New G.I. Bill Chops Student Vet Benefits
On August 1st, an update to the G.I. Bill will come into effect. Its most important provision though will do more to satisfy Congress’ sudden concern for budgetary restraint than actually help soldiers who have risked their lives for their country.
GI Bill 2.0, which was signed into law last December, includes something that the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 and the “Post-9/11 GI Bill” didn’t: a clause affirming its “statutory pay-as-you-go compliance.” The bill extends GI Bill coverage to National Guardsmen deployed within the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and creates new benefits for vocational and on-the-job training. It was an attempt at expanding GI Bill coverage while remaining budget-neutral. But it accomplished this by pilfering benefits from a potentially-significant number of student veterans—a situation which convinced former Congressman Steve Buyer (R-IA), then ranking member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, to vote against it.
G.I. Bill 2.0, proposed by Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and supported by every major veterans’ service organization, includes a number of cost-cutting measures: student veterans will no longer receive cost of living stipends during winter and summer breaks, and these stipends will now be scaled to reflect the number of credit hours they are taking at a given time.
Daniel Caldwell, a senior at Arizona State University who served four years in the Marine Corps and has written a blogpost critical of the new GI Bill for the Veterans Administration’s website, told me that such a measure would have cut his benefits by around $2,000 a year.
More significantly, starting in August, tuition assistance for veterans attending private schools will be capped at $17,500 a year, partly to resolve a nagging inconsistency within the post-9/11 GI Bill. Under that law, students at private institutions received money equal to the tuition and fees at the most expensive public school in their college’s state. For a veteran at Stanford, which is in a state where public fees and credit hours are actually quite low for the VA’s purposes, GI 2.0 heralds an increase in benefits. But for a veteran at Columbia University, which is the largest recipient of GI Bill money among non-profit private institutions, it means a dramatic cut.
According to Pro Publica (see above link), 211 student veterans at Columbia University received an average of $28,000 in GI Bill-related aid in 2009. Starting August 1st, they will see an over-$10,000 cut in benefits. The situation is similar at other elite schools: the University of Chicago’s 69 vets received an average of $27,500; at the University of Pennsylvania, 74 vets received about $27,000 each.
John McClelland, a Columbia senior and former vice president of the school’s nationally-recognized MilVets organization (as well as an army medic who served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan), says that his group has identified 26 states where the maximum post-9/11 GI Bill funding for students at private schools exceeded $17,500. He says the lack of a “grandfather clause” for veterans drawing benefits from the initial post-9/11 bill means that some of his classmates will suddenly be forced to pay for more of their education out-of-pocket. “A lot of veterans have uprooted themselves,” he says. “They’ve come to Columbia and all of a sudden they’re seeing their education become more expensive.”
In his mind, GI Bill 2.0 is an “abrogation of contract” between the U.S. government and the veterans who are seeing their benefits cut. “We fought over two years for these benefits,” he said, in reference to the 2008 GI Bill. “And then in six months they just took it away.”
The new G.I. Bill might be an overall improvement over the old one—but it begs the question of why its improvements had to come at any veteran’s expense. Brian Hawthorne, an Iraq war veteran, board member for Student Veterans of America and graduate student at George Washington University, offers a partial explanation.
Hawthorne was part of a working group of veterans’ activists lobbying for the new GI Bill. He said that one of the group’s goals was a simplified system for funding veterans attending private schools. “We believe very strongly that the benefits should be applied equally instead of students in some states receiving significantly more or significantly less based just on where they were living,” he says.
Veterans groups wanted as high a cap as possible—something in the $20,000- $25,000 range. But when the Congressional Budget Office performed a cost estimate for the bill, it found that even a $20,000 cap would “increase direct spending by about $1.8 billion over the 2011-2020 period.” The average, per-state maximum benefits a GI could draw at a private institution—a number the CBO pegged at $17,300—made its way into the final version of the bill. Hawthorne says that this is far from ideal. “Ultimately, we would love to see a higher number,” he says. “Unfortunately it’s the reality of budget restrictions and cost rules that that wasn’t possible.”
