Sponsors (184)
Prevents remarriage from terminating certain VA DIC, SBP annuity, and TRICARE dependent benefits and restores SBP payments in specified cases.
Official title: To amend titles 10 and 38, United States Code, to improve benefits and services for surviving spouses, and for other purposes.
Introduced February 5, 2025 by Richard Hudson · Last progress February 5, 2025
The bill restores and clarifies survivor pay and health benefits for many surviving spouses—improving financial security and access to care—at the cost of higher federal spending and short-term administrative burdens and delays.
Surviving spouses of veterans and service members (including those who remarried) will have monthly survivor payments (VA DIC and DoD SBP) restored or preserved, resuming payments for many who previously lost benefits.
Remarried widows and widowers whose later marriage ends will regain TRICARE eligibility, restoring health coverage and reducing out-of-pocket medical costs for those families.
Spouses who transferred SBP benefits to children under the 2019 rule will have annuity payments resumed sooner (first month after enactment), providing faster financial relief to that specific group.
Restoring and continuing survivor payments and expanding TRICARE eligibility increases federal benefit outlays across VA, DoD, and military health programs, which raises costs for taxpayers and pressures program budgets.
Implementing the changes will require statute renumbering, regulation updates, system changes, and processing of retroactive payments, creating short-term administrative costs, confusion, and possible delays in benefit delivery.
Expanding eligibility will increase TRICARE and provider administrative workload (verification, claims processing), which may cause short-term delays in care authorization or claims handling for beneficiaries and health systems.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Changes federal law so that a surviving spouse’s remarriage generally does not end eligibility for certain veterans and military survivor benefits. It preserves or restores Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC), Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP) annuities, and TRICARE dependent status for widows and widowers in specified circumstances. The bill amends VA and DoD statutes to (1) clarify that remarriage will not bar DIC or related VA benefits in specified sections, (2) prohibit termination of SBP annuity payments solely because a surviving spouse remarried if the service member died on active duty and require resumption of payments for some previously terminated recipients, and (3) expand TRICARE’s definition of “dependent” to include certain remarried widows/widowers whose later marriage ended by death, divorce, or annulment.