Published July 29, 2026. The benefits-news items below were current as of that date; pending legislation was pending when written. This is an archived issue of our weekly email — subscribe here to get new issues first.
The NDAA pay raise is not your pay raise
On July 22 the House passed the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act, 216–212, and the coverage led with a 5–7% pay raise. Read the fine print: that raise is for active-duty service members. Retired pay, VA disability compensation, and CRSC do not move with an NDAA pay raise — they move with the annual COLA, which is set from third-quarter inflation data and announced in mid-October.
What retirees should actually watch inside that bill is the Major Richard Star Act (H.R. 2102 / S. 1032). It would let combat-injured medical retirees with fewer than 20 years keep full retired pay and full VA compensation; CBO scoring on an earlier version of the bill put it at roughly $1,200 more per month, on average, for those affected. In June, Sen. Rand Paul objected twice on the Senate floor — first to unanimous consent, then to a 60-vote roll call — citing the national debt. The Star Act has been filed as an NDAA amendment in both chambers before and never made it into the enacted bill. The Senate hasn't passed its own FY2027 NDAA either: cloture on the motion to proceed failed 50–46 on July 14. (Sources: House Roll Call 278, July 22, 2026; Stars and Stripes, June 10, 2026; CRS IN12704; CBO.)
Bottom line: nothing on your next retired-pay statement changes because of this vote. But if you're a Chapter 61 retiree under 20 years, this is the bill that decides whether CRSC remains the only route to recovering waived retired pay. Worth knowing what that's worth before Congress comes back — run the numbers on the CRSC calculator.
Faster decisions — with a lot fewer people reading them
At a July 13 House Veterans' Affairs technology-modernization hearing, VA defended the record we covered two weeks ago: the rating backlog is down more than 74% since January 20, 2025 and has fallen below 70,000 for the first time since February 2020; average processing time is a record-low 77.7 days; and claims-processing accuracy reached 94.02%, the highest 12-month rate in two years.
The other half of that hearing didn't make headlines. Rep. Nikki Budzinski put the staffing cost on the record: VA has lost 1,100 claims examiners this fiscal year and is down roughly 2,700 examiners and 120 IT specialists since January 2025 — while leaning harder on AI-assisted routing and document review. GAO testified that 15 of the 43 recommendations it has made to VA since 2021 remain unimplemented. The VFW told the subcommittee that AI-assisted claims should still be reviewed by qualified VA employees; Paralyzed Veterans of America warned that AI “should never replace meaningful human oversight.” VA's answer, from acting deputy CIO Robert Orifici: “Every disability claim is decided by a trained VA employee, not by AI or automation.” (Sources: House VA Subcommittee on Technology Modernization hearing, July 13, 2026; GAO-26-109137; VA news releases, April 15 & July 7, 2026.)
Why this matters for CRSC: a CRSC award is built on your VA ratings — and on the language inside the rating decision. Decisions written faster by a thinner workforce are decisions worth reading closely, not filing away unopened.
Treating the VA rating decision as proof of combat-relatedness
It isn't — and that gap is one of the most common reasons a strong-looking claim comes back denied. VA decides service connection. Your branch's CRSC board decides combat-relatedness — a separate determination, under a separate statute, on a separate record. A rating decision that says “service-connected” but never names the incident, the deployment, or the mechanism of injury gives that board nothing to work with.
What moves a CRSC board is contemporaneous evidence: the service treatment record from the time of the injury, the line-of-duty or casualty document, the award citation, the incident or after-action report. Mailing in a thick VA file without those is not a packet — it's paperwork.
Pull the most recent VA rating decision for each condition you believe is combat-related. Go to the “Evidence” and “Reasons for Decision” sections and ask one question of each: does this narrative name the in-service event? If it does, note the page — that's a citation your packet can use. If it doesn't, you've just found the exact gap your CRSC packet has to close with records from the time of injury.
Not sure what you're looking at? We'll look at it with you. Book a free 15-minute CRSC review.
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