Veterans shouldn’t have to worry about lawyers taking their benefits



I served in combat with the U.S. Army. Like many veterans, I know that men and women who come home carrying the physical and mental costs of war rely on disability payments to maintain mortgages and keep their families afloat. These funds help people rebuild lives that were permanently changed during their years of service and sacrifice.

Benefits are meant to help families recover from the physical and mental costs of war, yet they too often become a revenue stream for law firms that specialize in VA appeals.

Navigating the VA's disability system is rarely simple. Many veterans are already coping with serious injuries, mental health challenges, or financial stress as they transition back to civilian life. Confronting a complicated bureaucracy on top of that can feel like fighting another battle — which is why veterans should have access to a range of options for help.

The current system often leaves veterans with limited options, partly because when disability claims are delayed and pushed into drawn-out appeals, attorneys are allowed to collect a percentage of the veteran’s eventual award. The longer the process drags on, the larger the payout.

The Department of Veterans Affairs paid $394.7 million to accredited attorneys over the past year — money taken directly from veterans who fought to earn those benefits. The CHOICE Act (H.R. 3132) would help ensure that those benefits stay with the veterans who earned them, not the lawyers who see them as a payday.

Federal law limits attorney fees in most VA disability cases at 20% of a veteran’s backpay award. Those guardrails exist for a reason: Without them, veterans’ benefits risk becoming just another profit center for the litigation industry.

Organizations representing trial lawyers spend millions lobbying Congress each year on issues affecting litigation and attorney compensation. Veterans’ disability claims are no exception. When legislation like the CHOICE Act seeks to limit attorney fees and protect veterans’ benefits, the trial bar mobilizes to protect its financial interests.

This opposition raises a simple question: When the debate is about veterans’ benefits, whose side are these lobbyists really on?

Does increasing the share of benefits that go to legal fees serve those who wore the uniform?

Benefits are meant to help families recover from the physical and mental costs of war, yet they too often become a revenue stream for law firms that specialize in VA appeals.

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Veterans deserve strong advocates. The system should prioritize protecting them, not increasing the financial incentives tied to their benefits in an already strenuous process.

The complex VA benefits process can attract bad actors looking to profit from veterans navigating a complicated bureaucracy. Reputable companies that assist veterans with disability claims have been among the loudest voices calling for stronger oversight and clear rules to eliminate those abuses.

The CHOICE Act would establish guardrails that veterans deserve, including stronger consumer protections, limits on fees, and accountability for providers that violate the rules.

Congress must put veterans and their families first. The priority should not be filling trial lawyers’ deep pockets, but ensuring the system truly serves veterans’ best interests. When powerful lobbying organizations treat those benefits as a potential revenue opportunity, the system risks losing sight of whom it is meant to serve.

Our country made a promise: If you serve, and if service leaves you injured or disabled, the nation will stand behind you. The benefits belong to the veterans who earned them and not to the lawyers or lobbyists who see them as a revenue stream. Congress should pass the CHOICE Act and ensure those benefits serve the veterans they were meant for.

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MAHA is sick: RFK’s FDA is drifting the wrong way



If Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to be true to his word and “Make America Healthy Again,” he must reform the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Vinay Prasad, whose actions thwart medical freedom, endanger the unborn, and compromise patient choice, needs to go now, not at the end of April.

Prasad is a “Bernie Sanders acolyte” who “doesn’t think patients can be trusted to make their own healthcare decisions,” as Allysia Finley put it in the Wall Street Journal. Prasad disparages the 2018 right-to-try law, which give terminal patients access to experimental treatments, calling it “terrible” and “disingenuous,” written by people who “want to weaken the FDA.”

MAHA won’t survive as a slogan alone. Behind the facade of RFK’s rhetoric is an ideological agenda at odds with key conservative values.

Prasad claims that dying patients already have access to drugs through the FDA’s expanded-use programs and blames drug companies as the “major barrier” to unapproved drugs, downplaying the government’s role in blocking patient choice.

His personal crusade against faster drug approvals has chilled medical innovation. When Prasad originally resigned in July, months into his FDA tenure, amid backlash, the market predicted a shift toward a more patient-centric “right-to-try” approach, potentially cutting the bureaucratic red tape stifling cell and gene therapies and patient access.

Prasad’s pro-abortion record is even worse. He proudly identifies as “pro-choice” and progressive, a stance fundamentally at odds with pro-life conservatism. His appointment to the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research overseeing drug development that affects pregnant women and unborn children is a direct threat to the culture of life.

