Senators Schmitt and Gillibrand Press TRICARE to Cover ABA Permanently

An Unlikely Bipartisan Alliance

WASHINGTON – two senators who rarely vote alike have handed the Pentagon the same demand: stop treating autism therapy for military children as an experiment. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, and Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, released a joint letter June 26 pressing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to make applied behavior analysis a permanent TRICARE benefit and to adopt every recommendation of a National Academies study of the program that now covers it.

Both sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Defense Health Agency (DHA) and TRICARE, the health program for roughly 9.6 million military beneficiaries. That shared perch matters: the same committee writes the annual defense authorization bill, the vehicle each has used before to move military-family policy. Their letter asks DHA to convert ABA from a temporary demonstration into a Basic benefit and to drop the testing and paperwork rules imposed in 2021.

The request went to Hegseth as head of the department, which the administration began calling the Department of War under a September 2025 executive order. For Schmitt and Gillibrand, the letter is less a first step than the latest in years of separate work on autism and military health that has now converged on a single target.

For Schmitt, the Fight Is Personal

Schmitt’s advocacy is personal. His son Stephen, now 19, is nonverbal and has autism, epilepsy, and tuberous sclerosis, a rare genetic disorder that causes tumors to grow on organs. In an Autism Speaks profile, Schmitt has said that watching his son’s early years pushed him toward public service and shaped the causes he took up once he got there.

As a Missouri state senator, he was a vocal backer of the state’s 2010 law requiring insurers to cover autism care, including ABA, speaking on the floor in its defense. In the U.S. Senate, which he entered in 2023 after serving as Missouri’s attorney general, he sponsored the bipartisan ENABLE Act to protect tax-free savings accounts for people with disabilities. He framed the TRICARE push as an extension of that record and of the Trump administration’s effort to ease burdens on families of Americans with disabilities.

“Since 2021, military families have struggled to access critical care for their children with autism … DHA has put undue burdens on service families.” – Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO), 2026

Gillibrand’s Decade-Long Campaign

Gillibrand came to the fight from the other direction, through years on military-family policy. She requested the National Academies analysis that now anchors the letter, and she has spent more than a decade pressing the Pentagon on autism care. In 2013, the Murray-Gillibrand amendment to the defense authorization bill guaranteed TRICARE coverage for military children with developmental disabilities. She later authored the USA Heroes Act to require TRICARE to cover autism treatment, including ABA, and co-sponsored the Autism Treatment Acceleration Act aimed at private insurers.

A member of the Armed Services Committee who previously chaired its personnel subcommittee, Gillibrand has folded autism access into a broader push to make autism treatment affordable for families nationwide. On the TRICARE letter, she was blunt about the agency’s current rules.

“The Defense Health Agency must dismantle these restrictive barriers immediately and permanently authorize full ABA therapy as a basic TRICARE benefit and adopt all of the NASEM recommendations …” – Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), 2026

Demands Backed by the Academies

The letter tracks the findings of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), which Congress ordered to be prepared under Section 737 of Public Law 117-81. In an October 24, 2025 report, the committee concluded that ABA meets the Defense Department’s own criteria for reliable evidence of proven medical effectiveness, and that the research behind it is robust. That runs counter to DHA, which has long held that ABA falls short of its evidence bar, a standard NASEM noted is higher than the one TRICARE applies to the speech, occupational, and physical therapy it already covers as Basic benefits.

According to the NASEM report summary (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov), the committee recommended that DHA discontinue the demonstration, cover ABA as a Basic benefit, halt the mandatory Parenting Stress Index and related assessments added in 2021, approve all Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes for ABA, and remove restrictions on the settings where ABA services can be delivered. Roughly 16,000 beneficiaries are enrolled in the Comprehensive Autism Care Demonstration (ACD), which has covered ABA for TRICARE families since 2014. From 2018 to 2023, about 32% of the 109,073 TRICARE-eligible children with an autism diagnosis had a claim for ABA.

The Families Caught in Between

The senators’ letter followed NBC News reporting on Logan Cabiao, a 10-year-old who is nonverbal and has a severe form of autism, and whose father, Mario Cabiao, is a retired Air Force pilot. Logan still receives some ABA, but the hands-on sessions that taught him to brush his teeth, wash his hands, and get dressed are no longer covered under the 2021 rules. Schmitt and Gillibrand cited that kind of case in arguing that military families face barriers civilian families with commercial or Medicaid coverage do not.

The Fight Moves to the Defense Bill

The senators wrote that more than nine months had passed since the changes were proposed and pressed for immediate action, singling out the call to make ABA a Basic benefit. DHA has not said whether it will adopt the recommendations. Both senators sit on the committee that writes the annual defense authorization bill, their most direct lever if the department does not move on its own. The demonstration’s legal authority expires December 31, 2028.

AT A GLANCE

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