Many veterans face challenges after military service, challenges which can be compounded by service-connected disabilities. To ease veterans’ transitions and improve their welfare, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) offers many benefits to former services members, who also have access to a myriad of programs available to the general civilian population through the social welfare system. There is a growing literature examining veterans’ reliance on individual public benefit programs, as well as the evolution of benefits offered by the VA. Yet, little is known about how the social welfare system and VA programs come together to support veterans, especially those with service-connected disabilities.
This research aims to fill a gap in our knowledge of veterans’ program participation by exploring what benefits veterans receive, as well as the relative reach of those benefits. Using ten years and multiple panels of data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, this study will (1) measure veterans’ participation rates in fourteen social welfare programs and five types of VA benefits, exploring disparities by race, sex, and service-connected disability, and (2) estimate the share of service-disabled veterans’ income coming from VA sources, SSA sources, and other public transfer sources. These descriptive results will support our understanding of how various public and veteran-specific programs function alongside each other to support the veteran population and, in doing so, build a foundation for future research.