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

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Notable

Change VA rules to reduce improper benefit payments and fraud

Partially done

649 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“Reduce improper payment and fraud. About $500 million is improperly paid out each year. Better tools, training, and management could reduce this substantially, but rule changes at the departmental level would be needed.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The benefits side of the ask, and its limits. The FY2027 congressional submission reports that in 2025 VA "reported under a 10% error rate for all programs for the first time since 2014", that VBA identified nearly $21 million in improper payments and 2,459 recurring improper-payment awards in 2025 and assigned all of them for correction, and that VBA's fraud, waste and abuse work now runs under EO 14243 ("Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos") and the task force created by EO 14395 of 2026-03-16, with new tools and models against payment-redirect fraud. Two things keep this short of `done`: no VA rule change of the kind the Quote names was issued — VA's benefits rulemaking in the window ran the other way, extending a debtor's waiver window from 180 days to one year (2025-11-26) — and on 2025-05-21 the Inspector General deemed the Pension program non-compliant with the Payment Integrity Information Act for a fourth consecutive year, with corrective action on unreported SSA income errors not fully in place until the end of 2027.

  2. Partially done

    The tools arrived before the rules. VA and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services established a data-matching agreement to identify providers billing both agencies for the same episode of care — "until now … VA and CMS had no system in place to prevent double billing" — reviewed six years of billings for the 5.9 million veterans enrolled in both programs, found $106 million improperly spent, and began billing overpaid providers to recover it that month. A new mechanism in place and money recovered, so `partial`; it is not the departmental rule change the Quote says would be needed, and it reaches health-care payments rather than benefit payments.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Read as “achieved by other means” (playbook §3): the reduction the Quote wanted is being pursued through interagency data matching, analytics and a fraud task force rather than through departmental rulemaking, so partial with the alternative reading recorded.
  • The Federal Register carries no VA rule aimed at improper payments in the window. A phrase search for “improper payment” across all VA documents since 2025-01-20 returns a single hit, the Uniform Guidance conformity proposed rule (2026-05-29, 2026-10817). VA’s benefit-debt rulemaking moved toward claimants: “Extending Deadline for Debtor To Request a Waiver” (2025-11-26, 2025-21242) doubles the waiver window as the Cleland Dole Act requires.
  • The Privacy Act matching-program notices published in the window (SSA/VBA 2025-07-21, SSA/VHA 2025-10-03, DOJ-BOP/VBA 2025-12-15, IRS/VBA 2025-12-16, IRS/VHA 2026-01-09) are all re-establishments of recurring matches, so they are context, not new tools.
  • “Agency Information Collection Activity: Mandatory Verification of Dependents” (2026-08-13, 2026-16500) looked like a new dependency-verification control; the notice was read in full at govinfo and is a routine PRA renewal of VA Form 21-0538 with a burden increase. Not Evidence.
Action
issue
Object
VA departmental rules on improper payments and fraud
ID
1790