Expanding Health Care Providers for Veterans Act

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Bill ID: 119/hr/5985
Last Updated: November 12, 2025

Sponsored by

Rep. Tlaib, Rashida [D-MI-12]

ID: T000481

Follow the money

The bill

Expanding Health Care Providers for Veterans Act

HR. 5985, 119th Congress — read as touching Hospitals & Health Systems.

The sponsor

Rep. Tlaib, Rashida [D-MI-12]

Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.

The money

$100,800 raised

28 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.

The alignment

95% match to Project 2025

This bill's text tracks the "Department of Veterans Affairs" section, p. 688-691 of the Mandate for Leadership.

Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law

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Committee Review

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Floor Action

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Passed Senate

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House Review

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Passed Congress

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Became Law

📚 How does a bill become a law?

1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.

2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.

3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.

4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.

5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.

6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.

7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!

Bill Summary

Another masterpiece of legislative theater, courtesy of the esteemed members of Congress. Let's dissect this farce and uncover the real disease beneath.

**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The "Expanding Health Care Providers for Veterans Act" (HR 5985) claims to address the shortage of healthcare providers at the Department of Veterans Affairs by removing numerical limitations on nonimmigrant aliens employed in these roles. How touching. The sponsors, including Ms. Tlaib and her cohorts, want us to believe they're championing veterans' health care. Please.

**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill amends the Immigration and Nationality Act to exempt certain nonimmigrant aliens working at the VA from numerical limitations on visas. It also creates a new category of exempt workers, including those employed by State homes recognized by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Oh, and it conveniently overrides any Presidential proclamations or executive orders that might restrict these nonimmigrants' entry into the United States.

**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The VA, veterans, and (surprise!) big healthcare corporations stand to benefit from this bill. The latter will likely hire more cheap foreign labor, while the VA gets to claim it's addressing its staffing shortages. Meanwhile, American workers in the healthcare sector might want to start polishing their résumés.

**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a symptom of a deeper disease – the chronic inability of our politicians to address real problems. Instead of investing in domestic workforce development or improving working conditions for VA employees, they're opting for a quick fix that benefits corporate interests and perpetuates the exploitation of foreign workers.

The "Expanding Health Care Providers for Veterans Act" is nothing more than a cynical ploy to appease voters while serving the interests of powerful lobbies. It's a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, designed to distract from the systemic issues plaguing our healthcare system.

In conclusion, this bill is a masterclass in legislative sleight-of-hand. Behind the façade of "helping veterans," it's just another example of our politicians' boundless creativity in serving special interests while ignoring the needs of their constituents. Bravo, Congress. You've managed to make a mockery of the legislative process once again.

Related Topics

Military & Veterans AffairsImmigration & Border Security
Generated using Llama 3.1 70B (Dr. Haus personality)

💰 Campaign Finance Network

Rep. Tlaib, Rashida [D-MI-12]

Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle

Total Contributions
$100,800
26 donors
PACs
$0
Organizations
$9,500
Committees
$0
Individuals
$91,300

No PAC contributions found

1
ANH MANAGEMENT LLC
1 transaction
$2,500
2
FALAH VENTURES LLC
1 transaction
$2,000
3
LAW OFFICE OF AFFAR BAKSH LLC
1 transaction
$1,000
4
A. ARMUSANDNEEBOM CONSULTING LLC
1 transaction
$1,000
5
NADIM ISLAM EMERGENCY SERVICES, PLLC
1 transaction
$1,000
6
KHALAF LLC
1 transaction
$1,000
7
MEHRIZI PROPERTIES LLC
1 transaction
$500
8
MR AND MOSTAK LLC
1 transaction
$500

