President Joe Biden's 11th-hour decision not to seek reelection and the quick rallying around Vice President Kamala Harris to take over for him at the top of the ticket give Democrats a likely presidential nominee with a less high-profile record on military and veterans issues than before.
As vice president, Harris has supported Biden's major initiatives on service members and veterans, including the massive expansion of veterans benefits under the PACT Act and the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. But the portfolio of projects she took the lead on in the White House did not focus on military and veterans issues.
Still, her four years in the Senate included votes on military and veterans bills, and her time as California's attorney general saw her take on for-profit colleges that targeted veterans -- a record that could provide a window into what a Harris presidency would mean for service members and veterans.
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Republican campaigning against her has so far focused mostly on her role in the Biden administration's immigration policies, rather than anything in her record on the military and veterans.
Harris, for her part, has leaned into her record as a prosecutor as she launches her campaign against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, who has been convicted in one criminal case and still faces charges in three others. At her first rally as a presidential candidate Tuesday, she touted that she "took on perpetrators of all kinds" and so she knows "Donald Trump's type."
Her time as California's top prosecutor included a major case that benefited veterans. In 2013, as the state's attorney general, Harris sued Corinthian Colleges, a now-defunct chain of for-profit schools that aggressively targeted veterans in its deceptive advertising. In 2016, she won a $1.1 billion judgment against the company for practices including advertising inflated job placement rates and using official military seals in its marketing without authorization.
She also joined other state attorneys general in urging the Department of Education to forgive the federal student loan debt of veterans and other students defrauded by Corinthian -- something that came to fruition when she was vice president.
"In 2016, after we obtained the judgment against Corinthian, I said then that the least we could do was to give everyone Corinthian took advantage of the relief they deserve. I said then that we would do everything in our power to help them," Harris said in a 2022 speech announcing the debt relief. "Finally -- and sadly it has taken this long -- finally, that promise is fulfilled."
During Harris' time in the Senate from 2017 to 2021, the biggest veterans bill that moved through Congress was the Mission Act, which expanded veterans' ability to seek Department of Veterans Affairs-funded care outside of the VA system. Trump has touted the bill as one of his signature achievements. In the years since it passed, it has taken on a partisan reputation, with Democrats and the Biden administration arguing it has caused community care costs to balloon, and Republicans accusing the Biden administration of undermining the law.
But the Mission Act received bipartisan support when it passed, and Harris was one of the 92 senators who voted for it. She later co-signed a letter with other Senate Democrats knocking the Trump administration's VA leadership for crafting access standards that "will significantly increase the overall cost and amount of care VA will send to the community" without consulting Congress.
Meanwhile, her voting record on what is considered the Pentagon's most important bill annually, the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, was mixed. The bill typically includes a wide range of military policy changes responding to issues of the day, as well as addresses more routine matters such as reauthorizing special pay and bonuses for service members.
In her first year in the Senate in 2017, she voted for the Senate's initial draft of the NDAA, while the final version that became law was approved by voice vote, meaning individual votes were not recorded. The next year, she voted "no" on both the initial draft and final version, explaining in a June 2018 statement that she opposed the bill's authorization for a new low-yield nuclear weapon. The year after that, she missed both votes.
In 2020, the year Trump vetoed the NDAA because it required the Pentagon to rename Army bases and other property that bore Confederate monikers, Harris voted against the Senate's initial draft, missed the vote on the House-Senate compromise version, and voted "yes" to override Trump's veto.
In voting against the initial 2020 draft, she blasted the bill for excluding efforts to block Trump from raiding Pentagon coffers to build a border wall and to prevent giving excess military equipment to police departments. Still, she said she "enthusiastically support[ed] provisions to give our troops a much-deserved pay raise and rename bases honoring Confederate generals."
Harris' campaign website as of now does not have any policy proposals. But when she first ran for president in the Democratic primary in 2019, she released a detailed plan for veterans and service members that led with extending VA health care and housing assistance to veterans with other-than-honorable discharges stemming from PTSD or brain injuries that could cause behavioral issues.
The plan also called for improving military housing, creating a grant program to place homeless veterans in transitional housing, cracking down on fraud against service members and veterans, and making it easier for immigrants to serve in the military and apply for citizenship if they do.
"It's time to honor the service and sacrifice of our warfighters, veterans and their families," Harris' 2019 plan said. "As commander in chief, Kamala will work to provide them the support they have earned."
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