What Line? What the Board’s Own Data Says About Docket Order
Every Veteran who appeals to the Board is promised a place in line. So, I asked the Board for its own records to see if the line is real. Three hundred eighty thousand appeals later, I can tell you, it ain’t.
Every Veteran who appeals to the Board gets the same promise. Well, not even a promise, more like a command from Congress set in statute.
First in, first out. Just like those long lines at the DMV. You file, you get a docket number, and you wait your turn. The wait may be long, but it’s supposed to be fair. The Veteran who filed before you goes before you. The one who filed after you goes after you. Now, I am not talking about those of you who get Advanced on the Docket. Y’all go to the front of the line like a Disney Fast Pass. What I am talking about is regular docket order.
For years, those of us who do this work have suspected that isn’t how it works. We’ve all had the client who filed in 2020 and is still waiting while his buddy from the VFW, who filed in 2024, already has a decision in hand. Ask the Board about it and you get some version of “every case is different.”
So, I asked the Board for its data. And the Board sent it (after a little litigation).
What the Board Handed Over
On August 25, 2026, in response to FOIA request 26-19815-F, the Board sent two spreadsheets. The first lists every appeal pending as of July 9, 2026: 141,729 of them. The second lists every decision dispatched from January 1, 2020, through July 9, 2026: 238,265. Each record shows the docket number, the docket (Direct Review, Evidence Submission, or Hearing), the date received, and for decided appeals, the date the decision went out.
Here’s the part that makes this data unusually interesting. The Board’s produced it without advanced on docket cases and without court remands. Those are the two big lawful ways to jump the line, and the Board pulled them out before it sent the files. What’s left is exactly the group the statute says should move in order.
But it don’t.
Three Dockets, Three Different Worlds
Under the Appeals Modernization Act, a Veteran picks one of three dockets, and docket order runs inside each one. Everything below plays fair with that. No Direct Review appeal gets compared to a Hearing appeal.
But before we even get to order inside a docket, look at the dockets themselves. Of appeals received in 2023, 89.4% of Direct Review appeals have been decided, and 79.8% of Evidence Submission appeals. On the Hearing docket? 4.2%.
Same filing year. Same statute. Same Board. The Hearing docket holds 58% of everything pending and gets 22% of the decisions. Asking to sit in front of a judge costs you years. That’s lawful, since Congress allowed separate dockets. But it’s the real answer to the question every Veteran asks me, “how long?”, and nobody at VA will say it out loud. For that matter, I have heard it on good authority “nobody’s home” at the Board. Acting Chairman just hides in his office. A vacuum of leadership.
Older Appeals Are Less Finished Than Newer Ones
Here’s the test that doesn’t take any interpretation, pure math.
If a docket is worked first in, first out, then each group of appeals filed in a given quarter has to be at least as finished as the group filed after it. The Board gets to the older ones first, so the older ones get done first. A backlog doesn’t change that. Understaffing doesn’t change that. A slow line is still a line. Just like the DMV. Apples to Apples.
In Direct Review, 76.4% of appeals filed in the first quarter of 2022 have been decided. For appeals filed in the first quarter of 2024, two full years later, it’s 92.8%. The younger group is 16.4 points further along. Evidence Submission shows the same thing: 70.8% of late-2021 filings decided, against 85.6% of early-2023 filings.
Across those two dockets, 20 filing quarters are further behind than a later quarter, and they’re holding 14,374 appeals that are still waiting. That doesn’t happen in a line. That happens when somebody reaches past the front of it.
“A slow line is still a line. This isn’t a line.”
How do You Reach the Front? No One Knows.
A real line has a front. In any given month, the Board ought to be deciding appeals filed within a pretty narrow stretch of time.
In the twelve months ending July 9, 2026, the Board sent out 86,771 decisions. The Direct Review decisions in that year went to appeals filed anywhere from January 2019 to May 2026. That’s a seven-year spread, all being worked at once. The typical Direct Review decision went to an appeal filed March 1, 2025, while 11,207 Direct Review appeals older than that sat and waited.
Use the Board’s own recent pace to mark the front of the line, and 37,112 pending appeals are older than it. That’s more than a quarter of everything pending. In Direct Review it’s about half the docket, and in Evidence Submission it’s more than half.
Almost Everybody Has Been Passed
For every pending appeal, I counted how many appeals in the same docket were filed later and have already been decided. If the Board followed docket order, that number would be zero for everybody.
It’s zero for 1.7% of them. Chances are, if you are reading this and have a pending appeal, you have been passed over.
The typical waiting Evidence Submission appeal has been passed by 5,428 appeals filed after it. The typical Direct Review appeal, 3,834. One Direct Review appeal filed back in October 2019 has been passed by 127,447.
A couple of examples, straight from the Board’s own records:
Neither was advanced on the docket. Neither was a court remand. The Board pulled both kinds out of the data. So, whatever moved those two to the front of the line, it wasn’t the law.
