Paul Rushing had a stroke at age 54 and a pulmonary embolism without any of the typical underlying issues. He has a hard time walking 100 yards without having to rest.
In Rushing’s estimation, the issues stem back to his time in the Army when he was exposed to toxic chemicals while serving at Fort Polk in Louisiana, later found to have unsafe levels of “forever chemicals” in its groundwater.
Earlier this year, the Department of Veterans Affairs denied Rushing’s claim. The department’s justification confounded him; it said a doctor had found that his illness was not connected to his service, something his doctor had never even evaluated. The denial letter mentioned medical issues entirely unrelated to his situation.
“Copy-paste errors” from a response to another veteran, Rushing concluded.
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The Trump administration has committed to “faster decisions, better service and more benefits for the men and women who have worn the uniform,” as Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins said in July. Its efforts have ushered in remarkable progress: the backlog of claims — defined by cases that have languished for at least 125 days — now sits at around 70,000, down from more than 400,000 in March 2024.
Those results, however, have come at a cost, VA employees, attorneys, advocates and veterans themselves said: The Trump administration keeps getting things wrong.
“We’re getting more decisions but they’re not good decisions,” said Wesley McCauley, an accredited agent who assists veterans in navigating their claims as CEO of United Veteran’s Disability, adding that the mistakes increasingly do not involve complex legal matters. “These are just very clear errors that just should not be missed with just a little bit of review.”
In its efforts to cut through the backlog, the administration’s mistakes have instead drawn out cases in appeals’ processes.
The number of pending “higher-level reviews,” an intermediary step for veterans seeking a second review of their claim before going to the Board of Veterans’ Appeals, has seen a 100% spike since Trump took office.
An appeals board employee, one of roughly 1,000 attorneys on the panel that veterans can turn to if their claims are denied, said their agency was receiving more cases from the regional offices with “very basic errors,” including “egregious” mistakes that “would have been caught in times past.”
“The errors that we’re seeing have just been exploding in the last year and a half,” said Derek Debus, who leads the Stone Rose law firm’s military and veterans practice. His office is emailing adjudicators 10-15 times per week because they missed something on a claim.
Rushing currently has multiple higher-level reviews pending. In July, he sent a supplemental doctor’s note — from a VA physician — linking additional health issues to his service.
The VA responded in just days, again denying the claim. The adjudicator failed to assess the new evidence, according to documents reviewed by NOTUS.
The VA stipend would “allow me to focus on my health and not be out chasing dollars every day,” Rushing said. “It wouldn’t replace my income but it would make life easier.” In the meantime, Rushing is still working every day.
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Earlier this year, the Veterans Benefits Administration told staff if the agency met its lofty “Freedom 250” goals for backlog reduction, employees would receive an extra day off and 10 days of telework. That was the carrot.
There was also a stick.
Collins has made it harder for staff to meet production and availability targets. He unilaterally terminated the VA’s union agreements last year, and while the matter remains subject to litigation, it has, in the meantime, allowed him to impose new conditions on employees without negotiation. Shortly after terminating the union contracts, the VA increased the quota of cases for appeal board attorneys. Collins also reinstated mandatory overtime and increased automation.
The work environment has driven burnout and mistakes, employees said. They are facing extraordinary pressure from their supervisors and VA headquarters to produce at all costs, likening VA disability claims to widgets that must be processed.
“At the end of the day, the number one thing is making the numbers, making the secretary look good, because if you don’t there’s going to be a problem,” one Veterans Benefits Administration employee said. “Everyone is afraid.”
Any staffer who misses their production or availability targets — employees must be actively working on cases 80% of the work hours in a given year — is subject to a performance improvement plan that can lead to termination. Employees lamented that they no longer get a reprieve from management’s demands when they are having IT issues, meet with a supervisor, sit in trainings or even when the VA’s systems are down. Employees who take 12 weeks that the government allows for paid parental leave, for example, would not hit the 80% annual availability requirement.
“There has been a bigger push to get cases out as quickly as possible,” another Veterans Benefits Administration employee said. “The pressure is there to produce, produce, produce.”
Veterans Benefits Administration staff are “rushing through files and making mistakes, and that’s a disservice to the veteran,” one worker said. Given their burdens, said Debus, some staff are “incentivized to say, ‘AI said it’s good, I’ll just click approve.’”
The VA’s approach is self-serving, several employees said: If a veteran appeals a denied claim, it resets the clock for the case back to zero; it makes the backlog look smaller without actually resolving a veteran’s need.
Internal VA data obtained by NOTUS supports fears that the department is just denying claims to move quickly. The VA denied 35% of claims in fiscal year 2024, the last year fully under then-President Joe Biden’s watch. That jumped to 38% in fiscal year 2025 and climbed to 39% in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026. The department completed nearly 30,000 more claims in October through December 2025 compared to the same period two years prior, though it granted 9,000 fewer.
