Chapter 1607 — REAP (Discontinued)

REAP was created by the FY2005 National Defense Authorization Act to give reserve and National Guard members who had been mobilised in support of a contingency operation an education benefit proportionate to the length of that mobilisation. Eligibility under 10 U.S.C. § 16163 rested on 90 consecutive days or more of active duty in support of a contingency operation, or, for Army and Air National Guard members, 90 consecutive days or more of full-time National Guard duty under 32 U.S.C. § 502(f) when authorised by the President or Secretary of Defense in response to a declared national emergency supported by federal funds.

The programme was ended by section 555 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, Public Law 114-92, enacted 25 November 2015, which added a new section 16167 headed “Sunset” to chapter 1607. That section provides that the authority to provide educational assistance under the chapter terminates four years after the date of enactment — 25 November 2019 — and that during the four-year run-off, assistance could be provided only to a member otherwise eligible who had already received assistance under the chapter for a course of study at an educational institution for the enrollment period immediately preceding the date of enactment. In other words, from November 2015 the programme was closed to new entrants and open only to students already in it, and from November 2019 it paid nothing at all.

Most affected students transitioned to the Post-9/11 GI Bill under chapter 33 of Title 38, which in most cases provided a more generous benefit. The Department of Veterans Affairs now redirects its former REAP pages to its Post-9/11 GI Bill material.

This entry exists because REAP still appears in older flight-school financial-aid pages, benefit comparison tables and school marketing material that has not been revised since 2019. For a school certifying enrollments to the VA, listing a benefit that cannot be paid is not a small error: it creates an expectation for a prospective student, wastes the school's certifying official's time, and undermines the credibility of the rest of the page.

The practical guidance is simple. A prospective student who mentions REAP is almost certainly eligible under a different programme — most often chapter 33, the Post-9/11 GI Bill, and in some cases chapter 1606, the Montgomery GI Bill for the Selected Reserve. The right response is to route them to a current benefit rather than to the closed one, and to make sure the school's own published list of accepted benefits no longer names it.

Aviatize tracks which benefit programme each student is funded under against their record, so a school certifying enrollments knows which students sit under which chapter without maintaining a separate spreadsheet. Because billing and the training record are the same system, a school can see at once whether any active student is still recorded against a programme that no longer pays, and correct the funding source before the invoice rather than after it.