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

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Major · Needs Congress

Codify VA MISSION Act Community Care access standards in legislation

Not started

645 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“If the makeup of Congress is favorable in 2025, the next Administration should rapidly and explicitly codify VA MISSION Act access standards in legislation to prevent the VA from avoiding or watering down the requirements in the future.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The vehicle exists and has not moved. H.R. 740, the Veterans' ACCESS Act of 2025, would do exactly what the Mandate asks — its § 101(a) amends 38 U.S.C. 1703B to "establish[] in statute access standards that determine when a veteran is eligible to receive non-VA care" through the Veterans Community Care Program, in place of the drive-time and wait-time standards VA now sets by regulation. The House Committee on Veterans' Affairs ordered it reported, as amended, by voice vote on 2025-07-23, and it had gone no further by 2026-08-27: no House floor vote, no Senate action, no enactment. A related bill, H.R. 3132 (CHOICE for Veterans Act of 2025, reported 2025-05-06), covers fee-basis care rather than access standards. Neither the FY2026 nor the FY2027 budget request carries a legislative proposal to codify the standards. Under the playbook's rule for Requires-Congress asks, committee action short of passage by a chamber leaves the Status at `not-started`.

Research log

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

Research notes

Queries and sources, 2026-08-27:

  • Corpus bills.ndjson / public-laws.ndjson, titles matching community care|access standard|MISSION Act|Veterans ACCESS|Choice — H.R. 740 and H.R. 3132 are the only community-care vehicles; no public law of the 119th Congress touches the access standards.
  • congress.gov API (/v3/bill/119/hr/740 and /summaries) confirmed both the bill’s content and that its latest action is still the 2025-07-23 committee report. The congress.gov page itself refuses automated fetches, so the govinfo.gov text of the introduced bill is cited instead; the reported-amended text was not published as a separate BILLS- package that could be read.
  • The FY2026 discretionary request and the FY2027 President’s Budget were read for a legislative proposal on community care: both mention community care only in IT and claims-payment contexts.
  • Evidence date note: the bill was introduced 2025-01-24; the event is dated to the committee action of 2025-07-23, which is the furthest the ask has traveled.
Action
create
Object
Legislation codifying VA MISSION Act access standards
ID
1760