Veterans With Gulf War Illness Were Finally Seeing Progress. Then Congress Cut Funding

(Photo courtesy of U.S. Army) /> It’s easy for Ron Brown to remember when his health problems first began. It was early March 1991, and Brown’s Army unit was in Khamisiyah, where Iraqi forces had been storing chemical weapons in a bunker and an excavated area known as “the pit.” As U.S. forces demolished the bunker and the weapons in the pit, plumes of smoke rose into the sky.

Ron Brown deployed twice during active duty, the second time during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. (Photo courtesy of Ron Brown) alt="" class="wp-image-43529" style="width:266px;height:auto" title="" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/null-28-edited.jpeg?w=484&ssl=1 484w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/null-28-edited.jpeg?resize=303%2C400&ssl=1 303w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/null-28-edited.jpeg?resize=400%2C529&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/null-28-edited.jpeg?w=370&ssl=1 370w" sizes="(max-width: 484px) 100vw, 484px" />

“Within 15 minutes of the first demolitions, I was sweating profusely,” said Brown, a specialist in the 82nd Airborne Division at the time. “My nose was running like a faucet, and I had a headache that felt like somebody hit me with a baseball bat.”

What he didn’t know at the time: the explosion had released a cloud of chemical weapons, including the nerve agents sarin and cyclosarin.

Brown’s health issues didn’t end when he returned to the States.

“I wasn’t able to breathe when I came back, so I wasn’t able to continue meeting [fitness] standards,” he said.

Soon after, when the military was downsized at the end of the Gulf War, he took the opportunity to leave the service with an honorable discharge.

Now 58 years old and living in Virginia, Brown has Gulf War Illness, a complex, multi-system disease that causes fatigue, cognitive problems, headaches, pain, and other symptoms.

“I still struggle to this day,” said Brown, who has participated in clinical trials that tested experimental supplements. “I take a pile of medications, and I’ve got three different inhalers.”

Now, after being sick for 35 years, he’s hopeful new treatments, or even a cure, for Gulf War Illness are on the horizon.

Gulf War Illness shouldn’t be lumped in with other toxic exposures to compete for funding, says Gulf War veteran Anthony Hardie. (Photo courtesy of Anthony Hardie) alt="" class="wp-image-43530" title="" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/null-29-edited.jpeg?w=192&ssl=1 192w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/null-29-edited.jpeg?w=370&ssl=1 370w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/null-29-edited.jpeg?w=400&ssl=1 400w" sizes="(max-width: 192px) 100vw, 192px" />

This year, researchers are closer than ever to finding that treatment. They might also finally understand the biological underpinnings of this mysterious disease. In a big step forward, Gulf War Illness last year got its own diagnostic code, which finally allows doctors to track sick veterans. And the Department of Defense has pledged to comb through and potentially declassify new documents relating to the Gulf War, which advocates hope could pave the way for new treatments.

About 175,000 to 250,000 veterans with Gulf War Illness have spent the years since Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm waiting for answers about their mysterious ailment. It has taken more than three decades to get here, as the U.S. is entangled in another war in the Middle East.

But amid all the progress Gulf War Illness advocates have seen in recent years, Congress slashed research funding for the condition without explanation.

Funding for Gulf War Illness and other toxic exposures “was never adequate in the first place,” said Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War Army veteran and advocate based in Florida. What’s even more concerning, Hardie said, “funding has now been cut in half and has not been restored.”

For many years after Gulf War veterans returned from the war, their illnesses were not taken seriously, said Kimberly Sullivan, a behavioral neuroscientist at Boston University who has been studying the health of Gulf War-era veterans for more than 25 years.

“These wounds are largely invisible,” she said. “They’re not as readily seen as a missing limb, but they may be just as debilitating.”

But many doctors and government officials have questioned whether Gulf War Illness was even a real disease, or chalked it up to a psychological illness.

Erin Dursa oversees one of the longest-running studies of Gulf War veterans in the United States. She said her research has found that, even decades after the war, Gulf War veterans reported more physical and mental health conditions than service members who did not deploy.

