04/21/2026
WARNING!!! LONG POST BUT YOU REALLY NEED TO READ IT!!!!
I want to talk about a bill in front of Congress. This bill is H.R. 6047. Read on…
H.R.6047– Sharri Briley and Eric Edmundson Veterans Benefits Expansion Act of 2026 (119th Congress)
On the surface, it supports Veterans—and in some ways, it does. It increases benefits for severely disabled (TBI) Veterans and surviving spouses. That’s a mission worth backing.
But here’s the catch: PayGo. To fund those increases, Congress offsets the cost elsewhere—and in this case, it’s coming from other Veterans.
The bill proposes:
• Tripling the VA Funding Fee on IRRRLs from 0.5% to 1.4%
o A $350K refinance jumps from $1,750 to $4,900 added to the loan
o Makes it harder to meet VA’s 36-month recoup rule (not considered in this bill but would now require ~0.625% rate drop vs. 0.5%)
o If we had a ~0.75% rate drop it could trigger over 300,000 new IRRRLs, meaning hundreds of thousands of Veterans paying this higher cost
• Doubling the funding fee on assumptions from 0.5% to 1%
o Weakens a key loss-mitigation tool for Veterans in financial hardship
• Expanding eligibility to Reserve/National Guard sooner at 90 days or the end of basic training
o But with a 1% higher funding fee than Active Duty if used early
Bottom line: this bill helps some Veterans—but by charging hundreds of thousands more to use their benefits.
So the real question is:
Should hundreds of thousands of Veterans foot the bill for a smaller group, or should Congress find another way to spread that cost across the broader public?
