Now the Lawyers Inside the Board Are Hollering Uncle
Last week I showed you what the Board of Veterans’ Appeals does with your place in line, using the Board’s own records. This week the Board’s own lawyers are saying the same thing out loud to Congress, and the Senate held confirmation hearings for the next Board chairman (or woman, gotta be PC).
Check out what a little bird sent me.
The American Federation of Government Employees Local 17, the union that evidently represents at least a few attorneys at the Board, is running a public campaign called "Veterans Deserve a Thorough Review of Their Appeals." It asks members of Congress to order an independent Government Accountability Office review of the Board’s attorney production quotas. When I looked, 156 letters had gone out toward a goal of 700.
Now, I want you to sit with that for a second. The people who write the decisions are asking Congress to send in an outside auditor to look at how fast they are being told to write them. That ain’t a grievance about parking spaces, a broken coffee maker, or lack of an in-office safe space. This is the folks holding the pen telling you the pen is moving too fast—scribble is coming out.
What the Board’s Own Attorneys Say
For those of you that don’t know, the Board is organized much like you’d expect from a bureaucracy. There is the Board leadership. Think Chairman, Vice Chairman, etc. Then there are regular line Judges. The ones signing decisions, granting or denying benefits. Then there are Board attorneys who report to the Board judges. They are the ones that do the actual initial draft of the decision. Then the Judge reviews, signs it, sends it back, etc. So, the Board attorneys are really the ones where the rubber meets the road.
Local 17 surveyed those attorneys who do the work. More than 300 picked up and responded back with a distress message “call Broken Arrow”. Here is what they said:
93% said the standards do not give them enough time for meaningful review.
92% said the standards put speed ahead of quality.
97% said the standards have made factual or legal errors more likely.
64% said they have cut back on reviewing evidence just to keep pace.
Read that last one again. Sixty-four percent of the attorneys deciding Veterans’ appeals say they are reviewing less evidence than they otherwise would, because of the clock. That is your service treatment records. That is your buddy statement. That is the nexus letter you paid for out of a disability check.
Good Ole Math
The new performance standards took effect in October 2025 (which incidentally matches my anecdotal observations concerning quality). According to Local 17, the annual quota went from 156 decisions to 182, the issue-based counting alternative was eliminated, and the Board added rigid biweekly productivity monitoring.
It is important to understand also that 1 decision may have multiple issues. Service-connection for 4 issues, plus an earlier effective date for x. Do the math the way a Veteran would. 182 decisions in a year is a finished Board decision about every day and a half, every working day, all year. And appeals are not all the same size. One is a 10% tinnitus rating. The next is thirty years of service records, two C&P exams that contradict each other, a TDIU claim, and an effective date fight going back to 1994. The old system at least counted issues. That is gone. A file is a file, and the clock does not care what is in it.
Congress didn’t set up the Board to be a mail sorting line. The whole reason it exists is de novo review, a fresh look by a lawyer and a judge who are supposed to read the record and apply the law to it. Take away the time to read the record and you haven’t sped up review. You’ve replaced it.
Vice FOIA City
Regular readers know where I’m going with this.
Last week’s post was built on the Board’s own FOIA production: 141,729 pending appeals and 238,265 decisions. What it showed was that appeals aren’t decided in the order they were filed. Only 1.7% of pending appeals have not been passed by a later-filed appeal in the same docket. More than 37,000 are sitting behind the Board’s own front of the line.
The most telling figure in that data was this one. Over four half-year periods, the Board’s total output barely moved: 40,340, then 42,963, then 41,451, then 44,758 decisions. But the Hearing docket’s share of that output went 8.6%, then 3.9%, then 3.6%, and then jumped to 44.8%. Same total, wildly different destinations.
I said at the time that this looked like capacity being moved around in blocks rather than a line being worked. Local 17 just told us what is driving the blocks. When everybody is measured on how many decisions they finish, the work gets managed to the number.
