TAPS tells House panel delays to Chapter 35 payments imposed ‘lifeline’ harms; urges permanent hotline and essential designation for processors
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Summary
TAPS told the House subcommittee survivors and dependents faced severe financial and academic harms from fall‑semester payment delays and recommended making the GI Bill hotline essential, designating education claims processors as essential, resuming stakeholder calls and avoiding academic‑term rollouts.
Ashlyn Haycock Lohman, director of government and legislative affairs for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), told the subcommittee that Chapter 35 education payments delayed this fall had immediate, concrete harms for dependent survivors and their families. TAPS staff and members reported students missing tuition deadlines, families accruing debt and students forced to take extra work shifts rather than attend classes.
Haycock Lohman described how TAPS learned of the scale of the problem from beneficiaries and schools rather than from VA briefings. She said VA initially informed Congress in September of a much smaller problem, and that by mid‑October more than 75,000 Chapter 35 beneficiaries had not received a payment; TAPS told the committee a total of 168,000 fall‑semester beneficiary payments were delayed at some point. TAPS also said the GI Bill hotline and stakeholder calls were not available in the way beneficiaries and VSOs needed during the lapse in appropriations and called on VA to restore and make those communications permanent.
TAPS recommended five specific actions to prevent recurrence: make the GI Bill hotline an essential service during any future government shutdown; designate education claims processors as essential; resume monthly stakeholder calls and briefings; create IT rollout plans that avoid the start of academic terms; and publicly share rigorous testing and rollout plans with VSOs and stakeholders. Haycock Lohman said TAPS worked directly with committee staff and schools to triage hardship cases and credited committee intervention for many immediate fixes.
Committee members pressed TAPS about whether schools had actually disenrolled students because of missed payments; TAPS said it did not have verified reports of final disenrollments after advocacy and casework but described many threats and urgent cases that were averted through outreach. Members also discussed the limits of existing statutory protections that Congress had previously enacted to prevent students from being penalized for delayed payments, and agreed to pursue further VSO testimony in follow‑up oversight.
TAPS’s testimony framed the delays as not merely administrative but as a direct, measurable economic hardship for a young and often financially vulnerable beneficiary cohort; lawmakers asked VA to increase transparency and to work more closely with VSOs on communications and contingency planning.