“The findings from this study over the last 30 years consistently demonstrate that military environmental exposures do impact health,” said Dursa, an epidemiologist and principal investigator of environmental exposures for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Last year marked a watershed moment for veterans with the disease: On Oct. 1, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a new medical diagnostic code, also known as an ICD-10 code, for Gulf War Illness.

This code is a big deal, says Lea Steele, a neuroepidemiologist at Baylor College of Medicine with more than two decades of research experience on Gulf War Illness. It means that Gulf War Illness is now a diagnosable disease that can be put into veterans’ medical records.

Not only is it a validation that Gulf War Illness is a real disease, but it will also allow doctors and researchers to more easily track veterans with the illness, understand what other conditions they have, and help target treatments, Sullivan said.

James McCormick also deployed during Operation Iraqi Freedom (Photo courtesy of James McCormick) alt="" class="wp-image-43494" style="width:600px;height:auto" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image8.jpeg?w=600&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image8.jpeg?resize=400%2C263&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image8.jpeg?w=370&ssl=1 370w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />

James McCormick said that he remembers chemical alarms going off while he was serving during the Gulf War.

“The residue that was coming out of the sky when they blew a lot of this stuff up, you know, was raining down on us,” said McCormick, a retired U.S. Army captain who is now the executive director of government affairs at Vietnam Veterans of America. In the decades since, Gulf War Illness has led to fibromyalgia and chronic pain in people with whom he served.

McCormick is one of the veterans who recently pushed the Department of Defense to declassify documents about the Gulf War—which he hopes can shed light on the exact chemicals he and other veterans were exposed to, and maybe pave the way for new treatments.

McCormick and Brown said that while previous administrations have been slow to declassify documents, the Trump administration has been more responsive. They’ve promised to release about 37,000 new Gulf War documents, though neither knows what might be in those records, and they are still working with the administration to commit to a timeline.

Advances in Research and Treatments

Scientists think they’ve nailed down what causes Gulf War Illness: exposures to certain compounds that impact the nervous system, including the anti-nerve gas pills that were given to soldiers, called pyridostigmine bromide, as well as pesticides, and nerve gas agents like sarin. But they’re still trying to figure out what happens in the body when people are exposed to these agents. Recently, they’ve come closer to understanding it.

For years, Beatrice Golomb, a doctor and researcher at UC San Diego Health, has believed that mitochondria, the cell’s tiny battery pack that provides energy, might be involved. Other researchers believed the symptoms were caused by widespread inflammation throughout the body.

Beatrice Golomb’s research group studies how environmental and chemical exposures impact health. (Photo courtesy of Beatrice Golomb) alt="" class="wp-image-43782" title="" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Beatrice-Golomb-text-removed.png?resize=1030%2C697&ssl=1 1030w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Beatrice-Golomb-text-removed.png?resize=400%2C271&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Beatrice-Golomb-text-removed.png?resize=768%2C519&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Beatrice-Golomb-text-removed.png?resize=1536%2C1039&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Beatrice-Golomb-text-removed.png?resize=1200%2C812&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Beatrice-Golomb-text-removed.png?resize=1024%2C693&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Beatrice-Golomb-text-removed.png?resize=2000%2C1353&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Beatrice-Golomb-text-removed.png?resize=780%2C527&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Beatrice-Golomb-text-removed.png?w=2048&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Beatrice-Golomb-text-removed-1030x697.png?w=370&ssl=1 370w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px" /> Research from Golomb’s team has now shown that mitochondria aren’t working correctly in veterans with Gulf War Illness. In other words, when it comes to the theory of what is happening in the body of veterans with Gulf War Illness, “I think inflammation is out, and cell energy impairment is in,” Golomb said. A separate research team at UT Southwestern Medical Center, led by another longtime Gulf War researcher, Robert Haley, found something similar.

This is good news, because Golomb thinks she has a treatment that can target faulty mitochondria. It’s a supplement called Coenzyme Q10, which helps mitochondria produce energy. In a small 2014 study, Golomb found that Coenzyme Q10 significantly helped Gulf War Veterans — though when VA researchers conducted their own study using a slightly different version of the supplement, they didn’t find the same benefit. Now, Golomb is recruiting for a larger clinical trial, and she hopes to see the benefits again in more participants.