And here is the question that neither the union survey nor my FOIA data can answer by itself, which is exactly why it belongs in front of the GAO: when an attorney has to produce 182 decisions a year, and the docket in front of them holds everything from a one-issue increase to a twenty-issue nightmare, what happens to the twenty-issue nightmare? Does it get worked, or does it get walked past? I have the evidence that older appeals are being walked past. They have the evidence that the clock is the reason. Somebody with subpoena power ought to put those two things on the same table.
Meanwhile, Down the Hall
On September 23, the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs held a hearing on pending nominations. Five names were on the witness list.
One is Maria Chapa Lopez, nominated to be Chairman of the Board of Veterans’ Appeals for a six-year term. She is a former Army judge advocate and a former United States Attorney for the Middle District of Florida. In her written statement she told the Committee that for many Veterans and their families the Board is their final opportunity within VA to receive a full and fair review, and that she would work to improve the timeliness of decisions while maintaining the high standards of legal review.
The other four are nominees to the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, each for a fifteen-year term. That is the court where my petition in Cartwright sits, and where Willars was decided. Four seats on a nine-judge court, all in one afternoon.
Here is the part that ought to catch your eye. The Board has not had a Senate-confirmed Chairman since January 15, 2025. For twenty months it has been run by an acting chairman (who hides in his office all day). That is the same stretch in which the quotas went up, the issue counting went away, and the docket data I published last week was generated.
So, if you have a senator on that Committee, they have a nominee in front of them and the leverage that comes with it. Four questions are worth asking before anybody votes:
Will you ask the GAO to review the Board’s production standards, or will you wait to be told to?
What is your position on 38 U.S.C. section 7107, and will the Board produce the data showing when appeals actually become ready for decision?
Will the 182-decision quota stay in place under your chairmanship?
Will the Board publish, quarterly, how its decisions are distributed among the three dockets?
A six-year term is a long time to answer those later.
Strange Company
I’ll be honest with you. I spend most of my working life on the other side of the table from VA. I have sued this Secretary several times this year. I have a petition pending at the Veterans Court asking the Court to make the Board follow docket order, and I have a case at the Federal Circuit. VA employees and I are not usually singing out of the same hymnal.
But on this one, we are. Not because anybody at the Board suddenly fell in love with Veterans’ advocates, and not because I am about to start carrying a union card. We agree because the math is the math. You cannot review what you do not have time to read, and a Veteran cannot be made whole by a decision that was written against a stopwatch.
There is also a warning in here for anybody who thinks the backlog number is the scoreboard. VA can clear a pile by deciding cases faster. It can clear the same pile by deciding them wrong, and then clearing them again when they bounce back on appeal, a supplemental claim, or a court remand. The second way looks just like the first on a chart. It just costs a Veteran four more years.
What You Can Do
The Local 17 campaign is aimed at Board attorneys, and I hope every one of them sends it. But the rest of us are not spectators here.
If you are a Veteran with an appeal pending, or a family member watching one crawl, your senators and your representative work for you too. You do not need a form letter. You need one paragraph: my appeal has been at the Board since such-and-such a date, I have watched newer cases get decided, and I want Congress to ask the GAO whether the Board’s production standards are giving Veterans the review the law requires.
If you are with a VSO, the Board’s own attorneys have handed you a survey and a sponsor. Use them.
And if you want the underlying paper, it is all below. The Local 17 newsletter, the letter campaign, and the petition are attached to this post, along with the NOTUS story by Eric Katz that broke the national coverage, "The VA’s Race to Shrink Its Backlog Is Leading to ‘Egregious’ Mistakes." Read them yourself. Do not take my word for any of it, and do not take VA’s.
Last week the records said the line isn’t a line. This week the people at the front of it say they are not being given time to do the work, and the Senate started interviewing the next person to run it. Those are not three different stories. That is one story, and right now there are three sets of hands on it: the Board’s, the union’s, and the Senate’s.
Godspeed.
Copies of What the Little Bird Sent Me
Attached to the post: the Local 17 newsletter (with the NOTUS story), the call for letters to Congress, and the campaign page, all published by AFGE Local 17, AFL-CIO. The post also links the Senate Committee hearing page, where each nominee’s written testimony can be downloaded.
Click a button to open or save that file. The last one opens the Committee’s own hearing page, where each nominee’s written testimony can be downloaded.
