The reason this door exists
How the program is written down decides whether a veteran keeps their compensation
Not how strict it is. Not how long it lasts. How it is characterized on paper. Two programs can be identical in every practical respect — same building, same locked doors, same curriculum, same length — and one of them cuts a fully rated veteran's monthly income to the ten percent rate while the other leaves it untouched.
The authority is 38 U.S.C. 5313 and 38 C.F.R. 3.665. It turns on two things: whether there was a conviction, and whether the place is a penal institution.
Signature
The passage
What the cut is worth
Put your own numbers on it
The exact dollar figures depend on the current VA rate table, which this build does not carry — an invented rate would misstate a veteran's income. Enter what you know and the arithmetic runs.
Look this up on the current VA rate table and enter it. It is a research-queue item in this build.
Build on what exists
Veterans treatment courts are already the gate
The first one opened in Buffalo, New York in January 2008 under Judge Robert T. Russell. It exists because of a single afternoon: Russell had a veteran on his mental health docket who would not accept help, and out of exasperation he asked two veterans on his own staff to talk to him in the hallway, vet to vet. They talked for over an hour. The man came back into the courtroom standing straighter and accepted treatment.
That is the whole model. Everything else — the docket, the plan, the supervision — is ordinary treatment court machinery. The peer mentor is the active ingredient, and it is the one component a general drug court cannot supply.
What HOMEPORT adds at the gate
- Mentor assigned at intake, not after assessment. The Buffalo story happened before any treatment plan existed.
- Screen for what is underneath. Substance use is frequently the presenting problem and rarely the whole one.
- Confirm discharge characterization and VA eligibility before placement. It determines who can treat the veteran and where.
- Write the legal characterization of every later phase down at the gate. That is the compensation decision, and it is easiest to make correctly before anyone has been placed anywhere.
A gate to reject
Combat-nexus eligibility screens out the people most likely to need this
A number of veterans treatment courts follow the Buffalo model of admitting only veterans whose criminal behavior arose from TBI, mental illness, or PTSD incurred in a combat zone or hazardous duty area.
That test excludes veterans who never deployed, veterans whose condition is not formally service-connected, and veterans with administrative or other-than-honorable discharges — who are, on the separation risk data, among the highest-risk groups there are. HOMEPORT takes the same position STANDFAST takes on discharge status: service is the eligibility criterion. Not the nexus, not the characterization, not the deployment record.
Same four phases
What changes at each station
HOMEPORT does not replace the DRYDOCK phases. It runs alongside them and adds what the general track cannot see.
Veterans Crisis Line Dial 988, then press 1 Free, confidential, 24 hours. You do not need to be enrolled in VA care.
The clinical case for a separate track
Treating the substance alone treats the smaller half
More than one in ten veterans has a diagnosed substance use disorder. Among veterans entering treatment, 65% name alcohol as the substance they most frequently misuse — almost double the general population rate, and a direct argument for the alcohol-first-class position DRYDOCK already takes.
63% of Afghanistan and Iraq War veterans diagnosed with a substance use disorder also met criteria for PTSD. A pipeline that removes the substance and leaves the service-connected condition in place has not finished. It has produced a sober veteran with untreated PTSD and a much shorter distance back to using.
Where the veteran track diverges clinically
- Concurrent, not sequential. The service-connected condition is treated alongside the substance use, not after it.
- VA is the treating system where eligibility allows — which is another reason placement characterization matters, since VA is restricted from providing hospital and outpatient care to an inmate of a penal institution.
- Medication decisions run through VA. DRYDOCK's antagonist-first policy holds here, but the prescriber, formulary, and continuity of care sit inside VA rather than the state system. Fewer than 35% of VHA patients diagnosed with opioid use disorder are prescribed medication for it.
- Family therapy includes the deployment years. DRYDOCK already runs family therapy for adults and juveniles. In the veteran track the family has usually been living around an absence and then around a return, and that is its own material.
