When the new House Republican majority passed its grab bag of government spending cuts last month, setting up an ongoing game of chicken with the White House over any federal debt limit increase, they also targeted essential services for military veterans, a constituency long courted by their own party. Included in the “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023” was a proposed 22 percent reduction in funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Right-wing Republicans scrambled to provide political cover for themselves by insisting that “our budget-cutting plan doesn’t harm veterans.” Instead, claimed Mike Bost, a former Marine from Illinois who now chairs the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, his conservative colleagues were just trying to force a long-overdue discussion of whether VA funding is “actually helping veterans.”

Fortunately, a VA patient, elected to Congress last year, took the House floor to accuse the Republican majority of passing a “B.S. plan” that’s “an absolute betrayal and a disgrace.” As former Navy officer Chris Deluzio (D-PA) noted, House Republicans are “threatening to blow up our economy and to push us into default unless we agree to cuts to the VA and veterans, and to so much else. There is not a single protection, not a single one for veterans in their bill. [. . .] Millions of veterans are going to be screwed by this plan. They won’t get the care they’ve earned, and they will have to wait longer for benefits.”