Employees are evaluated for how quickly they move cases but face less pressure for accuracy.
“There’s a lot of pressure to get these claims adjudicated quickly, even if it’s sloppily done,” the board attorney said. “The problem is it doesn’t really address the root issue of the backlog if you’re just denying claims arbitrarily. We have to remand, and it goes back to the regional office and they have to correct that.”
Some of the cases are so complex they involve thousands of pages, or have festered for so long that they include notes hand written during the Vietnam War. Attorneys with the agency are “absolutely” making more mistakes in the current environment, an employee said, and are remanding cases after they find the first mistake instead of conducting a comprehensive review.
“If there are additional errors, that’s someone else’s problem to address because you need to hit your production goal,” the board attorney said. The quota creates “perverse incentives. Everything is just about the numbers so you have to push the numbers as fast as you can.”
Around 97% of Board of Veterans’ Appeals attorneys said the new quotas “increased the likelihood of factual or legal errors in board decisions,” according to a recent survey of staff commissioned by the American Federation of Government Employees chapter that represents the employees. Ninety-three percent said they no longer had time to conduct a completely fresh review of an appeal.
“Respondents described spending less time reviewing case files, supporting evidence and legal authorities in order to meet the biweekly quota,” according to the survey.
Quinn Slaven, a VA spokesperson, said the administration’s approach has led to its success in lowering the backlog so dramatically. He noted that the VA’s internal metrics show accuracy rates increasing.
“Whereas the Biden administration judged the department’s performance by how many people it employed and how much money it spent, the Trump administration is solely focused on measuring VA’s success by how well it serves veterans,” Slaven said.
As for the promised day off and telework, the Veterans Benefits Administration missed its stated goal of bringing the backlog down to its lowest point ever. While the agency got below 70,000 claims, it fell just short of its 64,000-claim goal.
“They were teasing the extra day off only to say, ‘Oh sorry, you didn’t meet it,’” another Veterans Benefits Administration employee said.
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The VA saw a rush of new claimants after Biden signed the PACT Act in 2022, a bipartisan law that made millions of veterans newly eligible for benefits for toxic exposures during their service.
In anticipation of a surge in claims, the Veterans Benefits Administration added 7,300 claims processors, a more than 50% increase, under Biden. The case inventory fell nearly in half between its spike in early 2024 and Trump’s inauguration, as new hires got trained up and put on the job. The more recent headway marks a continuation of that trend.
The Veterans Benefits Administration has shed 2,400 claims processors under Trump, though it recently began to reopen hiring for the roles. Overall, the VA’s benefits shop has lost 5,000 employees under the current administration, or 15% of its workforce.
Staffing shortages have only exacerbated pressures, employees said.
The VA is walking a tightrope as it slashes its claims backlog, with congressionally chartered veterans service organizations like Veterans of Foreign Wars warning Congress that the department cannot sacrifice accuracy for speed.
The VA has insisted its accuracy has not waned during its recent push, a claim supported by its public-facing data. Around 83% of claims are error free, an increase from a nadir of around 79% when the backlog hit its recent high point in 2024.
Some outside groups and attorneys have questioned the VA’s methodology, though the department has said it draws from a statistically significant random sample. Scott Hope, the national service director for Disabled American Veterans, said the public has little insight into the internal data that underlies the VA’s public error rates. The group has asked the department’s inspector general to examine that process, he said.
Lisa Van Haeren, director of the VA inspector general’s evaluations and audits office, told NOTUS that the Veterans Benefits Administration is so production oriented that “it’s at the expense of quality.” She noted the agency internally uses a limited checklist to identify errors, whereas the inspector general’s auditors aim to identify any claim decision misaligned with department policy or federal law.
“We find a higher error rate” than the VA does internally, Van Haeren said.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims — a body outside the executive branch where veterans can take their case if they are unsuccessful before the VA’s internal board — saw appeals spike to a record high in fiscal year 2025 as the VA processed more claims. Cases that reach that level have historically maintained a high remand rate, a trend that continued under Trump and Collins. Of the more than 10,000 appeals before the court it received in fiscal year 2025, 9,600 of them contained errors.
“How can you say we’re reversing the backlog if the court is drowning,” said McCauley, the veterans advocate.
One employee, who works on cases involving military sexual trauma, said the work, coupled with the mandatory extra hours and pressure from management, is draining. Some days, the burden becomes personal.
“I don’t feel like I did a good job for these veterans today,” the employee recalled recently telling a family member. “I’m really tired. I feel really guilty about it.”
Like others, the employee said they are driven by the mission to serve veterans and a desire to treat every claim “with the utmost care because they are real people behind the paper.”
“Some days I go, ‘Did I do a good enough job on that person?’” the staffer said, begrudging VA management for the unrelenting intensity the workplace demands have placed on employees. “I want to do a good job for the veteran, but they make it hard.”
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