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

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Minor

Bring VA wait times into compliance with VA MISSION Act time frames

Partially done

647 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“Identify a workflow process to bring wait times in compliance with VA MISSION Act–required time frames wherever possible.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    VA identified and deployed a workflow process aimed squarely at the MISSION Act time frames: the External Provider Scheduling system, which gives VA schedulers direct access to participating community providers’ booking systems. VA says EPS was implemented at every VA facility by late 2025, raises a scheduler’s throughput from a handful of community-care appointments a day to as many as 25, and covers 27,000 participating providers across 78 specialties. That is the mechanism the Quote asks for. It is partial and not done because it works on the community-care side of the MISSION Act — the remedy when VA cannot meet the 20/28-day and 30/60-minute standards — and VA has published no figures showing its own wait times brought into compliance.

Research log

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

Research notes

Queries and sources, 2026-09-01:

  • news.va.gov press-release searches wait times, appointments, scheduling, MISSION Act.
  • Corpus grep wait time across every Federal Register file, presidential actions, bills and public laws — two hits, neither a VA action. Federal Register API, conditions[agencies][]=veterans-affairs-department from 2025-01-20 — no rule or notice amending the access standards at 38 CFR 17.4040.
  • Related but not this ask, so recorded here: VA reports completing 82,083,918 direct care appointments in FY2025, up 4.1% on FY2024 (https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-hospitals-earn-record-high-quality-ratings-in-2026-cms-report/). Volume is not wait-time compliance.
  • Congress has a vehicle of its own — S. 654, external provider scheduling, and H.R. 3482, Veterans Community Care Scheduling Improvement Act — neither enacted.
  • Boundary call (partial vs attempted) raised in the spot-check register.
Action
other
Object
VA MISSION Act wait-time compliance
ID
1774