is tragic to delve into the degrading circumstances facing widows of servicemen who have given their lives for this country. The Veterans' Administration study cited that 37 percent of all widows surveyed could not afford all the food they needed. Evictions are mounting as apartments are turning into condominiums. Medical care is becoming nonexistent for them as health service in the Armed Forces is curtailed. All together, these facts denote a program clearly inadequate to allow widows to live their lives with dignity. The Defense Manpower Commission Report of April 1976 stated: As a matter of priority, the proposed Federal Commission Board should investigate and recommend remedial legislation for widows of servicemen who received little or no benefits. The Nation has acknowledged a debt to these widows through enactment of the survivor benefit plan legislation. It is considered unseemly that the lamentable plight of these fine people should continue to be ignored. The dependency and indemnity compensation for a service-connected death ranges from $260 a month if the husband was a private, airman, or recruit in pay grade E-1, up to $664 a month if the husband was an admiral or general in pay grade O-10. The longer a careerman remains in the Armed Forces, the lower is the survivor benefit ratio to earned retired pay. Years of service certainly should be reflected in the surviving family's benefit, particularly if the deceased serviceman was in the category eligible for retirement pay. In this regard, in computing VA pensions and death compensation, if a man had 90 days of service, the same formula for a VA pension or DIC is used for his widow's benefit as for the widow of a man with 40 years of service. Civil service or Congress certainly do not predicate their retirement and survivor benefit systems on such a formula; in fact, we cannot find any other program that does penalize the survivors in this unfortunate way. Before the All-Volunteer Armed Forces pay adjustment, the salaries and retirement annuities for military personnel were incompatible with pay in nonmilitary occupations requiring comparable prerequisites, as shown in the Department of Labor's Occupational Handbook. By using present RMC and retirement annuities, regardless of when military career service was performed, equal years of service will provide an equal survivor benefit. In our opinion, this would be the most practical way to make restitution and correct the longstanding discrimination against dependent survivors of military professionals in Federal service. A DIC widow who lost her husband after September 21, 1972, and whose husband died on active duty but was eligible for retirement at the time of death, is covered by a provision of the survivor benefit plan (SBP). She is entitled to 55 percent of the serviceman's retired pay as of the date of death, despite the fact that the serviceman had taken no reductions in pay to provide such coverage. This provision takes care of current widows, but it is discriminatory against the widow who lost her husband before September 21, 1972. Take a case in point: The widow who lost her husband on September 20, 1972, receives DIC in the amount of $423 a month; her counterpart, whose husband died on September 21, 1972, receives DIC and SBP in the amount of $718 a month. Also, she is able to remarry after age 60 and still receive 55 percent of the retirement pay. There is no justification for arbitrarily setting September 21, 1972 as the beginning date of the 55-percent annuity. The Vietnam era did not start on that day, nor did post-1972 widows lose more than the widows of earlier years who were tragically robbed of husbands and condemned to be "forgotten" and to live lives of deprivation. I bring this to your attention to illustrate the many problems which confront military widows and the fragmentation of the many programs in terms of responsible Federal agencies and congressional committee jurisdiction. My primary purpose in appearing before you today is to emphasize the inadequacies of the DIC program, particularly as it applies to the widows of men with long years of service to their country. In my opinion, the survivors of these men also deserve consideration as veterans. Additionally, the benefits paid to these widows are particularly low in comparison with the payments available to widows of career civil service employees who die in the line of active duty. Their reinstatement of widow's DIC payments are terminated by remarriage at age 60. There are widows in this age bracket who would probably marry. They deserve to keep their annuity and not be forced to live in sin, as social security and civil service and other pension programs have perceived. That pension as the pre-1972 member remarries, according to DIC, all benefits stop; if she is a post-1972 widow, the survivor's benefits increases to the full 55 percent. In 1958, Congress passed legislation to include all surviving widows of civil service personnel who died before the 1948 survivor protection plan became law. Yet a comparable measure has not been enacted for widows of military personnel who died before September 21, 1972. The Department of Defense has estimated that there are 21,600 widows of members who died on active duty prior to 1972, retirement eligible, and the cost factor is $18,748 million. In view of our Nation's gross national product, pre-1972 widows deserve equity with the post1972 widows to correct long denied justice, and to alleviate the widows' dire economic circumstances, resulting from high inflation and the unending rise in the cost of life's basic necessities. Very briefly, I'd like to go over the situation of the minimum income widow. Many of these widows have been denied a VA pension. Denial is based on income restrictions in the VA's pension law for nonservice connected deaths, regardless of career service years. The widow's pension formula, based on the "need test" is the same for a husband with 90 days of service as for 40 years of career service in several wars, regardless of salary and pay grade. Certain widows receive a non-service-connected death pension varying from $5 to $125 a month if their personal income is below the 1972 poverty level of $2,700 a year, a figure $100 a month below the current national poverty level. There is an erroneous assumption made that all military widows are rich. For instance, a widow of the Spanish-American War careerman receives no more than $70 to $75 a month with no cost-of-living increase. This can scarcely be considered rich. The most severely penalized widows on VA rolls are the elderly and disabled survivors who cannot supplement their modest incomes by gainful employment. Inflation and conflicting law have reduced these unfortunates to a life of perilous insecurity. It is forgotten that pay was incredibly low for the military in the past, that there were children to educate, perhaps an aged parent to support, and the expense of moving from pillar to post constantly. Standards used in private industry and in the civil service do not apply to the military service, despite the fact that military personnel and civil service personnel are paid and administered by the same U.S. Government. Both are Federal employees in every sense of the term. In accordance with our equitable system of justice, it logically follows that the same personnel criteria should apply to all categories of Federal employees, be they civilian or military personnel. In 1958, the Civil Service Retirement and Pensions System included their pre-1948 widows in their survivor plan, the FEČA. The military widows have been denied the same treatment under survivor benefit plan of 1972; again, an arbitrary distinction between civilian and military service, where no actual distinction exists. The widow receiving a VA pension, in addition to being subjected to a shockingly low annuity, is faced with losing all or part of it when she becomes eligible for social security. Under the present system of VA pensions, when a widow reaches 62 or 65 and applies for social security, 90 percent of her social secruity payment is deducted from her VA check. This offset applies even if the social security is the widow's own earned payment, totally unrelated to her husband's income. We feel that social security is a separate system from survivor benefits and should have no effect on the payments of those benefits. We know of no other system, including civil service, in which retirement payments and social security are interrelated. VA pensions, like all other pensions, should be adjusted semiannually for cost-of-living increases; they should not be decreased or eliminated by social security offsets; and they should consider length of service. Again, a VA pension is a Federal pension and should be administered in the same way as any other Federal program. It is our desire that the inequities be corrected by including all widows of military careermen who died before September 21, 1972, in the survivor benefit program. For the first time, Mr. Chairman, we have facts and figures for you. This has been one of the big drawbacks in the past, that they could not arrive at the cost factor due to the inability of ascertaining the number of widows-now we have a DOD estimate of numbers and cost to go forward and work on. In the packet I will give to you we do have the facts for you now, based on Department of Defense figures. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for giving us this opportunity to present our grievances and to offer our well-considered recommendations for alleviating serious and unjust hardships. We will be pleased to answer any questions you may have to the best of our ability. Thank you. [Subsequently, the Society of Military Widows submitted the following information:] |