All Hat no Cattle
“Hard cases take longer.” It is a common excuse we heard. An earlier FOIA production (25-13205-F) covers 64,528 decisions with their outcomes. In Direct Review, the typical wait was 799 days for a denial, 800 for a remand, and 823 for a grant. The longest wait, 986 days, was for “Other”: dismissals and withdrawals, about the simplest thing the Board does. How hard the case is doesn’t set the order.
"Remands come back with old dates." They do, and I checked. Take out every duplicate docket number, run it again, and the numbers don’t budge.
"Those were advanced or court cases." The Board took those out before it sent me the data.
Now, I’ll be straight with you about the limits. A Veteran who switches dockets keeps the original docket date, and these files can’t show every switch. A stay of some group of appeals could explain a cluster here and there. On March 1, 2022, for example, the Board got 290 Direct Review appeals, and 71% of them are still pending, compared with about 13% for the weeks around it. I’d sure like to know why. But none of those explanations gets you a 2022 group that’s 16 points behind a 2024 group in the same docket.
Cartwright v. Collins: One Veteran, One Docket Date
Numbers this big can go fuzzy on you, so let me put a face on it.
Mr. Cartwright filed his Notices of Disagreement on October 5 and October 25, 2020, and picked the Hearing docket. Then he waited, and waited, and waited. He finally filed a petition at the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, Cartwright v. Collins, No. 26-0888, over the Board’s out of order decisions. Naturally, I helped him ask the Court to certify a class of Veterans in the same boat.
The Court had already cracked this door open. In Willars v. Collins, No. 26-0275 (Apr. 29, 2026), it looked at fourteen Hearing docket appeals filed on a single day and found that at least eight were decided while an October 2020 appeal sat waiting. The Court wrote:
The FOIA data lets you run that same check across the entire Hearing docket.
Same place in line, years apart. Seventy-three Hearing appeals share Mr. Cartwright’s October 5, 2020, docket date and have been decided. The first one was decided August 11, 2021. The last one, July 1, 2026. Three are still waiting. Veterans standing in the exact same spot in line got their decisions four years and ten months apart. Across 850 Hearing docket dates from 2019 through 2022, the typical gap between the first and last decision on a single day is 4.4 years.
The line jumped right over him. 23,349 Hearing appeals filed after Mr. Cartwright’s have been decided, and 8,701 of them were decided before his decision finally issued on February 25, 2026. One of them was filed November 4, 2025, and decided 106 days later, one week before Mr. Cartwright got his decision after five years and four months. Only 228 Hearing appeals filed on or before his are still pending. He was among the very last of his group to be reached.
The class. The proposed class is Veterans with pending appeals filed before November 2024 whose cases are being decided out of order. On the Hearing docket, that’s 51,022 appeals, and every one of them has already been passed by at least one Hearing appeal filed after it. The typical member has been passed by 1,062. Whether the Board followed § 7107 is one question, and two columns in the Board’s own spreadsheet answer it for every member.
“Capacity” isn’t the problem. VA’s defense in these cases has been that Hearing docket delay is a capacity problem that hits everybody the same. The Board’s own records say otherwise. Over the last four half-years, total output held steady: 40,340, 42,963, 41,451, and 44,758 decisions. The Hearing docket’s share went from 8.6% to 3.9% to 3.6%, then jumped to 44.8%. That’s 1,482 Hearing decisions in the back half of 2025 and 20,032 in the first half of 2026, with no matching jump in the Board’s total output. That’s not a ceiling. That’s somebody deciding where to point the hose.
Mr. Cartwright asked the Court to make the Board hand over the data that would show when appeals are actually ready for decision: hearing dates, transcript dates, and when the record closed. On June 4, 2026, the Court said that request was premature and denied it without prejudice. So, the question is still sitting there. As the Court put it in Willars, a Veteran in this spot "is requesting merely not to be jumped in line by others in the same appeal lane."
The Line That Isn't: The Veteran's Spectator Report on Docket Order
On a phone, tap “Open full screen” to read every page.
Why It Matters
A Veteran can’t see the docket. You can’t look up your place in line, and you can’t see who got called up ahead of you. The only thing you’ve got is the promise in § 7107: wait your turn, and your turn will come.
The Board’s own records show that promise ain’t being kept, and the Board leadership sure doesn’t give a damn. This isn’t a rounding error. It’s tens of thousands of Veterans, in every docket, with no explanation tied to where they stood in line. Maybe there’s a good reason. Maybe there’s some internal process the Board has never shared that explains every bit of it. If so, the Board ought to say what it is, in writing, where a court can look at it.
Until then, the line isn’t a line. It’s a lottery. And the Veterans who’ve waited the longest are the ones losing it.
Godspeed.
The figures in this post come from the Board of Veterans’ Appeals’ FOIA responses 26-19815-F (August 25, 2026) and 25-13205-F (May 21, 2025). Nothing was added from outside data, and nothing was estimated.
