Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Major

Accelerate VASRD reviews to cut disability ratings for future claimants

Not started

650 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“The next Administration should explore how VASRD reviews could be accelerated with clearance from OMB to target significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants while preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Ten days later VA rescinded the interim final rule and restored the prior regulatory text, effective immediately. Nothing in the VA Schedule for Rating Disabilities has been revised to cut awards for future claimants, and no accelerated VASRD review has been proposed: the only three rating-schedule proposals published since 2025-01-20 are narrow diagnostic-code items, two of which (endometriosis, bradycardia) would widen entitlement rather than narrow it.

  2. Attempted

    VA's only cost-driven amendment to the rating schedule in the window: an interim final rule amending 38 CFR 4.10, effective on publication, to stop examiners discounting the ameliorative effects of medication when rating a disability. VA said the rule was "needed immediately" to head off the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims' decision in *Ingram v. Collins*, 38 Vet. App. 130 (2025), which "could be applied broadly to over 500 separate diagnostic codes, requiring re-adjudications of over 350,000 currently pending claims" — a workload and cost rationale, not the accelerated body-system VASRD review the Mandate describes, and one that reaches pending claimants rather than sparing them.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Negative searches, 2026-08-27:

  • Federal Register API full text, conditions[term]="Schedule for Rating Disabilities", conditions[agencies][]=veterans-affairs-department, publication date on or after 2025-01-20 — seven documents in total: two Advisory Committee on Disability Compensation meeting notices (2025-06-30, 2025-07-11), three proposed rules on single diagnostic codes (“Objective Evidence of Pain for Painful Scars Under DC 7804”, 2025-09-29; “Eliminating the Requirement for Laparoscopy To Establish Service Connection for Endometriosis”, 2025-10-01; “Providing a Minimum Evaluation for Bradycardia”, 2026-01-30), and the medication pair cited above. No body-system rewrite, and nothing framed as accelerating the VASRD review cycle.
  • Corpus: every Federal Register rule and proposed rule with VA as an agency since 2025-01-20 (39 documents, read by title) — same result.
  • No OMB or OIRA clearance document for a VASRD review was found; reginfo.gov, which would carry the unified agenda entry, is outside the Corpus and was not queried.
  • The Advisory Committee on Disability Compensation is the statutory body that recommends VASRD revisions; its 2025 meeting notices are leads for a future check of whether an accelerated review has been commissioned.
Action
restrict
Object
VA Schedule for Rating Disabilities (VASRD)
ID
1791