The President’s budget proposal fiscal year (FY) 2018 and FY 2019 advance appropriation was released on May 23, 2017. The following day, DAV and its Independent Budget (IB) partners provided testimony and recommendations to the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, on the medical care, benefits, cemetery and construction sections of the budget.
We also joined with our IB partners in expressing concern over two specific proposals in the President’s budget related to individual unemployability (IU) ratings and rounding down of cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) for veterans’ disability compensation benefits.
While we appreciate the increases provided in the FY 2018 budget proposal for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), we have concerns the overall budget falls short of what is needed to ensure service-disabled veterans have timely access to quality health care, benefits, and the ability for VA to modernize its health care and benefits systems, infrastructure, replacement of its IT systems and other priorities of the Administration.
You can read the Independent Budget press release here.
You can read the testimony of the IB veterans service organizations (including DAV) on the FY 2018 budget here.
You can read DAV’s alert on the proposals and IU and COLA contained in the President’s budget and send a message to your Representative and Senators by clicking here.
This is the first step in the long budget process. We will keep you updated with new information and calls to action as necessary.
As always, thank you for your support of DAV’s legislative efforts.
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