Advocacy

Every day, veterans die by suicide. Often a firearm is the method used. We know that suicide is often impulsive, and that even small barriers to immediate access, like safe storage, saves lives. When that moment passes, the crisis often does too.

The Saving Our Veterans Lives Act of 2025 is an effort to standardize and expand the tools, education, and resources to safely store firearms and create critical moments of pause between crisis and action. 

Support the Saving Our Veterans Lives Act of 2025 and help ensure that more veterans make it through their hardest moments.

Military spouses too often face barriers created by the demands of military life, resulting in persistently high unemployment—an issue that has drawn bipartisan concern for years.

The Military Spouse Hiring Act (H.R. 2033 & S. 1027) offers a practical, commonsense solution. By expanding the Work Opportunity Tax Credit to include military spouses, this bill provides employers with a meaningful incentive to hire and retain them.

Supporting military spouses supports the readiness and retention of our all-volunteer force. Ensuring military spouses have fair access to employment is a shared responsibility and a clear opportunity for bipartisan action in support of those who serve and the families who support them.

The Take Care of America’s Veterans Act (H.R. 9237/S. 4744) pits one community of veterans against another by choosing to finance the package by reducing or restricting earned benefits to other disabled (and future disabled) veterans. 

Rather than fully funding these proposals through the normal appropriations process, this package pays for itself by making significant changes to VA disability compensation and housing benefits. Most notably, the bill eliminates or sharply reduces future disability compensation for veterans suffering from tinnitus and sleep apnea, cutting off an estimated 1.5 million current and future veterans from benefits they would otherwise have earned over the next decade.

The bill also increases the cost of using certain VA home loan benefits. It doubles the VA home loan funding fee for loan assumptions from 0.5% to 1.0% and nearly triples the fee for refinancing from 0.5% to 1.42%, making homeownership more expensive for veterans and military families who rely on the VA home loan program.

Veterans should not be forced to choose between supporting one group of veterans and protecting the earned benefits of another.

Currently, VA deducts the retirement pay of veterans with a disability rating of less than 50%. Disability compensation and retirement pay are two separate and different payments though, and both programs have very different legislative intents.
IAVA continues to urge Congress to end this unjust denial of retirement benefits. The Major Richard Star Act (S.1032/ H.R.2102) would repeal this unfair offset for disabled veterans.

Tell Congress to pass the Major Richard Star Act and ensure that this country keeps its promise to injured veterans in support of this nation’s defense.

American veterans remain deeply troubled by the chaotic exit by the U.S. from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. Many of the Afghans who partnered with us during the war were left behind.

It is imperative that we pass into law a means to ensure our Afghan allies are able to gain the legal status in the U.S. that we promised them. Tell Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act (H.R.4895)/ Fullfilling Promises to Our Afghan Allies Act (S.2679) and the Enduring Welcome Act (H.R.4995), supporting our Afghan allies.

In a first for our annual member survey, we asked IAVA veterans whether they supported expanding veteran access to psychedelic treatment options within the VA, and 65% of them told us they did. Only 12% told us they were opposed. Whether it’s cannabis or psychedelics, the data makes clear that our generation of veterans is ready to try more alternative therapies. We just need our elected leaders to help make it possible.

The Innovative Therapies Centers of Excellence Act of 2025 (H.R.2623/S.4031) would create a system in the VA to treat veterans through breakthrough psychedelic-assisted therapies and study its impact. 

Tell Congress to pass this bill and give post-9/11 veterans the care and support they deserve!