No committee contributions found

1
MAHMOUD, ANNA F.
1 transaction
$13,200
2
HAMARSHI, MAJDI
2 transactions
$11,600
3
BARAKAT, AMANI
2 transactions
$10,000
4
MALAS, MOHANNAD
1 transaction
$9,300
5
ALAUSU, SAYF
1 transaction
$4,300
6
BEARAT, LINA
1 transaction
$3,300
7
DUDUM, ANDREW
1 transaction
$3,300
8
MUGHNI, ANJUM
1 transaction
$3,300
9
MCFADDEN, JIM
1 transaction
$3,300
10
BASHA, AHMAD
1 transaction
$3,300
11
RAHMAN, ZIAUR
1 transaction
$3,300
12
SARAFA, RANDALL
1 transaction
$3,300
13
NASR, KRISTINA
1 transaction
$3,300
14
KANDIL, MARIAM
1 transaction
$3,300
15
ALSAWAH, SAMIR
1 transaction
$3,300
16
KHALDI, AHMAD
1 transaction
$3,300
17
DUDUM, RON
1 transaction
$3,300
18
ATTIA, MAGED
1 transaction
$3,300

Donor Network - Rep. Tlaib, Rashida [D-MI-12]

PACs
Organizations
Individuals
Politicians

Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.

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Showing 39 nodes and 28 connections (53 secondary connections hidden)

Total contributions: $100,800

Top Donors - Rep. Tlaib, Rashida [D-MI-12]

Showing top 25 donors by contribution amount

8 Orgs18 Individuals

Industry Impact

Which industries are materially affected by specific provisions in this bill. 1 helped.

  • Section 2(a)(3) adds a new subparagraph (D) allowing nonimmigrant aliens employed at the Department of Veterans Affairs or a State home to be exempt from numerical limitations on H-1B visas, which expands the pool of eligible foreign health care workers for VA facilities and State veterans homes, directly benefiting hospitals and health systems that employ such workers.

Who funds the sponsor on these industries

For each industry this bill affects, here's what the sponsor (Rep. Tlaib, Rashida [D-MI-12])received from donors associated with that industry during the 2022–present cycles. Donations are not proof of intent — they are a record of who funds the people writing the law.

Industries this bill HELPS

  • from 42 contributions
    • MAHMOUD, ANNA F.$13,200
    • MIRZA-GEORGE, NAUREEN$3,300
    • ALAVI, MUBARIKA$1,350
    • AKSU, ZEHRA$1,005
    • ABDELJABER, HAYAT$900

Project 2025 Policy Matches

This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.AI-enhanced analysis provides detailed alignment ratings.

Department of Veterans Affairs

Very Strong
Vector: 64%
Pages: 688-691AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"HR 5985 directly implements Project 2025's VA objective of improving veteran healthcare access by removing barriers to hiring foreign-born healthcare professionals, thereby addressing workforce shortages and expanding provider capacity."

Key themes:veteran healthcare accessworkforce shortage reliefexpanding provider capacityimmigration exemption for VA staffimproving care quality

— 655 — Department of Veterans Affairs ENDNOTES 1. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Division, VHA Directive 1003, “VHA Veteran Patient Experience,” April 14, 2020, pp. 1 and B-1. 2. S. 2372, VA Mission Act of 2018, Public Law No. 115-182, 115th Congress, June 6, 2018, https://www.congress. gov/115/plaws/publ182/PLAW-115publ182.pdf (accessed January 30, 2023). 3. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, VA History Office, “VA History,” last updated May 27, 2021, https://www. va.gov/HISTORY/VA_History/Overview.asp (accessed January 28, 2023). 4. 38 U.S. Code § 1116, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/38/1116 (accessed January 28, 2023). 5. S. 3373, Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022 (Honoring Our PACT Act of 2022), Public Law No. 117-168, 117th Congress, August 10, 2022, https://www. congress.gov/117/plaws/publ168/PLAW-117publ168.pdf (accessed January 28, 2023). 6. H.R. 2471, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, Public Law No. 117-103, 117th Congress, March 15, 2022, Division S, Title I, https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ103/PLAW-117publ103.pdf (accessed March 18, 2023). Known variously as the Department of Veterans Affairs Nurse and Physician Assistant Retention and Income Security Enhancement Act and the VA Nurse and Physician Assistant RAISE Act. 7. See note 5, supra.

Department of Veterans Affairs

Strong
Vector: 65%
Pages: 679-681AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"HR 5985 aligns strongly with Project 2025's VA personnel objectives by addressing recruitment and retention challenges through expanding the healthcare workforce, particularly in high-demand specialties, which supports goals like increasing patient throughput and leveraging talent in strained markets."

