20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Minor
Maximize VA hiring and pay authorities from the RAISE Act and PACT Act
Printed page 652 20. Department of Veterans Affairs
“Continue to maximize the use of new VA hiring and pay authorities provided by Congress in the RAISE Act and PACT Act as well as existing authorities in student loan forgiveness and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.”
What has happened
- Partially done
The education-debt authorities continue and are growing. VA's FY2027 medical programs submission reports 2,475 new Education Debt Reduction Program awards to clinical providers in hard-to-fill positions in 2025 and 11,477 active participants at year end, with about 3,000 new awards and nearly 12,600 participants projected for 2026; the FY2027 request is $230.0 million for EDRP, above the $211.0 million revised 2026 estimate, plus $2.0 million for the Specialty Education Loan Repayment Program, which placed 25 new participants in 2025 and expects 25 more in 2026. Still `partial`: nothing in the record shows VA using the RAISE Act's pay-cap authority for nurses and physician assistants, and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program the Quote names is a Department of Education program on which VA took no action. The wider context runs against "maximize": VA shed nearly 30,000 employees in FY2025 under a hiring freeze, deferred resignations and early retirement.
- Partially done
VA kept using the pay authorities Congress gave it. The annual Title 38 pay-range notice of 2025-10-24 sets department-wide minimum and maximum annual pay for VHA physicians, dentists, podiatrists and — for the first time — optometrists, added by section 142 of the Dole Act (P.L. 118-210), and applies the PACT Act's own pay authority: under Title IX section 906 of P.L. 117-168, recruitment, relocation and retention incentives and performance awards are excluded from the section 7431(e)(4) compensation cap, which is what lets VA stack incentives on top of market pay. The predecessor notice of 2025-07-25 does the same. `partial` and not `done` because this is one of the three authority families the Quote names.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- Boundary call, raised for the consistency pass: §3b makes a “continue” ask done while the thing continues, which would put this at done. It is held at partial because the Quote names four authority families and only two are documented as continuing — the ask is “maximize the use of” each of them, and for the RAISE Act nothing at all was found.
- “RAISE Act” returns nothing in the FY2027 medical programs volume and nothing in the VA Federal Register traffic for the window; the phrase in the 119th-Congress Corpus matches three unrelated bills.
- Action
- expand
- Object
- VA hiring and pay authorities under the RAISE Act and PACT Act
- ID
- 1802