has been given to the veteran or their family, to the way these injuries transform them forever. No, it’s budgetary hawkishness aimed at precisely the wrong group. We are a rounding error, a policy on paper. Men in suits in some faraway office have decided that we’re all okay now because they said so.

They tell me that they’ve been determining disability ratings this way since 1958, as if “this is how it’s always been done” is a legitimate rebuttal to sidestep an appeals court ruling that, frankly, makes a lot more sense than this regulation.

They tell me this action will have no impact on any veteran’s current disability rating. That is, of course, unless they have the temerity or need to file an amendment, a secondary claim, or face a periodic re-evaluation. And, frankly, it isn’t just about those of us who already have ratings. Unlike the people who made this decision, we think about people other than ourselves, such as the veterans who come next. We aren’t willing to sit idly by as you pull the rug from under their feet before you even send them to war.

So no, the VA didn’t refine or clarify an existing policy. They issued a regulation in direct opposition to court findings that benefited veterans, to sidestep the ruling, save time, and cut our budget.

Which brings us to the second issue, and perhaps even more troubling.

Regarding why this amendment was not opened to public comment before implementation, the VA responded:

“Providing advance notice and prior opportunity for public comment is impracticable and contrary to the public interest.”

That answer should concern every American.

Not because veteran disability ratings should become a partisan battlefield, but because public rulemaking in a Constitutional Republic demands transparency.

Veterans swore an oath to defend a system built on checks, balances, and procedural legitimacy, and they fulfilled that oath. They did not swear to defend bureaucratic insulation from scrutiny.

Public comment is not a ceremonial box to check; it’s a safeguard.

It allows disabled veterans, medical professionals, advocacy organizations, economists, and taxpayers to examine consequences before they are locked into policy. It exposes blind spots. It surfaces unintended effects. It strengthens legitimacy.

To dismiss that process as “impracticable” and “contrary to the public interest” invites distrust, deservedly so.

And distrust is corrosive.

Veterans deserve clarity in how their disabilities are evaluated. They deserve consistency in how those evaluations are applied. And they deserve to know that changes affecting their livelihood are not made behind closed doors.

If a rule is fair, it can withstand scrutiny.

If a rule is sound, it can survive public comment.

Process matters because process protects legitimacy.

And legitimacy is the foundation upon which every promise to veterans must rest.

Now, we can begin.

Veterans Are Multipliers, Not Takers

Let’s speak plainly.

A veteran leaves active duty with something increasingly rare in this country: experience under consequence. He has made decisions that carried weight. She has led people when failure meant real loss. They have operated complex systems in hostile environments, adapted in chaos, solved problems when comfort was not an option.

That does not evaporate at ETS. It transfers to everything we do for the rest of our lives.

Veteran-owned businesses employ more than five million Americans in manufacturing, logistics, construction, energy, and technology, the spine of the real economy. Not speculative bubbles. Not paper wealth. Real goods. Real payrolls. Real taxes paid. The GI Bill doesn’t create dependents; it creates engineers, entrepreneurs, tradesmen, and executives. VA home loans helped build the American middle class. Transition programs drive veteran unemployment rates below the national average.

This is not charity.

It is a sustained and consistent return on investment.

Now, contrast that with the hemorrhaging fraud in other corners of government: billions lost annually to waste and abuse in welfare systems, Medicare scams, fraudulent billing rings, phantom recipients. Entire bureaucracies leak money through corruption and incompetence, and yet we are told that tightening the screws on disabled veterans is a fiscal necessity?

Absolutely fucking not. That is insanity.

Veterans are not takers. They are net contributors. They stabilize communities as business owners, first responders, coaches, school board members. They anchor families. Their pensions and survivor benefits produce generational lift, children more likely to graduate, to build, to contribute.

And there is the strategic layer.

America runs an all-volunteer force. That system runs on trust. If young Americans see veterans thriving, enlistment is rational. If they see veterans nickel-and-dimed while fraud runs wild elsewhere, the signal is clear: service does not compound.

When veterans succeed, recruitment strengthens. Expertise flows into defense industries. Institutional knowledge is preserved. Readiness compounds.

Investing in veterans is not indulgence. It is conversion: military capital into civilian capital. Sacrifice into stability. Discipline into productivity. It is the heart and soul of this nation.

This is not a handout economy.

It is a compounding return model.

And pulling the rug out from under the very people who carried the weight, while tolerating rampant waste elsewhere, is not just bad policy.

It is a betrayal of priorities and of the men and women who served America.

The Republic’s Duty

Every veteran invested first.

Before there was a debate about budgets or benefits, there was a young man or woman who signed a contract with their country. They invested their youth, the years most people spend building comfort and stability, into something uncertain. They invested skill, discipline, and risk. Some invested blood. Others carry injuries that never make headlines. All paid in quieter currency: missed birthdays, strained marriages, long separations, the slow erosion of normalcy that comes from living on alert.

The republic draws daily security from that investment. The stability we take for granted, the markets that open each morning, the schools that operate, the elections that proceed, rests in part on their willingness to stand post.

To reinvest in them is not generosity.

It is stewardship.

Veterans are not passive recipients of aid. They are force multipliers of national strength. Economic engines who start companies and strengthen industries. Civic anchors who stabilize communities. Security assets whose expertise continues long after active duty ends.

In a time when public coffers are being raided by bad actors across the country, the very idea this administration would seek to limit its responsibility to this nation’s veterans is abhorrent and unacceptable.

If America wants growth, stability, and readiness, the path is not mysterious.

Invest in veterans, and watch the returns compound.

Finally, don’t tell me you believe in this unless you’re ready to actually do something about it.

_____________________________

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.