Damon Bird moved in with his daughter to repay the roughly $74,000 incentive he received to leave the Army in 2015. The Department of Veterans Affairs has clawed back billions of dollars that countless veterans were given as incentive to leave the military, including when it needed to downsize, according to new data obtained by NBC News.
Disabled veterans have been told in the last 12 fiscal years to return nearly $3 billion in special separation pay — lump-sum incentives that were offered when the U.S. had to reduce its active-duty force or release slightly injured service members, the data shows.
Since fiscal year 2013, the earliest year for which the VA shared data, about 122,000 veterans have returned more than $2.5 billion so far, with about $364 million still left to be recouped, according to the VA.
“It felt like I would never see the light at the end of the tunnel,” said Damon Bird, who struggled to repay the roughly $74,000 incentive he received to leave the Army in 2015.
The VA said it is legally bound to recover separation payouts from veterans before those eligible can begin receiving disability compensation, due to a little-known federal law that prohibits them from receiving both, NBC News previously reported .
The obscure law — of which about a dozen military law and veterans policy experts said they did not have enough knowledge to weigh in on — has thrown many disabled veterans into financial and emotional despair since Congress authorized it in 1949.
Bird, 54, said he and his wife had to leave their rental home in Haslet, Texas, to move in with their daughter in 2021 when the VA began withholding his monthly disability payment of more than $2,400 until he returned his separation pay.
“We were barely keeping up with our day-to-day cost of living,” said Bird, who was diagnosed with service-connected bladder cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder. “It was already bad enough as it was, but I had already been dealing with mental health issues prior to losing that income.”
Army veteran Salahudin Majeed, now 73, still remembers the anguish he felt when the […]
Government has clawed back more than $2.5B given to veterans to leave the military, data shows
