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

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Notable

Overhaul the Family Caregiver Program expansion

Partially done

646 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“Section 161 (overhauling Family Caregiver Program expansion, which has gone poorly, so that it focuses on consistency of eligibility and awareness that the most severely wounded or injured may require the program indefinitely).”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    VA adopted the extension as a final rule: the legacy cohort keeps PCAFC eligibility and its stipend level, without reassessment-driven reduction, through 2028-09-30. That delivers the part of the Quote about consistency of eligibility and about the most severely wounded needing the program for a long time, and it is the only structural change to the sec. 161 expansion in the window. It is not the overhaul the Quote asks for: the wider PCAFC redesign is still the proposed rule VA published on 2024-12-06 and has not finalized, and the only other in-window PCAFC rule (2026-02-13) merely removes a spent COVID-19 home-visit flexibility.

  2. Attempted

    VA announced it would propose a rule extending Program of Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers eligibility for the “legacy” cohort — roughly 15,000 participants and applicants from before 2020-10-01 — through 2028-09-30, “while VA continues the rulemaking process to refine the program”. An announcement of intent, with nothing yet in force.

Research log

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

Research notes

Queries and sources, 2026-09-01:

  • Corpus: every VA rule and proposed rule since 2025-01-20 (39 documents, read by title). The PCAFC items are the legacy-cohort extension (2025-09-29) and the removal of the COVID-19 home visit regulation (2026-02-13, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/02/13/2026-02978/home-visits-in-program-of-comprehensive-assistance-for-family-caregivers-during-covid-19-national), plus two information-collection notices for the PCAFC decision appeal form.
  • news.va.gov press releases 2025-07-18 (announcement) and 2025-11-20 (announcing the final rule as published Sept. 29). The 2025-11-20 release is the source for the “nearly 15,000 legacy participants” figure and for VA’s statement that it “will continue to consider additional changes to PCAFC, as outlined in a proposed rule published Dec. 6, 2024”; the Federal Register rule is cited in preference to it as the Primary record of the action itself.
  • Corpus bills.ndjson: five caregiver bills in the 119th Congress, none enacted and none reaching a floor vote; they do not move this ask.
  • Section number confirmed against the VA MISSION Act table of contents: sec. 161, “Expansion of family caregiver program”.
Action
other
Object
Family Caregiver Program
ID
1765