VA moves survivors’ help office, again, to make it easier to get benefits

The Veteran Affairs Department is aiming to improve the process by which survivors obtain their benefits by again moving an office designed to serve a central resource for information on those benefits. 

VA officials said in a statement Monday that they were moving the Office of Survivors Assistance from the Veterans Benefits Administration and back into the Office of the Secretary as part of efforts to reduce the bureaucracy faced by eligible survivors and dependents of deceased veterans and servicemembers. 

“The last thing survivors need in their time of grief is frustrating red tape and bureaucracy. That’s why we are creating a better system to more quickly and effectively provide survivors the services, support and compassion they’ve earned,” said VA Secretary Doug Collins, in a statement.

The OSA was established under the Veterans' Benefits Improvement Act of 2008, intended  as a hub to “to advise the Secretary on VA policies, programs, legislative issues, and other initiatives affecting the survivors and dependents of deceased veterans and members of the Armed Forces,” but has been moved within the department several times. 

Prior to the Biden administration moving the five-person office to the VBA in February 2021, where it first landed at the Office of Outreach, Transition and Economic Development before later moving to the Pension and Fiduciary Service June 2023, OSA was previously shifted from the secretary’s office to the Chief of Staff to the Veteran Experience Office.

The result led to most survivors not knowing that the office existed, said Candace Wheeler, senior director of government and legislative affairs for the nonprofit Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, before the House Veterans Affairs Committee testified in April 2024. 

“The frequent moves of OSA and its minimal staffing appear to the survivor community to reflect a less than full understanding of the comprehensive nature of their needs and willingness to support their access to the full range of care, benefits, and memorial services that they so desperately need at a most difficult time in their lives,” she said, noting that under the Pension and Fiduciary Service, OSA staff only had access to pension and Dependency and Indemnity Compensation records and no information about other benefits. 

“OSA appears not to have the authority and full range of case management coordination processes in place to ensure that they can help survivors access all of the care and memorial services available in other administrations within the VA,” she said.

The 2021 shift has led to pushback from some Republican lawmakers for distancing the OSA from the VA secretary’s office, including Rep. Juan Ciscomani, R-Ariz., who introduced the Prioritizing Veterans’ Survivors Act (H.R. 7100) in 2024 to move it back out of VBA. 

The bill passed the House by voice vote, but didn’t move forward in the Senate. Ciscomani reintroduced the legislation in February and it passed the House again in a 424-0 vote on April 9. 

Monday’s OSA move comes alongside other efforts described as a “three-pronged approach” to improve the benefits that includes establishing a “white-glove” survivor outreach team this month to help guide through the Dependency and Indemnity Compensation claims process alongside increasing automation within the claims process. 

House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Mike Bost, R-Ill., touted the VA’s move in a statement Monday. 

“It should go without saying that the grieving surviving families of our nation’s veterans should not have to comb through piles of paperwork by themselves just to get the benefits their veteran loved ones have earned,” he said.