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@RobGouveiaEsq
Rob,
My name is Mike Bski. Army combat medic. Twenty-three years. Iraq. Medically retired, one hundred percent disabled. I teach high school science in Northeast Ohio now because I have four kids and a mortgage and apparently I like eating, so here we are.
I watch your show because it's about accountability. The government doing what it wants and hoping nobody notices. Well. I need you to notice something, because it has been six years and most of America still has no idea this is happening.
One thing before I get into the policy. Veterans kill themselves at a rate roughly one and a half times higher than the civilian population. The financially destroyed, medically retired combat veteran — the one who just watched years of earned retirement evaporate while his wife had to quit her job to become his caregiver — is exactly that profile. This is not just a budget fight. People are dying while Congress stalls.
Here's the short version.
When a service member enlists, there's a deal. Serve twenty years and you collect a military retirement — 2.5% of base pay for every year you put in. You also have a completely separate promise on the table: if you're injured in the government's service, you'll receive VA disability compensation for that injury. Two promises. Separate. For separate things.
Now. A soldier hits eighteen years. Multiple combat deployments. An IED. Or burn pit cancer — and there are tens of thousands of guys with exactly that story. His body is done. The Army medically retires him. Not his choice. He gets rated 100% disabled by the VA.
What happens next is the part I need you to put on your show.
The government subtracts his disability payment from his retirement, dollar for dollar. If his eighteen-year retirement is around eighteen hundred dollars a month and his VA disability runs about thirty-seven hundred, the retirement gets zeroed out entirely. The man who gave eighteen years — who got blown up, or who breathed whatever poison was coming out of those burn pits — receives zero dollars from his military retirement. Not less. Zero. Eighteen years. Gone.
And here's the part that should set off every alarm bell in your accountability brain: Congress already fixed this exact problem for twenty-year retirees back in 2004. They get both. Full retirement, full disability, no offset. The only veterans still getting their retirement clawed back are the ones the government broke before they could reach that twenty-year mark. Think about that for a second. The government injured them badly enough to end their careers early, and then penalized them for not completing the career the government cut short.
That is the story. Fifty-two thousand veterans. Losing twelve hundred to nineteen hundred dollars a month. For life.
The bill to fix it is called the Major Richard Star Act — H.R. 2102, S. 1032, now sitting as S.Amdt.4056. CBO-certified cost: $9.75 billion over TEN years. Not per year. Ten years. It is the most cosponsored bill in Congress right now. Seventy-six senators. Over three hundred House members. Both parties. The votes exist.
One senator won't let it come to a vote.
Roger Wicker. Mississippi. Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He controls what gets scheduled, what gets a hearing, what dies quietly in committee without the public ever knowing. And he has used every bit of that power to make sure this bill never reaches the floor.
October 8, 2025, Senator Blumenthal asked for unanimous consent to bring it up. Wicker objected. One word. Bill dies for the fourth consecutive Congress. The NEXT DAY — not a week later, not a month later, the very next day — Wicker voted yes on a $924.7 billion defense authorization bill.
Nine hundred and twenty-four billion dollars. In twenty-four hours. For defense.
Eight hundred million a year to stop stealing retirement pay from wounded veterans? Can't do it. Too expensive.
That's not a fiscal argument, Rob. That's what you'd call on your show when a prosecutor argues one thing in court and does the exact opposite in the next case. You have a word for that. Several of them.
Oh, and he told the Senate floor the bill costs ten billion dollars a year. The CBO says $9.75 billion over ten years. He was a cosponsor in 2021. He knew the real number. He said a different one anyway, under his own name, on the record, in the United States Senate.
This is your show. This is accountability. This is a senator misrepresenting a CBO score on the floor to justify blocking the most popular bipartisan bill in Washington. And nobody is covering it like it deserves.
You covered the Epstein discharge petition. You know exactly how that process works. There is one right now for the Major Richard Star Act — H.Res. 1247 — that would bypass Wicker and force a floor vote. It needs House members to sign. It needs people like you to make enough noise that they do.
The bill is named after Major Richard Star. Army combat engineer, Ohio. Burn pit cancer, stage four. Medically retired just short of twenty years. While he was dying, while he was on oxygen, traveling to testify because he couldn't hardly stand — the government was taking back part of his retirement check. He died February 2021 at fifty-one years old and never saw it pass.
His wife Tonya quit her job to care for him. She kept pushing after he died. She kept pushing until she passed too.
I keep thinking about your show's mission. Defending the American people from a corrupt government. Accountability. Transparency. Here's a senator who co-sponsored this bill, then blocked it, misquoted the price to justify it, and voted for a trillion dollars in spending the next morning. That is the story. Fifty-two thousand veterans are the victims. And the mechanism killing it is a committee chair who won't put it on a calendar.
Watch that watcher.
I'm happy to come on if you want to walk through the numbers. All of them. I'm a science teacher and a former Army NCO — I actually read the CBO score, line by line, and I can explain exactly where Wicker's math falls apart. You were a wrestler. You know what it looks like when someone is stalling instead of engaging. That's what Wicker is doing, and I can prove it with his own voting record.
Reach out at @BskiMike22802
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