Veterans: the Gold Star Families Act
What they say
Her plan says she introduced and passed the Gold Star Families Act to give Gold Star families tax relief.
“In Congress, I served on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and was instrumental in passing the PACT Act–the largest expansion of veterans’ benefits in our lifetime. I also introduced and passed the Gold Star Families Act to provide tax relief for Gold Star families and championed legislation to provide three cost of living increases to veterans.”
What the record shows ·
The bill she introduced was H.R. 2481, the Gold Star Family Tax Relief Act, on May 2, 2019. It drew 172 cosponsors and its only recorded action is the referral to the Committee on Ways and Means on the day of introduction; the House never voted on it. Its identical Senate companion, S. 1370, passed the Senate without amendment by unanimous consent on May 21, 2019 and was then ordered held at the House desk, where the House never took it up; no version of the bill became law. The harm it addressed was ended seven months later in another bill, by a different and much broader instrument than the one she proposed. Her bill would have amended section 1(g)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code to treat military survivor benefits as earned income, a change confined to those benefits. Division O, title V, section 501 of the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020 instead struck paragraph (4) of section 1(j) outright, repealing the trust-rate treatment for every child's unearned income rather than reclassifying survivor benefits; the amendment her bill proposed was never enacted, and no subparagraph (D) was added to section 1(g)(4). She voted for that act on December 17, 2019 (Roll Call 689, agreed to 297 to 120), and it became Public Law 116-94 on December 20, 2019.
Limit: Her bill never got a House vote, though its Senate twin passed the Senate. The relief became law in a 2019 spending act she voted for, through a broader change. Her words here were read in the Internet Archive's snapshot of 2026-08-03, because her campaign site returns HTTP 403 to automated readers, and the wording is unconfirmed against the live page.