Veterans Affairs reduces claims backlog at record rate

With six weeks still left to go in fiscal 2025, the Veterans Affairs Department announced Wednesday the agency has already processed a single-year record of 2,524,115 veteran disability compensation and pension claims, exceeding last year’s previous high of 2.51 million claims processed.

Progress on the years-long backlog has ramped up significantly during the second Trump administration. According to agency officials, the veteran claims backlog has been reduced by more than 37% since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. The backlog collectively rose by about 24% during the previous Biden administration.

“Under President Trump, VA is making major improvements to better serve Veterans, and this announcement underscores that fact,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said in a statement. “We look forward to implementing more reforms to increase customer service and convenience for those we are charged with serving.”

According to statistics maintained by the Veterans Benefits Administration, the agency processed 300,000 ratings claims in July — VA’s most ever in a single month. Processing times have been sped up by 17.8% during the second Trump administration despite receipts being 10% higher than last year at the same time.

At least some of the major improvements in processing claims can be attributed to VBA’s adoption of modernization and automation technologies “aimed at speeding up the VA disability claims process,” according to VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz. 

Those efforts include automated decision support and automated review summary documents, which assists claims processors by identifying data that supports a veteran’s claim and automatically summarizes linked evidence in a veteran’s electronic folder for claims processors to quickly review. 

In addition, VBA’s Express 30 Claims Pilot program identifies certain types of disability claims that — based on automated decision support functions — claims processors can make decisions on within 30 days. 

The claims backlog has been a nearly two decades-long reality for VA, leading to Government Accountability Office audits and heated hearings from lawmakers. The claims backlog peaked at more than 600,000 in March 2013 during the second Obama administration and has ebbed and flowed, including a spike in the early 2020s after pandemic temporarily shuttered in-person health exams.

VA’s reduction in the claims backlog comes as the department conducts review of its mission and structure and after it called off mass reductions in force, opting instead to downsize its workforce through attrition.