Veterans can’t wait for a perfect bill. Pass the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Karee White is a veteran, a military mother and an Elizabeth Dole Foundation Caregiver Fellow. She lives in North Carolina. Her memoir, “Ash Woven,” was published in April.

The military teaches that leadership sometimes means choosing when no perfect choice exists.

That is where Congress stands on the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act (TCAVA).

I am a veteran, and so is my husband, Jim. Seven of our nine children have served or are serving, and one came home injured. Our daughter Kimmy was an Army paratrooper when a traumatic brain injury put her in a coma for a year at 25 years old. Twelve years later she is working on sitting upright, cannot speak, and our mornings still begin at 6:30 with medication, a shower and feeding through a tube. I am one of an estimated 14.3 million military and veteran caregivers in this country, according to a 2024 RAND study, and most of us do this work unseen.

TCAVA might not be perfect. I have heard the objections to Section 108, which would change how future disability claims for sleep apnea and tinnitus are rated, and while that conversation should be had, they do not justify killing 62 long-awaited reforms for veterans, caregivers and survivors.

Veterans receiving these benefits today would be protected under the legislation, because Section 108 applies the new criteria only to claims filed after enactment and bars those revisions from being used to reduce, discontinue or otherwise adversely affect compensation already in effect. Nor did the idea originate here. With input from the medical community, these changes are part of an overhaul of the Department of Veterans Affairs disability rating schedule that began in 2017, and VA proposed substantially similar changes in 2022, long before TCAVA existed.

The billions in projected savings from those changes over the next decade have become the center of this fight. Opponents call it money taken from future veterans. I call it money that stays with veterans, caregivers and survivors instead of vanishing back into the federal budget. If this bill dies, the money returns to the Treasury and those dollars stop being ours to direct to families who need them, families who earned them.

Be clear about what is lost if the legislation fails. TCAVA would finally enact the Major Richard Star Act, addressing an injustice facing more than 50,000 combat-injured veterans who were medically retired before 20 years of service and must forfeit part of their retirement pay because they also receive VA disability compensation. It had 334 House cosponsors and 79 in the Senate as of June, and those veterans have waited for years while leaders of both parties called them a priority.

It would also strengthen support for family caregivers who have traded careers, income and retirement security to keep a wounded veteran at home, increase compensation for catastrophically injured veterans, improve traumatic brain injury care, expand blast-exposure research, expand suicide prevention efforts, shore up benefits for surviving families and advance reforms in health care, claims and community care.

Those are not line items to me. Traumatic brain injury care is what my daughter’s week is made of, and across the country other families are living their own version of it.

Congress could find the money elsewhere, but an imaginary offset has never delivered a benefit to a single wounded veteran.

In a Mission Roll Call survey of 1,058 veterans from all 50 states released in July, 71% supported TCAVA and 11% opposed it, and 23 veterans service organizations, among them the American Legion, Wounded Warrior Project, the Elizabeth Dole Foundation and the Military Officers Association of America, signed a letter June 29 urging Congress to act.

Waiting has become Washington’s easiest answer, and it is the one answer the veteran community cannot afford. Another delayed or failed vote is another year of hours nobody counts and bills nobody covers, and we have already given 12 in my family.

So pass TCAVA. Protect the ratings veterans have already earned and hold VA accountable for how it applies the new criteria. But do not let 62 reforms die because Congress could not accept one hard compromise.

A friend once told me that in the military you volunteer for service, and as a caregiver you are drafted. Neither one is about protecting what is easiest for us. Both are about looking across the formation and asking who needs us most. Congress should do the same.