Prasad consistently casts abortion as a medical issue rather than a moral issue. He also fiercely defended mifepristone, the abortion pill, when a Texas judge tried to suspend its FDA approval. Prasad called the court’s intervention a “dangerous precedent,” and applauded the Supreme Court for preserving access to the drug, framing the issue purely as protecting “FDA authority” and “scientific integrity.” To pro-life voters, that posture reads less like neutrality and more like a commitment to keeping the abortion drug regime insulated from challenge.

Small-government promises are colliding with Prasad’s big-government dogma. Conservatives assumed RFK Jr. and his FDA appointees would shrink regulatory excess in support of President Trump’s innovation agenda, but they have done the opposite. Prasad came in with a “stringent regulatory mindset.” Rather than trusting patients to weigh risks for themselves, he has tightened the FDA’s grip with paternalistic, ideological rules. He has sidelined MAHA’s promise and expanded oversight instead.

Prasad’s policies have often expanded the FDA’s reach in ways that could seriously harm timely access to treatments. He is imposing tougher requirements on industry, insisting on larger trials and refusing to rely on surrogate endpoints for approvals, which means more delays and more red tape before new solutions can reach the public.

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Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images

The internal dynamics under Prasad reflect a top-down, bureaucratic rigidity and are under formal investigation, with the FDA retaining an outside investigator to examine workplace complaints alleging a toxic environment. Instead of signaling healthy reform, Prasad’s authoritarian rule of CBER is run on control and fear of pushback, where staff worry that dissent will be punished and experienced voices are pushed out or sidelined. Rather than “draining the swamp,” this approach fortified an insider bureaucracy loyal to Prasad’s agenda.

When the FDA held a meeting on a Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher drug, the voting members were top leaders like Prasad, not the scientists who reviewed the application. Career reviewers were excluded from the vote entirely, a major break from the FDA’s long-standing practice of empowering these staffers to make the final scientific call in order to shield approvals from political pressure.

The paradox for conservatives is obvious. Kennedy and Prasad earn plaudits for pulling back certain excesses, including scaling down aggressive vaccine promotion. Yet at the same time, they are building a larger, more controlling FDA bureaucracy in other domains — one that constricts medical freedom, slows innovation, and keeps pro-life concerns at arm’s length.

MAHA won’t survive as a slogan alone. Behind the facade of RFK’s rhetoric is an ideological agenda at odds with key conservative values. Conservatives who cherish medical freedom and rapid innovation find themselves at odds with Prasad’s FDA. A few welcome policy tweaks cannot obscure the reality of an expanding bureaucracy and pro-abortion policies.

With the 2026 midterms fast approaching, continuing this pattern will hurt Republicans and erode the trust of voters, handing Democrats an easy narrative about broken promises. Such an outcome would leave MAHA dead and MAGA mortally wounded. We must do better.

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FDA caution is starting to look like cruelty to sick kids



Biomedical research has produced extraordinary breakthroughs that have saved countless lives. But too many promising drugs now stall in federal review, and children with rare diseases are paying the price.

I’m a bioscientist. My work has focused on how healthy cells function and how that knowledge can be applied to therapeutic enzyme development. I’ve spent my career working inside the disciplines that move a treatment from lab bench to patient: protocol design, reproducibility, evidence standards, and layered human testing to ensure safety.

Is this simply bureaucracy doing what bureaucracy does? Or are rare pediatric therapies effectively facing a higher bar inside the system?

Standards, evidence, and process matter. But so does urgency.

Children with rare diseases do not live on regulatory timelines. They lose function month by month — speech, mobility, independence, even the ability to breathe on their own.

Of the more than 6,800 known rare diseases, about 70% begin in childhood. Better-known examples include Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Gaucher disease, and cystic fibrosis.

Developing therapies for these children is difficult, expensive, and slow even under the best conditions. Treatments such as Ultragenyx’s UX111 for Sanfilippo syndrome, Sarepta’s Elevidys for Duchenne, and Regenxbio’s RGX-121 for Hunter syndrome can take decades to develop, years to move through trials, and still more time to reach the children who need them.

That reality makes avoidable regulatory delay even harder to defend.

