The Bush administration has endorsed a House bill that would improve the Montgomery G.I. Bill education benefits in several ways, including a 31 percent jump in monthly benefits and a new $500-a-month stipend to help cover college living expenses.
The administration’s aim is not only to improve veterans benefits in wartime but to derail a far more costly G.I. Bill reform package that Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., in just his second year, is shepherding toward likely enactment with tenacity and timely compromises.
No matter who wins this showdown, current and future G.I. Bill users are almost assured that their benefits will be more valuable by next year.
Webb’s bill, the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act (S 22), would be available to any active or reserve member who served at least three months on active duty since Sept. 11, 2001. Maximum benefits would cover tuition costs up to an amount equal to tuition payments at a state’s most expensive public university. Payments to full-time students would jump to about $1,900 a month, up from $1,100.
Webb’s bill also would pay a monthly stipend to cover living expenses. That payment would be based on local military housing allowances payable in the college area to a married enlisted member of grade E-5.
To win the influential support of Sen. John Warner, R-Va., Webb added a provision to entice private colleges to accept more veterans. The government will pay half of any tuition costs in excess of the new G.I. Bill ceiling if colleges agree to absorb the other half. So veterans, in effect, could attend most any college that accepted them.
Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, became a new and vital co-sponsor last week after Webb made his changes. The housing stipend would not be paid to veterans who are part-time students. Also the new G.I. Bill’s effective date would be Aug. 1, 2009, rather than the date of the bill’s enactment, to allow the Department of Veterans Affairs time to prepare. VA also would get an extra $95 million to hire more people and to develop new information technology for administering this new G.I. Bill for a new generation students.
Webb also agreed with Akaka that in August 2008, benefits should be raised 20 percent so veterans who don’t qualify for the new G.I. Bill, and those who have to wait another year for the new program, can still receive some immediate help with education costs.
Rep. Harry E. Mitchell, D-Ariz., introduced a companion bill, HR 5740, on April 9. Before a week had passed, it attracted 196 co-sponsors.
Webb, an aide said, hopes these changes have lowered the cost of his G.I. Bill below $3 billion a year. Regardless, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., will allow Webb to clear conventional funding hurdles over entitlement spending by making his bill an amendment to the wartime supplemental budget to be taken up by the Senate at the end of April.
Webb’s press aide, Kimberly Hunter, said Webb will argue that, with the Iraq war costs running at up to $15 billion a month, it’s only appropriate to spend “a few billion dollars a year” from the same pot to give returning veterans better education benefits as they return to civilian life.
Defense officials fear Webb’s Bill not only would be costly, but it would threaten the viability of an all-volunteer force by enticing thousands of members to leave service after a single tour to use education benefits, particularly if the option is another wartime tour.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., soon to be the Republican Party’s nominee for president, told reporters on his campaign plan that he is working with others to find an alternative to S. 22 that won’t harm service retention rates.
That alternative might have been introduced in the House April 2 by Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, D-S.D., a fiscal conservative. Sandlin’s bill, the Veterans Education Improvement Act of 2008 (HR 5684), drew mixed reviews from veterans’ service associations when called to testify this week on her education bill and a of other veterans’ initiatives. Veterans representatives more than hinted that they favor Webb’s bill.
But Curtis Gilroy, director of recruiting policy for the Defense Department, praised Sandlin’s bill as if the department itself had helped to write it.
Though Sandlin’s bill is “less generous” than S. 22, Gilroy said, it “addresses all of the significant issues as we see them.”
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