An essay published recently in The Economist, the British magazine, suggested that the U.S. compensates its veterans too generously. “Absurdly” generous, was how it described veterans’ benefits. Far be it from an American to criticize the British approach to caring for veterans wounded during counterinsurgency operations. If the British want to give wounded veterans such as Mr. Bates a chance to work as Lord Crawley’s valet, even though Mr. Carson and the rest of Downton Abbey’s staff thinks it’s a bad idea, that’s their business. Every country’s approach to veteran care is the product of its history. And without the U.S. Army, there would be no America. Without compensation and benefits during and after service, not enough people would serve in the U.S. military. I have taken advantage of those benefits myself. I received a master’s degree through the post-9/11 GI Bill. I have a service-connected disability rating through the Department of Veterans Affairs and get a monthly check from the government, plus a couple hundred bucks off my property taxes every year. Most importantly, I get medical care for injuries and conditions I incurred during service in Afghanistan. I don’t depend on the check, or the medical coverage (I could get this through work), or the property tax break. But other veterans do. The Economist essay’s conclusion — that the U.S. treats its veterans too well — is debatable. I certainly haven’t gotten rich from being a veteran, nor do I feel that I’ve taken advantage of the system in claiming benefits. In fact, I’ve used the degree I received to give back to the community. My M.F.A. from SUNY Stony Brook Southampton was instrumental to helping me found and grow a literary journal that has published dozens of veteran writers and essayists over the last decade. The Economist piece seems geared toward readers in the incoming Trump administration. Some part of the MAGA movement is a response to the centralization of government and the expansion of the federal government into people’s everyday lives. All agencies and departments that exist at the national level will come under scrutiny, even the Department of Defense and the VA. The Pentagon requires a certain amount of centralization and coordination at the federal level to produce a competitive modern military. To win quickly and decisively in modern war, as the U.S. did against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 and against the Taliban in 2001 and 2002, depends on the ability to concentrate firepower in time and space using planes, boats, tanks, drones and people — and to do this repeatedly until an opponent’s military disintegrates. To make the military the U.S. has, which is sufficient to quickly and decisively win battles against any other military on earth (including Russia and China), one needs the system we have in place today. That system has never been disproven. And that system is expensive. Paying for the U.S. military (nearing a trillion dollars) and paying for veterans ($325 billion to the VA for 2024) is costly, and the spending happens at the federal level. It is probably frustrating to some people who feel that they don’t have any control over that process, although when one thinks it through, where and how the spending happens makes perfect sense. Even devout libertarians agree that the military is a national responsibility. But if some are concerned that veterans’ benefits (a key component of having the best military in the world) are too generous, one way to address that problem would be to put the VA at the state level, and have states compensate their own veteran populations. In other words, let the states pay for it. It should be possible to push most of the $325 billion in the federal budget for the VA to the state level. That $325 billion would still be spent, but it would be in Hartford, Albany, Austin and Topeka instead of in D.C. If a state’s population feels that their veterans are being compensated too generously for their service, it’s far more likely that they can get state politicians to do their bidding than national politicians. Maybe those same state residents feel that their veterans are not being compensated well enough — that the benefits are insufficiently generous. Benefits could go up! Under the current centralized model, states (and individual citizens) share the burden of paying for veteran benefits equally across the nation. It’s effective and efficient, but it’s a single point of failure, as unwise and misguided people like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are currently demonstrating. A decentralized model would mean citizens of some states would pay less, while other states would pay more. States with more veterans (mostly in the South and Midwest) would see their taxes go up, while states with fewer veterans (such as in New England) would see taxes go down. Making politics more responsive at a state level, or even at a local level, is important and an underappreciated facet of “populist” politics. As long as citizens feel as though they don’t have a say in the administration of a program, or that the program’s implementation is somehow beyond their control, there will be discontent. Making those programs more responsive is a key to making them resilient in any form. Decentralizing the Department of Veterans Affairs — pushing veteran care down to the state level — might be one way to accomplish that goal. Of course, before you lean into that as a solution, you’ll want to check where your own state ranks in terms of veterans. Alaska, where nearly one in 10 citizens is a veteran, would end up carrying a much greater obligation for its veterans than Connecticut, where barely five in 100 have served. It’s also likely that more than $325 billion would get spent — centralization goes hand in hand with efficiency. Maybe American citizens paying more overall for veterans benefits is worth the price of determining how that money gets spent. Or we could simply continue funding veterans benefits at the national level. After all, our military is quite a bit bigger than the U.K.’s, and there aren’t enough Lord Crawleys for every Mr. Bates. Adrian Bonenberger is a writer and a veteran of the U.S. Army. He is a co-founder of American Veterans for Ukraine.