Too often, applications do not stall because the underlying science has failed. They stall over manufacturing or procedural concerns — in many cases, issues that are fixable and not directly tied to whether the therapy is clinically helping patients. Those delays can undermine the purpose of the FDA’s accelerated approval pathway, which exists to move critical treatments to patients faster while additional data is collected.

As a scientist, I was particularly troubled by the FDA’s recent rejection of a promising Hunter syndrome treatment and by yet another clinical hold placed on its development despite positive trial results.

That raises an uncomfortable question: Does the review process itself need review?

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The approval path for UX111 is another example. The therapy went through the rigorous biologics license application process, only to be delayed by a manufacturing hold.

Elevidys offers a similarly painful lesson. More than 1,200 Duchenne patients received the treatment over three years. Then, after two non-ambulatory patients (including one with underlying complications) tragically died, the FDA pulled the treatment from all patients, leaving families crushed and panicked.

Children are waiting too long for access to potentially life-changing therapies.

Yes, medical breakthroughs have increased. But so have regulatory burdens tied to approval and release. By the time many of these therapies reach the market, a decade or more has passed. In rare pediatric disease, that delay has a name: time children do not have.

Sometimes, it is their entire lifetime.

Manufacturing processes can be improved. Facilities can be upgraded. Paperwork can be corrected.

Lost neurons and muscle fibers cannot be replaced.

FDA leaders, along with Congress and the White House, should push for a smarter accelerated approval process — one that allows multiple requirements to be addressed simultaneously when appropriate, instead of serially dragging out timelines. If regulatory review had moved more efficiently, the Sanfilippo treatment might have cleared on its original 2025 approval timeline. Duchenne patients might not have lost access to the only available gene therapy. Hunter syndrome patients might not still be waiting.

This debate is not about abandoning safety or efficacy standards.

Ultragenyx has said manufacturing improvements are addressable and not directly related to product quality. Sarepeta responded to FDA concerns over Elevidys by requesting black-box warnings while allowing treatment to continue for ambulatory patients. In the RGX-121 Hunter syndrome case, the FDA rejected the use of a long-accepted biomarker (cerebrospinal fluid) used in the trial.

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These decisions do not help children with rare diseases. Timely, science-based approvals would.

And the stakes go beyond today’s patients. Regulatory efficiency also affects whether companies continue investing in rare-disease therapies at all. Orphan drug development requires major upfront investment, long timelines, and often poor financial returns. In many cases, these programs are closer to philanthropic science than blockbuster pharma economics.

When developers face repeated slowdowns across different diseases, sponsors, and technologies for reasons unrelated to core clinical safety or efficacy, the signal to the market is clear: Don’t take the risk.

That is how innovation gets smothered.

At some point, the pattern at the FDA becomes impossible to ignore. Is this simply bureaucracy doing what bureaucracy does? Or are rare pediatric therapies effectively facing a higher bar inside the system?

Those are scientific and ethical questions that deserve honest answers.

Accelerated approval does not mean lower standards. It means applying standards intelligently. It means allowing earlier access while confirming evidence continues to accumulate. It means recognizing that “wait and see” is not neutral. It is a choice that guarantees disease progression in children who cannot afford delay.

Good science and compassion are not competing values. We can maintain rigor and still act with urgency.

The FDA has the authority. The science is moving. The children cannot wait.

Accelerated approval is not cutting corners. It is using every tool we have to save time families do not have.

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Idaho is deep red. So why do leftist bureaucrats still run the show?



Idaho votes like a conservative juggernaut. Republicans hold the governor’s mansion, both legislative chambers, and every statewide office. Yet the administrative state still runs on autopilot, and progressives who never win at the ballot box keep their hands on levers of power.

Last week delivered a clean example. Estella Zamora, the 72-year-old vice president of the Idaho Human Rights Commission, lost her seat after Gov. Brad Little withdrew her reappointment. Progressive activists erupted. The press corps dutifully framed it as a purge. But the real scandal sits one step earlier: Little’s office initially recommended her for another term, as if nobody bothered to look.

President Trump’s ‘drain the swamp’ mandate doesn’t end at Maryland and Virginia’s borders. It reaches every state capital where permanent bureaucrats ignore the electorate.

That rubber-stamp culture explains how red-state voters keep getting blue-state governance.

Zamora held influence for more than three decades. She didn’t win it from voters. She inherited it from the system. A Democratic governor appointed her in the 1990s. Republican administrations kept renewing her anyway, term after term, until she became another “untouchable” fixture inside Idaho’s bureaucracy.

