Ranking Member Takano’s Remarks at Hearing on VA Disability Claims Backlog

WASHINGTON—Today, House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Ranking Member Mark Takano delivered the following opening remarks, as prepared, at today’s House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Full Committee hearingon the Department of Veterans Affairs’ disability claims backlog.

“Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here today as we examine the timeliness of VA disability claims decisions. Veterans need, want, and deserve a timely decision on their claims. Access to earned benefits and care can mean the difference between financial stability and better health, or a life of hardship. And I say thatwithout exaggeration. So yes, it is welcome news that the disability claims backlog has returned to its pre-pandemic level.

But veterans also deserve an honest accounting of how we got here and why the backlog ballooned over the last few years.

The backlog did not materialize out of thin air, nor was its trajectory a mystery. It reflects two major events. As you can see on the chart behind me, we hit a peak backlog of roughly 425,000 claims in summer 2024 and have kept trending downward since then. But there are two prominent spikes. The first spike, beginning in 2020, was driven by the COVID pandemic which no one could have predicted. The second, beginning in 2022, followed passage of the Honoring our PACT Act. And that second increase was not a failure or due to bureaucratic malfeasance. It was anticipated and intentional.

When President Joe Biden signed the PACT Act in 2022, the goal was not to suppress claims to keep numbers low. The goal was the opposite. VA accelerated implementation and surged resources to encourage veterans to come forward and file. That ensured veterans could secure their date of claim and their place in line as quickly as possible.

In other words, the backlog increase, reflected increased access. It reflected veterans finally getting into the system, many for the first time, after years of being shut out.

VA’s own projections from October 2022 anticipated this. This second chart here was created by VA just after passage of the PACT Act in October 2022 and shows projections for claims inventory and backlog based on the then-new law. You can see a projected peak of about 450,000 backlogged claims in October 2023, dropping to roughly 100,000 by February 2025. All told their projections were pretty accurate, albeit shifted to the right a few months from what we saw in the real world.

What we are seeing today is not the result of some extraordinary turnaround. It is largely the system, and hard-working VA employees, performing as expected under the weight of expanded eligibility and long-overdue access.

That context matters, especially as we hear VA boasting, and taking credit for a trend that was already happening. But there is more to this story.

There is growing concern about a distinct shift of emphasis to quantity over quality at the Department. Processing speed has become the headline metric. But veterans do not experience the VA system as a metric. They experience it as a decision that is either right or wrong from their perspective. If it is wrong, the consequences are significant, including a denial of a veterans’ access to healthcare. So, veterans deserve to know what the opportunity costs are, of the Department focusing solely on processing times.

Now I am confident in saying that veterans don’t want partisan blame-games, just as much as they don’t want partisan cheerleading sessions. Unfortunately, the nakedly political backslapping session the Majority has arranged today fails in that.

We have a single witness before us: the Department of Veterans Affairs. VA is hardly in a position to provide an independent assessment of its own performance. We are missing other key oversight voices, like the Office of the Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office, who would be able to speak objectively about the quality of VA’s claims processing work. We are missing the voice of the VA workforce, who would be able to talk about the challenges of VA’s increased emphasis on throughput, and the toll that mass firings and a return to mandatory overtime have taken.

But most importantly, we are missing the voices of veterans themselves, either individually, or collectively through their advocates in the Veterans Service Organizations. It’s impossible to justify a hearing by this committee on VA’s claims system without including a single actual user of the system or the service officers who help veterans navigate it every day.

We need to hear beyond the carefully honed talking points VA will deliver. We need to know what is actually happening on the ground, from veterans and those service officers who are helping them navigate this complex process. We raised the need for other voices to the Majority more than a month ago, and sadly we were rebuffed. And so here we are with only VA before us…

Nevertheless, we on our side will do our best to draw out what is actually happening with disability claims processing, beyond just how fast claims are moving.

A quick decision is well and good. But if we’re moving so quickly that errors are made, or if we’re simply rushing to denials, there are downstream effects we must consider.

Anecdotally, but consistently, we are hearing that claim processing errors are rising and denial rates are increasing. That, of course, is problematic.

Premature or erroneous denials lead to more appeals, where timelines are measured in years, and not months.

So, it is imperative that the Veterans Benefits Administration get it right the first time. Because any delay in getting a veteran their earned benefits is a problem. It can lead to the denial of healthcare and needless suffering. We need to spend this committee’s time finding solutions to the problems veterans face, not on engineering victory laps for the administration so it can pat itself on the back for simply doing what it is supposed to do.

But our responsibility remains the same. The question before us is not just how fast claims are moving, but whether we are getting them right the first time. Unfortunately, the structure of today’s hearing makes that harder to assess.

We need a clear understanding of what is actually happening in claims processing. Not just how quickly decisions are issued, but whether those decisions are accurate, durable, and fair to the veterans who depend on them. Veterans deserve both speed and accuracy, because one without the other is not success. It is simply delay in another uniform.

I yield back.”

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