Key themes:workforce recruitmentaddressing staffing shortagesincreasing patient accesshigh-demand specialtiesVA healthcare capacity

— 647 — Department of Veterans Affairs reimagine the health care footprint in some locales, and spur a realignment of capacity through budgetary allocations. Specifically: 1. Embrace the expansion of Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) as an avenue to maintain a VA footprint in challenging medical markets without investing further in obsolete and unaffordable VA health care campuses. 2. Explore the potential to pilot facility-sharing partnerships between the VA and strained local health care systems to reduce costs by leveraging limited talent and resources. Personnel l Extend the term of the Under Secretary for Health (USH) to five years. Additionally, authority should be given to reappoint this individual for a second five-year term both to allow for continuity and to protect the USH from political transition. l Establish a Senior Executive Service (SES) position of VHA Care System Chief Information Officer (CIO), selected by and reporting to the chief of the VHA Care System with a dotted line to the VA CIO. l Identify a workflow process to bring wait times in compliance with VA MISSION Act–required time frames wherever possible. 1. Assess the daily clinical appointment load for physicians and clinical staff in medical facilities where wait times for care are well outside of the time frames required by the VA MISSION Act. 2. Require VHA facilities to increase the number of patients seen each day to equal the number seen by DOD medical facilities: approximately 19 patients per provider per day. Currently, VA facilities may be seeing as few as six patients per provider per day. 3. Consider a pilot program to extend weekday appointment hours and offer Saturday appointment options to veterans if a facility continues to demonstrate that it has excess capacity and is experiencing delays in the delivery of care for veterans. 4. Identify clinical services that are consistently in high demand but require cost-prohibitive compensation to recruit and retain talent, and examine exceptions for higher competitive pay. — 648 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 5. Assess the medical facilities where Community Care is readily available but referrals for Community Care are below the averages in other similar markets, referrals expiring are above the average, and/ or canceled appointments are above the average. Identify reasons and factors and consider possible ways to improve timeliness and responsiveness for veterans. 6. Further explore how to leverage telehealth to reduce personnel costs across the enterprise and serve veterans. Continue to pursue expansion of broadband services to remote and rural areas. 7. Assess recruitment and retention in highly competitive medical markets to identify common limiting factors for attracting high-demand, specialized occupations. 8. Consider aggressively recruiting retired physicians who desire to serve veterans. 9. Consider expanding VA tuition assistance in exchange for reciprocal service in rural or understaffed VAMCs. 10. Examine the surpluses or deficits in mental health professionals throughout the enterprise, recognizing that the department needs a blend of social workers, therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists with a focus on attracting high-quality talent. l Conduct a high-priority assessment of Electronic Health Record (EHR) transition delays and functionality problems. VA innovation in health care for the next 20 years and beyond will rest squarely on the timely implementation of the new VHA EHR in coordination with the DOD’s parallel pacing effort. The VA’s EHR rollout has been blocked by technical delays at local facilities where personnel have raised safety concerns and infrastructure has not been modernized to accept the new system. VETERANS BENEFITS ADMINISTRATION (VBA) Needed Reforms The most evident and ongoing concern is the complexity of benefits, which can lead to confusion for the veteran and, if not mitigated early in the veteran’s interactions, long-term distrust of and animosity toward the VA. Wholesale ben- efits reform is unnecessary and politically a “third rail,” but effective managerial

Department of Veterans Affairs

Moderate
Vector: 65%
Pages: 676-678AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"Both the bill and the Project 2025 VA section aim to address VA workforce shortages and improve veterans' access to care, but the bill focuses narrowly on immigration exemptions for healthcare workers while Project 2025 emphasizes broader hiring needs, claims processing, and conservative governance reforms."