Coenzyme Q10 isn’t the only new treatment that shows promise for veterans with Gulf War Illness. Scientists at Nova Southeastern University in Florida are currently studying an antioxidant called n-acetylcysteine to see if it can help treat the disease. And researchers at Georgetown and American University in Washington, D.C., are investigating whether a low-glutamate diet—one without soy sauce, fish sauces, aged cheeses, and flavor-enhancing additives—can improve symptoms.

Despite a spate of promising new treatments in clinical studies, funding for Gulf War Illness research was cut by Congress last year, jeopardizing future research.

A significant portion of federal Gulf War Illness research comes from a special fund called the Congressionally-Directed Medical Research Programs, or CDMRP. The Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Institute of Health also fund some Gulf War Illness research, but millions of dollars of research funding is allocated through this program. And in fiscal year 2025, funding for CDMRP’s toxic exposure research, which includes Gulf War Illness, was cut in half, from $30 million to $15 million. It stayed at that level in fiscal year 2026—even while other programs in the fund were restored.

“This was quite a blow to this community, having that kind of cut to these programs,” said Mark Vieth, the coordinator of the Defense Health Research Consortium, a collective of the congressionally funded programs. In March 2025, the program budget was cut by 57% when Congress passed a bill that funded government operations for the remainder of the 2025 fiscal year.

Soldiers also inhaled smoke from burning oil wells during the Gulf War (photo courtesy James McCormick) alt="" class="wp-image-43492" style="width:640px;height:auto" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/James-McCormick-Photo-2.jpeg?w=640&ssl=1 640w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/James-McCormick-Photo-2.jpeg?resize=400%2C266&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/thewarhorse.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/James-McCormick-Photo-2.jpeg?w=370&ssl=1 370w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />

The congressional research program is special, Vieth said, because it is open to all researchers, unlike agencies such as VA, which fund only VA-affiliated researchers. It is a “high risk, high reward” program, Vieth said, targeted towards finding cures, therapies, and “improvements in quality of life.”

Sullivan, the behavioral neuroscientist at Boston University, agreed. She and other university researchers rely on the CDMRP funding. She said the program has been “a beacon of hope” for researchers in the Gulf War community.

“To have cuts happening at this time is really unfortunate for the field, and it really slows things down,” Sullivan said.

She said her research team wasn’t able to secure funding for some Gulf War Illness research projects, including one studying the illness’s biomarkers, or abnormal molecules in people with the disease. She’s also concerned about future funding for a network she runs that helps other researchers speed up recruitment for study participants. “We will continue as best we can,” she said.

Golomb from UC San Diego Health said her lab was regularly funded with grants from the program in the past as well. “It would be a tragedy for all the work and insights we have been gaining to come to a halt,” she said.

Congress is deciding funding for fiscal year 2027 right now, and Vieth said that the debate will be an important issue for Gulf War veterans and other advocates in the upcoming midterm elections.

“That will determine who they vote for,” he said.

Recently, Vieth and the Consortium sent letters to members of Congress urging them to increase funding to the CDMRP program.

“Without full restoration and growth, these programs will experience research interruptions that could have long-term implications for the health and readiness of our warfighters,” the letters read.

It is a personal issue for Brown, the Gulf War veteran who was exposed to chemical weapons in Khamisiyah. He has taken part in medical research funded by the CDMRP program, including one study that required brain imaging with a functional MRI. The test was for the supplement carnosine, an antioxidant that researchers thought might improve cognition in veterans with Gulf War Illness, but ultimately didn’t. Brown isn’t sure if he got the medication or the placebo.

In the end, though, one particular experiment not working out doesn’t worry him. What matters is that “something does come from this research,” he said. “Then hopefully, even if it’s not in time for us, it’ll benefit future troops. Because exposures on the battlefield are not going away.”

This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel and Paul Szoldra. It was fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.