The “Blue Water Veterans” are a group of about 90,000 men and women who served on coastal ships during the Vietnam war. The poisonous herbicide Agent Orange that has sickened so many Veterans was not intentionally sprayed directly onto or near the ships. However, chemicals sprayed onto land will eventually make their way into the water, and the Blue Water Veterans have argued that they were exposed to toxins when their nearby ships’ water systems distilled that contaminated water for showering, drinking, laundry, and cooking. Expert opinion has reportedly affirmed that the distillation process could have concentrated the Agent Orange.
Veterans exposed to Agent Orange on land have been successful in their campaign for VA benefits. However, the VA has generally refused to recognize most Blue Water Veterans for the same benefits, even after a federal appeals court in 2015 ordered the VA to review its policy for denying Blue Water claims.
This week, Rep. Phil Roe, Chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee and representing Tennessee’s First District, announced that his committee has approved a mechanism that bypasses rules governing the normal VA funding process in order to pay for Blue Water benefits.
Roe explained that the estimated $1 billion needed to provide benefits to the Blue Water Veterans will be raised by imposing a new fee on VA-backed home loans.
Now I’m all in favor of Veterans receiving benefits they have earned.
However, in this case the funding mechanism chills what should otherwise be a positive and long-awaited development.
The problem is this — to come up with the money for the Blue Water Veterans’ benefits, Rep. Roe plans to impose a Veteran-specific "fee" to pay for the program.
Of course, a government “fee” is just another word for “tax.” In this case, the tax doesn’t apply to everybody. Instead, it will come as a small monthly surcharge on the mortgage payments of those Veterans who obtain home loans under the VA loan-guarantee program.
Veterans who don't want to pay the tax presumably have the option of getting a mortgage outside the VA loan-guarantee program. But loss of the VA mortgage oversight exposes those Veterans to other risks, because Roe also wants to gut the protections afforded by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to borrowers in general.
Bottom line - this Blue Water Veterans plan is not Rep. Roe helping Veterans so much as it is Veterans helping each other. Veterans who support Roe’s proposal are taking a financial hit for the team by agreeing to be taxed so that other Veterans can receive benefits.
This is happening only because Congress lacks the will to grant Blue Water benefits out of its regular funding.
Roe points out that major Veterans groups have “accepted” his plan to impose a mortgage fee. Well — what choice did they have? Blue Water Veterans won a new policy review in court and then still lost. The VA bureaucracy had pushed the Blue Water Veterans up against a wall and Congress hadn’t stepped up to do the right thing.
So, I’m not surprised that Veterans have chosen to carry the burden of supporting each other by accepting a Veteran-specific tax. Veterans supporting each other is what Veterans do. Veterans don’t leave each other behind, even if Congress does.
But taxing Veterans to pay for Veterans’ benefits feels like a dangerously slippery slope. The current proposed fee is modest — but once this Trojan Tax Horse is inside the VA walls, what is to stop a similar mechanism from being used to pay for something else that Congress has failed to properly fund?
There is an important principle at stake. Veterans should not be subject to a new special tax to pay for VA benefits. They already paid for those benefits with their service.
Enough is enough.