The rule is older than the problem
Congress wrote this in 1980, and said out loud why
38 U.S.C. 5313 was added by Public Law 96-385 on October 7, 1980. The stated rationale survives in the legislative history: compensation exists to replace lost wage-earning capacity, and a veteran serving a long sentence does not feel the economic detriment of the disability.
That premise is simply untrue of someone in treatment. A veteran in this pipeline is being deliberately restored to earning capacity — Fit-Out is credentialing, Sea Trials is work release. They have rent, dependents, and often a business plan. Congress wrote a rule for people whose earning capacity was suspended and irrelevant, and it is landing on people whose earning capacity is the entire object of the program.
In 1980 there was no fentanyl in the illicit supply, there were no drug courts — the first opened in 1989 — and there were no veterans treatment courts, which arrived twenty-eight years later. Congress did not weigh treatment against punishment and choose punishment. The alternative had not been invented yet.
Lane A — free, available now
Draft around it
No act of Congress required. Authorize the Repair phase as court-ordered treatment under diversion, or structure it as a residential reentry setting, and compensation continues and VA can treat. This costs nothing and works immediately. Do not wait on the other two lanes.
Lane B — months, no Congress
Ask VA General Counsel the question directly
Is a court-ordered residential treatment program a penal institution within the meaning of section 5313?
VA General Counsel issues precedent opinions interpreting this exact section, and those opinions bind VA adjudicators. VA's own regulation already defines release from incarceration to include work release and halfway house participation — which shows the agency reads the section by function, not by the label on the building.
This is the highest-value, lowest-cost step in the whole strategy, and the one most likely to be missed, because it is not a bill.
Lane C — the durable fix
The carve-out already exists. This adds a third item to a list of two.
Section 5313(a)(2) already says the reduction does not apply while a person is participating in a work-release program or residing in a halfway house. Congress has already decided that non-penal settings come out from under this rule. The ask is not a new principle.
Model amendment
Section 5313(a)(2) of title 38, United States Code, is amended by striking "or is residing in a halfway house" and inserting: "is residing in a halfway house, or is participating in a court-ordered program of residential substance use disorder treatment or mental health treatment, including any such program administered under the supervision of a veterans treatment court, drug court, or other problem-solving court".
Conforming changes follow for individual unemployability, pension, and the medical-care restriction. The full text with drafting notes is in the legislative strategy document.
One caution on how to argue it
Do not lead with "overdoses are worse than ever"
Overdose deaths peaked near 110,000 in 2022, fell 27% in 2024 — the largest one-year drop ever recorded — and fell about 14% again in 2025 to roughly 70,000. Leading with a worsening trend hands an opponent a federal chart and the last word.
Stronger, and all true: scale — even now the country loses more people to overdose annually than to motor vehicle crashes and firearms combined; lethality — the supply is incomparably more dangerous per use than in 1980, and xylazine in the fentanyl supply does not respond to naloxone; and timing — we are finally winning, and the cheapest way to hold the gains is to stop destabilizing the veterans who enter treatment.
The single strongest sentence is not about drugs at all: the statute predates fentanyl, predates drug courts by nine years, and predates veterans treatment courts by twenty-eight. That does not depend on any trend line.
Who carries it
The advocacy track has a target now
A veteran who lost compensation on day 61 of a treatment program is the most credible witness this bill could have. The advocate training already built into the model should point at this specific ask rather than at drug policy in general — a named statute, a short fix, and a person who can say what it cost them. A winnable fight with a finish line is worth more to someone's recovery than an open-ended cause.
Honest about the evidence
The statutes are settled. The outcome data is not.
Everything on the compensation page rests on statute and regulation, and it is as solid as this framework gets.
The veterans treatment court outcome literature is a different matter. Early figures — 71 Buffalo graduates with no recidivism, roughly 75% of national finishers not rearrested within two years — come from small self-reported cohorts. The peer-reviewed assessment is that published case reports do not give a clear picture of success rates.
The model is worth building on. It should not be sold as proven, and HOMEPORT should generate the evidence the field is missing rather than borrowing claims it cannot support.
Full evidence base