About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

1 Use of the Post-9/11 GI Bill by the National Guard and Reserves 1 (December 13, 2019)

handle is hein.congrec/cbopgibl0001 and id is 1 raw text is: ~DECEMBER 2019 Use of the Post-9/11 GI Bill by the National Guard and Reserves Summary The Post-9/11 GI Bill provides educational benefits to service members and veterans who served on active duty on or after September 11, 2001. This GI Bill (officially the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008), which covers tuition, fees, housing, and related educational expenses, is managed by the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), part of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Partial benefits are available after 90 days of active-duty service, and many members of the National Guard and reserves have met that threshold because they have been activated for extended periods in support of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those with longer active-duty service receive greater benefits. Scope of This Report This report focuses on the reserve component's use of Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits in 2016 and the cost of those benefits. (Throughout this report, reserve component refers collectively to the non-active-duty part of the U.S. military, which encompasses the National Guard and reserves.) In 2016, about 78,500 members of the reserve component used the program, and the total cost to VBA for those benefits was about $1 billon. About half of that amount was for tuition and fees; most of the remainder was for housing allowances. The cost of providing education benefits to the reserve component under the Post-9/11 GI Bill is higher than it was under earlier laws. Whereas the Montgomery GI Bill-Selected Reserve pro- gram and the Reserve Educational Assistance Program (REAP) have been available only to members of the reserve component, the Post-9/11 GI Bill may be used by both the reserve and regular components. The report compares the way members of the reserve and regular components use their benefits.1 CBO's Findings Overall, there were few variations in how members of the reserve component and other veterans used their benefits, but there was a difference in how much those benefits cost. Spending on veterans from the regular component was higher on average, mainly because most of them were eligible for full benefits, whereas members from the reserve component were more likely to qualify for 1. In an earlier report, the Congressional Budget Office examined use of Post-9/1 1 GI Bill benefits by all veterans (including members of the reserve component) and their eligible dependents. See Congressional Budget Office, The Post-9/11 GI Bill: Beneficiaries, Choices, and Cost (May 2019), www.cbo.gov/ publication/55 179. Notes: All years referred to in this report are federal fiscal years, which run from October 1 to September 30 and are designated by the calendar year in which they end. Unless otherwise specified, all dollar values are expressed in 2018 dollars; to remove the effects of inflation, the Congressional Budget Office adjusted the dollar values with the Bureau of Economic Analysis's gross domestic product price index. This report uses the terms spending and payments to refer to outlays, which are payments by the federal government to meet a legal obligation. Outlays may be made for obligations incurred in a prior fiscal year or in the current year. Numbers in the text and tables may not add up to totals because of rounding.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most