The fact that veterans’ service organizations felt that a new GI Bill was worth the reduction of some veterans’ benefits reflects an unpleasant reality: In a time when added attention is being paid to the nation’s balance sheet, veterans’ programs are hardly immune from budgetary scrutiny. “The fact that when people are talking about veterans’ issues that they actually start worrying about cost is really messed up,” says Tim Embree, an Iraq war veteran and legislative associate with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. After all, he says “vets write a blank check when they’re service members.” With added attention to the country’s debt, lawmakers are hardly prepared to write a blank check in return. “We came to Congress and said ‘look folks, this is what needed to be done, this is how to pay for it, let’s get it done,’” Embree says of the process of lobbying for G.I. 2.0. “Unfortunately they didn’t listen to us completely. We got a good bill, but we didn’t get a great bill.”
Tim Tetz, the legislative director of the American Legion, agrees with Embree that veterans groups have to cope with a new political reality in pushing for expanded benefits. “They may not be coming at us with a knife,” he says of Congress and veterans’ groups, “but they’re saying we’re not exempt. So we’re circling the wagons and trying to protect what we have.”
The recent history of the GI Bill has in fact mirrored the schizophrenic reversals in attitude that have seemingly ruled American politics over the past half-decade. As a rider in an emergency defense authorization bill, the 2008 G.I. Bill was exempt from pay-go rules, and allowed for a vast expansion of benefits for those serving after the September 11th terrorist attacks. Even if the bill had undergone rigorous budgetary scrutiny, it was passed during a time when the public was acutely aware of the plight of American military personnel: 2007 was a record year for American deaths in Iraq. That same year, Washington Post series exposing the poor quality of treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center highlighted the government’s seemingly oblivious attitude towards veterans’ care.
But the sense that budgetary concerns were secondary to veterans’ needs only lasted until the latest lame duck session of Congress, which took place in the wake of an election where Republican promises of fiscal restraint resonated with voters— and just after an election season in which America’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan were barely discussed. Today, the GOP House rules state that an increase in entitlement spending has to be offset with spending cuts somewhere else. Military entitlements, such as GI Bill benefits, are not exempt.
At the same time, since the post-World War II period, the overall social impact of veterans programs has diminished as their share of the total population has decreased. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 allowed the United States to absorb 15 million soldiers returning from World War II while flooding the country’s university campuses with new students. Cornell University historian Glenn Altschuler, who has co-authored a book about the social impact of the GI Bill, says that in the years after World War II, nearly half of American college students were GI Bill recipients. For Altschuler, the 1944 bill was a success in joining American society’s high valuing of education to its sense of patriotism. “[The 1944 GI Bill] is iconic,” says Altschuler, “because of the belief attached to it that investing in education, especially investing in the education of people who have put their lives on the line for us, is among the very best investments that the collective ‘we’ can make.”
G.I. Bill 2.0 is a disconcerting sign that that belief might be fraying. Altschuler says that he detects “a reduction in passion in the general population in interest [and] in knowledge about war veterans and their fate once they returned home” compared to other war eras, when veterans made up a greater share of the population and the benefits of the GI Bill could be felt throughout the whole of American society. The GI Bill is no longer the engine of social transformation that it used to be. This doesn’t mean that it’s in danger—just that it could be easier to strip it down or de-fund some of its provisions in the future. “I fear that 10 years from now when we don’t have troops in harm’s way, that [the GI Bill] could be prime for plucking,” says Hawthorne, whose group is currently in the process of lobbying for a grandfather clause for veterans previously covered by the 2008 bill.
John McClelland, meanwhile, is planning a lobbying trip to Washington, DC over spring break for Columbia veterans, and recently met with New Jersey congressman Jon Runyan about problems with GI 2.0. He is spearheading the Columbia veterans’ lobbying efforts, even though he is graduating from the school this May and won’t be affected by the new bill.
“This is an investment in people who contribute to the character of our nation,” says McClelland of the GI Bill. “The first people you should fund are people who are going to risk their lives.”
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