Only public pressure forced movement. Conservative activists and outlets like the Gem State Chronicle, along with our own program, Idaho Signal, highlighted Zamora’s political activism online. She appeared before the Senate State Affairs Committee on Jan. 28 as part of the reappointment process. Lawmakers asked questions. The public noticed. Little reversed course a few days later.

Little made the right call in the end. The process that led to the near-miss should worry every Idaho voter.

Zamora didn’t simply hold personal opinions. She couldn’t resist using her public platform to attack Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency charged with enforcing federal immigration law. Her posts pushed anti-ICE propaganda, circulated protest material, and condemned enforcement operations as “harmful.” She aligned herself with the activist line that treats border enforcement as a moral offense.

Idaho doesn’t need every commissioner to share the governor’s politics. Idaho does need commissioners who can credibly carry out their duties without turning a state post into a political megaphone. A human rights commission depends on public confidence. Activism that signals contempt for lawful enforcement undermines that confidence.

This isn’t a free-speech dispute. Zamora can say whatever she wants as a private citizen. Voters can judge it. Officials must still decide whether that behavior fits a role that demands impartiality and restraint.

Progressives are already shouting “censorship” and “partisan purge.” They’re portraying Zamora as some saintly Latina icon victimized for speaking out. That rhetoric flips the facts. Nobody owes a lifetime appointment to someone who campaigns against the policies Idaho voters repeatedly choose in overwhelming numbers at the ballot box. Public service carries conditions. When the public loses trust, leaders should act.

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Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

The greater lesson extends beyond Zamora.

Idaho’s bureaucracy keeps reappointing the same figures because too many Republican offices treat commissions and boards as background noise. Staffers recycle names. Vetting becomes procedural. Appointments become habit. Progressives understand this weakness, so they play the long game: They entrench themselves in institutions that outlast elections.

That pattern repeats across the country. Red states elect Republican leaders. Agencies keep advancing progressive priorities through regulation, enforcement discretion, and institutional culture. The left loses elections and wins governance anyway.

Republican governors and legislators can’t keep solving this problem only after activists force their hand. They should audit commissions and boards, review reappointments with real scrutiny, and replace partisan operatives with people who respect the mission and the law without bias and without apology.

President Trump’s “drain the swamp” mandate doesn’t end at the Maryland and Virginia borders. It reaches every state capital where permanent bureaucrats ignore the electorate and treat public posts as ideological turf.

Idaho voters spoke loudly. The administrative state had better listen because we’re just getting started.

'Impossible to deal with': Pete Hegseth reveals the real culprit behind defense contractor delays



War Secretary Pete Hegseth has made it his mission to slash through red tape and streamline defense production. But in order to do that, Hegseth says the Pentagon needs to take a look in the mirror.

Blaze News traveled with Hegseth as he visited defense contractors like Anduril and General Dynamics during his "Arsenal of Freedom" tour Monday, hammering the importance of overcoming burdensome production delays. In order to embolden the hardworking men and women who build America's arsenal, Hegseth told Blaze News the Pentagon needs to take the first step.

'There's mazes of requirements.'

"A lot of the hang-up has been us," Hegseth told Blaze News. "So we've got to look at ourselves first. The way we do business — we've been impossible to deal with."

"A bad customer who, year after year, changes our mind about what we want or what we don't want, and then we make little, small technological changes, which makes it more difficult for them to produce what they need to produce on time. So we have to fix our own house first: provide clarity, simplify the system, allow more people to access it, give that steady demand signal."

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NEW: Hegseth tells me the real reason why there are massive production delays in the defense industry: “A lot of the hang up has been us.”

“The way we do business, we’ve been impossible to deal with.” @theblaze pic.twitter.com/hv87VWMHw6
— Rebeka Zeljko (@rebekazeljko) February 9, 2026

Whether it's building warships or acquiring the latest technologies for autonomous underwater vehicles, Hegseth acknowledged how often these projects often fall far behind schedule and go way over budget. In an attempt to combat this, Hegseth noted several DOW deals with defense companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin that facilitate investment because "they know we're going to be buying in the future."

"That's groundbreaking stuff. Our department's never done that. ... That's just good business. We haven't operated ... that way before."

