Iraq Veteran, Now a West Point Professor, Seeks to Rein In Disability Pay

By DAVE PHILIPPS | JAN. 7, 2015
New York Times

COLORADO SPRINGS — Nearly 200 sick and wounded soldiers in a gym at Fort Carson last month listened silently as Lt. Col. Daniel Gade offered a surprising warning: The disability checks designed to help troops like them after they leave the service might actually be harmful.

As he paced back and forth in front of the soldiers, some of them leaning on crutches, Colonel Gade said that too many veterans become financially dependent on those monthly checks, choose not to find jobs and lose the sense of identity and self-worth that can come from work.

“People who stay home because they are getting paid enough to get by on disability are worse off,” he said. “They are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. They are more likely to live alone. You’ve seen these guys. And the system is driving you to become one of them, if you are not careful.”

It was a message that many veterans find offensive and misguided. But Colonel Gade is not your typical messenger. He is a combat veteran who lost a leg while serving as a tank company commander in Iraq in 2005.

On speaking trips, Colonel Gade assails the system. “From an economic standpoint, you would be crazy to get a job,” he said.

Today he is a professor of public policy at the United States Military Academy at West Point, but he spends much of his spare time publishing essays and traveling the country pushing the idea that the Department of Veterans Affairs should move away from paying veterans for their wounds and instead create incentives for them to find work or create businesses.

“It’s a difficult issue to broach. People immediately think you are trying to shortchange veterans,” he said in an interview. “But I’m in a position to do it because I have skin in the game, literally.”

Much like debate over Social Security, discussion of disability compensation is the third rail of veterans politics. It is a program with broad public support that has defied efforts at change even as it has consumed a growing portion of the $151 billion Veterans Affairs budget.

Since 2001, the number of veterans getting monthly checks for service-related disabilities, ranging from bad knees to catastrophic injuries, increased by 55 percent, and the overall cost of compensation nearly tripled, to $59 billion.

Colonel Gade, 39, says he wants to avoid a partisan fight over his ideas, which he says are first about helping veterans and second about saving money. “I think we can show we have a no-kidding better way to help veterans that is cheaper and more effective,” he said.

He is not completely alone. Some new veterans groups say labeling so many veterans “disabled” makes it harder for them to rejoin society.

“When vets come home from war they are going through a tremendous change in identity,” said Eric Greitens, a former member of the Navy SEALs and founder of The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that encourages veterans to volunteer in their communities. “Then the V.A., and others, encourage them to view themselves as disabled. We meet a number of veterans who see themselves as charity cases and are not sure anymore what they have to contribute.”

Colonel Gade sometimes uses his leg as an example of what needs updating in the system. A century ago, he says, he might have spent his life hobbling on crutches, dependent on government aid to provide for his three children. Today he has a lightweight aluminum and carbon fiber prosthesis guided by microprocessors that has allowed him to return to active duty. But the disability system still treats him as if he needs a crutch, he says.

He first noticed what he considers the misguided incentives of disability compensation while recuperating from his injuries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2005. Many of the amputees in his ward, he said, had been there for years.

He left the hospital after five months and spent another six months in daily physical therapy. A year later, when a scandal over poor treatment of soldiers at the hospital erupted in 2007, he saw some of the patients he knew testifying before Congress.

His main goal is to reach young veterans who initially get modest compensation for less severe injuries, then seek a greater payout — a phenomenon critics call “the benefits escalator.”

He points in particular to a federal program known as Individual Unemployability, for which veterans become eligible when the government gives them a rating of 60 percent disabled or more. The program pays them as if they are 100 percent disabled, as long as they can show their disabilities keep them from maintaining “substantially gainful employment.”

The bump in benefits is substantial: Veterans getting $1,200 per month can receive up to $3,100 per month, as long as they do not work.

“From an economic standpoint, you would be crazy to get a job. It’s a trap,” Colonel Gade said.

At Fort Carson, he attempted to recruit people to test his alternative to that system. With funding from private donors, he hopes next year to give 100 participants $55,000 to use toward anything that will help them secure employment, such as equipment for a business, training or professional certification. The participants must agree not to increase their initial disability ratings or use the Individual Unemployability program during the trial.

Veterans in the group would get a 25 percent bonus on everything they earn up to $40,000, an incentive designed to push them into the work force. The program will also track 100 veterans that get only the bonus payments, and a control group of 100 that gets nothing.

“We are not taking away your benefits, but we don’t want you to ride the escalator,” Colonel Gade told his audience at Fort Carson.

It was difficult to know what the wounded soldiers thought, but some seemed receptive.

“The current system is just ‘Give me the money, who cares about anything else,’” a soldier from a military police unit told Colonel Gade. “Your idea says go out and work, be productive, feel good about yourself. There is where we do well. If we don’t have a mission, we don’t do well.”