Posted on: Monday, April 18, 2005

MILITARY UPDATE

By Tom Philpott

The Senate approved an amendment from Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., that rejects Bush administration plans to establish a two-tiered military death gratuity and to limit retroactive payment of $238,000 in enhanced death benefits only to families of members who die in combat assignments.

The Kerry amendment, approved by voice vote on Wednesday, would allow higher retroactive death payments for an additional 3,000 families, those who lost loved ones to noncombat-related accidents or illnesses since Oct. 7, 2001, the start of operations in Afghanistan.

The death benefit initiatives are part of the fiscal 2005 wartime emergency supplemental appropriations bill nearing final passage.

The House passed its version March 16. It would raise the $12,400 lump-sum death gratuity for next-of-kin to $100,000 and apply the increase retroactively to most active-duty deaths since fall of 2001.

It also would raise maximum coverage under Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance, from $250,000 to $400,000. That, too, would be paid retroactively for military deaths since Oct. 7, 2001, and also tied to "performance of duty," a term left to defense officials to interpret.

The Senate bill proposed identical increases but, as the administration recommended, it would restrict retroactive payments, and future payment of the $100,000 death gratuity, to deaths resulting from wounds, injuries or illnesses tied to combat or to service in a combat zone.

Military leaders and service associations urged the Senate to join the House in voting for a single death gratuity. But in a "statement of administration policy" last month, the Office of Management and Budget urged the House instead to get behind "the president's version" of the death gratuity "which specially honors those service members who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the Global War on Terrorism."

The House plan, OMB said, would cost up to $500 million more than the administration's death benefit package.

A Republican motion to table Kerry's amendment before it came to a vote lost 75-to-25, and 27 Republicans sided with Kerry.

The Senate also approved a second Kerry amendment to allow survivors of service members killed in action to stay in government quarters for up to a year, versus 180 days under current law.

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