The Budget Isn’t Neutral
What the CBO deficit options quietly signal for veterans, caregivers, and surviving spouses
(Analysis of: Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2025 to 2034 by the Congressional Budget Office in December 2024, https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-12/60557-budget-options.pdf )
Every year, federal budget conversations promise responsibility, sustainability, and tough choices.
What they rarely promise is honesty about who absorbs those choices.
The Congressional Budget Office’s report, Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2025 to 2034, is not a set of recommendations. It is a catalog of possibilities. A menu. A fiscal thought exercise.
But menus matter. Because once something appears on a menu, it becomes politically imaginable.
And buried inside this report are multiple options that would significantly affect veterans, military families, caregivers, and surviving spouses.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. But steadily, structurally, and in ways that shift burden away from government systems and onto individual households.
That distinction matters.
Because military and veteran families already carry more invisible labor than most policy models account for.
Health care eligibility changes that shift responsibility to families
One option examined in the report would restrict VA health care enrollment for certain veterans without service connected disabilities or with higher incomes.
On paper, that looks like a targeted cost control.
In practice, it creates ripple effects:
• Veterans lose predictable access to coordinated care
• Families must navigate fragmented civilian systems
• Caregivers absorb scheduling, advocacy, and transportation burdens
• Household health expenses become less stable
When access narrows, responsibility does not disappear. It relocates. Usually into the home.
For caregivers and surviving spouses, especially those already managing complex medical histories tied to service, reduced access increases emotional strain and financial uncertainty.
Disability compensation proposals that affect survivor stability
The report explores options such as means testing disability compensation, taxing benefits, or slowing benefit growth.
These ideas often get framed as fairness adjustments or fiscal necessity. What they rarely get framed as is a destabilization of the financial foundation many families rely on before loss occurs.
Disability compensation is not just income. It is often the bridge that allows:
• Reduced work hours for caregiving
• Stability during medical decline
• Access to transportation and adaptive needs
• Financial survivability after death
When that foundation weakens, surviving spouses inherit the consequences long before they ever receive survivor benefits.
This is not theoretical. Financial erosion during illness frequently determines long term survivor stability.
TRICARE cost sharing and the quiet impact on surviving spouses
Several options consider increasing TRICARE enrollment fees or cost sharing.
For retirees, this represents higher health expenses. For surviving spouses, it represents something more complicated.
Health coverage after loss is already a landscape of transitions, eligibility timelines, and financial recalibration. Increased TRICARE costs create additional pressure during a period when income often decreases while medical needs remain high.
The policy discussion focuses on savings.
The lived experience looks like delayed care, postponed prescriptions, or difficult decisions between financial security and medical continuity.
Retirement and COLA adjustments that compound over time
Some proposals involve slowing cost of living adjustments or modifying retirement benefit growth.
Small percentage changes sound minor in budget language. Over time, they accumulate into meaningful loss of purchasing power.
That matters for surviving spouses dependent on:
• Survivor Benefit Plan payments
• Fixed retirement income
• Inflation sensitive health and housing expenses
The impact is gradual. That makes it easier to overlook and harder for families to recover from.
Housing allowance changes and the downstream effect on survivorship
Options to reduce the percentage of housing costs covered by military housing allowances primarily affect active duty families.
But survivorship is not a moment. It is a trajectory.
When service families are forced to absorb more housing cost during service, they save less, accumulate more debt, and enter transition periods with fewer resources.
That financial vulnerability does not disappear after death. It often becomes the surviving spouse’s starting point.
Budget discussions rarely connect those timelines. Families live them as one continuous story.
Caregiver impact that rarely appears in fiscal scoring
Caregiver programs are not directly targeted in the report.
Yet almost every option described increases reliance on unpaid caregiving labor.
Reduced health access means more home coordination. Financial strain means fewer external supports. Coverage changes mean more advocacy and navigation work done by family members.
Caregiving is not free. It is simply unaccounted for.
And when policy shifts responsibilities without recognizing that labor, caregivers become the silent deficit reduction mechanism.
Recruitment, retention, and trust
Budget options that reduce compensation growth, housing support, or benefit predictability also affect trust.
Service is built on an expectation that sacrifice will be matched by stability for families. When benefits appear uncertain, that trust erodes.
Recruitment and retention conversations often focus on pay tables or bonuses. Families evaluate stability, survivorship protections, and whether the system will still be there when the hardest moments arrive.
Budget signals matter even when policies are not enacted.
The larger truth: savings often become private costs
None of the options in the report are official policy.
But collectively they reflect a recurring strategy. Reduce federal expenditures by transferring risk and cost to individual households.
For many communities, that shift is difficult.
For military and veteran families, who already operate within a system of mobility, uncertainty, and service connected health risks, it can be destabilizing.
Surviving spouses understand this reality more clearly than most. The consequences of policy decisions made years earlier often arrive fully formed during the most vulnerable chapters of life.
Why engagement matters now
Budget conversations can feel abstract and distant.
They are not.
The language used today shapes the policies debated tomorrow. Silence allows complex trade offs to become simplified narratives about efficiency without acknowledgment of family impact.
Veterans, caregivers, and surviving spouses bring critical perspective to these conversations. Not to resist fiscal responsibility, but to ensure that responsibility does not quietly become family burden.
Deficit reduction is a legitimate goal.
But it should never rely on invisible sacrifice from those who have already given more than most.
