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

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Minor

Create pay exceptions for hard-to-recruit high-demand clinical services

Partially done

647 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“Identify clinical services that are consistently in high demand but require cost-prohibitive compensation to recruit and retain talent, and examine exceptions for higher competitive pay.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    One high-demand clinical occupation was moved into VA’s higher competitive pay authority: VA updated the annual pay ranges under 38 U.S.C. 7431 to include optometrists alongside physicians, dentists and podiatrists, saying the placement is “intended to enhance the flexibility of the Department to recruit, develop, and retain the most highly qualified optometrists”. That is a pay exception for an identified hard-to-recruit service, so a piece of the ask is delivered. It is partial and not done because the addition implements a provision of the Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act rather than an administration exercise, and no wider identification of consistently high-demand, cost-prohibitive clinical services or of further pay exceptions was published.

Research log

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

Research notes

Judgment call and sources, 2026-09-01:

  • The alternative reading is not started: the annual pay-range notice is a recurring statutory exercise and the optometrist addition was Congress’s doing, so on a strict reading the administration examined nothing. It is leveled partial because the Secretary prescribed the ranges and the effect — an exception carrying a high-demand clinical service into the physician/dentist pay system — is the thing the Quote asks to be examined and created. Raised as a boundary row in the spot-check register.
  • Federal Register API, exact phrases "annual pay ranges" (2 documents, 2025-07-25 and 2025-10-24) and "special salary rate" (0) with conditions[agencies][]=veterans-affairs-department from 2025-01-20.
  • news.va.gov press-release searches pay, recruitment, retention — no identification exercise across clinical services.
  • Overlaps #1801 and #1802 (p. 652, another agent’s range), which cover VA pay and hiring authorities more generally; flagged for the ticket 26 consistency review.
Action
other
Object
Competitive pay exceptions for high-demand clinical services
ID
1778