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Over 2,000 workers at General Dynamics cheer “USA” in anticipation of Sec. Hegseth’s arrival. @theblaze

“We build the apex predator.” pic.twitter.com/63v2vvuFHq
— Rebeka Zeljko (@rebekazeljko) February 9, 2026

Like all other government agencies, Hegseth also pointed to bureaucracy and regulations as major hindrances for these defense companies.

"There's mazes of requirements that this department has traditionally put on different systems and platforms that are impossible to navigate, and by the time you navigate them, you're five years behind the actual technology," Hegseth told Blaze News.

"We're going to companies and saying tell us what you can do based on the parameters of what kind of capabilities we're looking for. ... Let's tailor it accordingly."

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Board-certified in what?!



Bureaucracy is where accountability gets diluted and common sense is quietly asked to wait outside for safety reasons.

You can usually spot it by the signs. Laminated, taped, stacked one on top of another, each announcing a rule that probably once made sense

Arrows point in conflicting directions. Doors are locked “temporarily,” which often means indefinitely. A desk sits between you and the thing you actually need, staffed by someone whose job is to make sure you don’t get there the wrong way.

We may not be able to change systems or bureaucrats, but we can change how they hook us into drama.

Hospitals are particularly good at this.

Clipboards multiply. Protocols overlap. Nobody is quite in charge, but everyone is certain about what you’re not allowed to do. Hospitals tend to amplify a familiar human impulse: gathering in herds, exchanging judgment for the illusion of safety.

Caregivers encounter this constantly. Not because we seek it out, but because care requires proximity to systems that prize procedure over discernment. By the time we reach the desk, our tension is already high and our patience nearly gone.

I found myself at a large teaching hospital with my wife, Gracie, as she prepared for a nine-hour surgery. We were staying with friends nearby. She had already been admitted, and the surgeon was clear about where I needed to enter so I could be with her in pre-op before they took her to surgery.

By now, most surgeons recognize that I’m not new to this. Forty years of caregiving tends to cure naïveté. I can follow the jargon, ask informed questions, and handle graphic medical realities without flinching. That familiarity earns a certain trust once you reach pre-op, recovery units, or the ICU.

The problem is getting there.

Between the parking lot and the patient lies a layered world of desks, checkpoints, screens, and policies, staffed by people who don’t know your history and aren’t allowed to consider it.

Which is how I found myself there with Gracie during her surgery, in the middle of COVID, a season I’ve come to think of as the high holy days of bureaucracy.

It was bitterly cold that morning in Denver. Montana cold I can handle. Denver cold is another matter. I had already made the long walk from the parking area to the emergency room and was not eager to be sent back outside to circle the hospital again in the frigid early morning.

At the ER security desk, I gave my wife’s name and said, “I’m here for her operation.”

The guard checked the screen and said, “You have to use the front entrance.”

“It’s closed,” I replied. “The surgeon directed me here.”

“You have to use the front entrance.”

I tried again, slower.

Same result.

So I asked, politely, “Ma’am, where did I lose you?”

She repeated herself.

Years ago, this is where I would have argued. Quoted instructions. Asked for a supervisor. Escalated things just enough to feel righteous while accomplishing nothing and raising my blood pressure.

Decades of caregiving taught me that nothing useful is changed that way.

So instead of arguing, I chose a different response. I met immovable force with irreverent restraint.

Since I have a full head of white hair, and with great hair comes great responsibility, I adopted my best Leslie Nielsen deadpan and said calmly, “Ma’am, I’m board-certified in cranial proctology. They’re waiting for me in pre-op.”

She blinked.

Her eyes widened.

She waved me through.

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Cienples / Getty Images

It later occurred to me that my last name may have served as the exclamation mark on the credentials I had just fabricated. Even nonsense, it seems, benefits from proper punctuation.

I arrived in pre-op on time, smiling to myself.

For the record, cranial proctology is not a recognized medical specialty, except perhaps in Washington, D.C., where demand appears chronic and widespread across multiple government buildings. My services, though sorely needed, remain unofficial.

Caregivers live with enough real emergencies. We don’t need to manufacture new ones by turning every bureaucratic impasse into a confrontation. We may not be able to change systems or bureaucrats, but we can change how they hook us into drama.

Not every obstacle deserves a skirmish. Some require restraint, a straight face, and conserving energy for what actually matters.

A little humor, a lot of deadpan, and the ability to avoid getting pulled into someone else’s craziness go a long way toward living a calmer life as a caregiver.

Maybe I’ll give it a try at the post office next.

Or, God help us all, the TSA.