Key themes:VA workforce shortagehealthcare access for veteranshiring needscommunity care

— 643 — Department of Veterans Affairs with a growth in same-day surgical procedures and outpatient care, so has the VA, and in 2018 Congress added access to private-sector urgent care outlets as one of the VA’s health care benefits. Today, the VA operates 172 inpatient VA Medical Centers (VAMCs), which are an average of 60 years old, and 1,113 Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs), which are newer facilities designed to meet the needs of veterans closer to home. The VA also manages a Community Care Network (CCN) through contracts with Optum and TriWest, third-party health care administrators responsible for build- ing and maintaining a robust population of community providers to meet the needs of veterans referred for care outside of the VA system. Currently, approximately 6.4 million veterans out of 18 million nationally (and out of the 9.1 million who are enrolled) use the VA for health care; the remainder use employer-sponsored plans, Tricare, Medicare, and Medicaid. The disability benefits system evolved significantly in the years between the Cold War era and the global war on terrorism, a period when the VA enrolled large numbers of veterans from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam who were seeking disability benefits and health care. Disability compensation is the largest VA benefit, but there also are dozens of others, the next largest of which are the GI Bill and the Home Loan Guaranty. These benefits are administered through 56 Regional Benefits Offices (RBOs) and hundreds of satellite sites around the country. The Agent Orange Act of 19914 significantly expanded the scope of disability ben- efits for those who had deployed to Vietnam, and the cost of those benefits began to increase dramatically as the Vietnam generation of veterans aged and began to expe- rience adverse health conditions, some of which were presumed to have been caused by defoliant chemicals used in Southeast Asia. In 2016 and 2017, a burdensome backlog of appeals of denied disability claims from multiple wartime generations—a backlog numbering in the hundreds of thousands—led to a joint effort by the VA, Vet- eran Service Organizations (VSOs), and Congress to pass legislation that streamlined appeal processes. Implemented in 2017, this historic “good governance” success has helped the VA to reduce the number of these appeals dramatically. The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 20225 addressed adverse health outcomes presumed to be the result of veterans’ exposure to airborne toxins during the global war on terrorism and further expanded disability benefits to the most recent gen- eration of veterans. These ambitious authorities, like the 1991 authorities, have the potential to overwhelm the VA’s ability to process new disability claims and adjudicate appeals. Currently, the VA is seeking to hire large numbers of personnel to process these claims while exploring the use of an automated process to accel- erate claims reviews and decisions. The ever-present lag in the hiring and training of new employees could result in major problems with the timely adjudication of benefits well into the next Administration in 2025. — 644 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise In sum, the VA for the foreseeable future will experience significant fiscal, human capital, and infrastructure crosswinds and risks. Budgets are at historic highs, and with a workforce now above 400,000, the VA is contending with a lack of new veteran enrollees to offset the declining population of older veterans. Recruitment of medical and benefits personnel has become more challenging. Veterans are migrating from the northern states to the southern and western states for retirement and employment. Meanwhile, VA information technol- ogy (IT) is struggling to keep pace with the evolution of patient care and record keeping. Consequently, VA leaders in the next Administration must be wise and courageous political strategists, experienced managers to run day-to-day oper- ations more effectively, innovators to address the changing veteran landscape, and agile “fixers” to mitigate and repair systemic problems created or ignored by the present leadership team. VETERANS HEALTH ADMINISTRATION (VHA) Needed Reforms l Rescind all departmental clinical policy directives that are contrary to principles of conservative governance starting with abortion services and gender reassignment surgery. Neither aligns with service-connected conditions that would warrant VA’s providing this type of clinical care, and both follow the Left’s pernicious trend of abusing the role of government to further its own agenda. l Focus on the effects of shifting veteran demographics. At least during the next decade, the VA will experience a significant generational shift in its overall patient population. Of the approximately 18 million veterans alive today, roughly 9.1 million are enrolled for VA health care, and 6.4 million of these enrollees use VA health care consistently. These 6.4 million veterans are split almost evenly between those who are over age 65 and those who are under age 65, but the share of VA’s health care dollars is spent predominantly in the over-65 cohort. That share increases significantly as veterans live longer and use the VHA system at a higher rate. VHA enrollments of new users are increasingly at risk of being exceeded by the deaths of current enrollees, primarily because significant numbers of the Vietnam generation are reaching their life expectancy. The generational transition from Vietnam-era veterans to post-9/11 veterans will take several years to complete. The ongoing demographic transition is a catalyst for needed assessments of how the VA can improve the delivery of care to a numerically declining and differently dispersed national population

Showing 3 of 5 policy matches

About These Correlations

Policy matches are calculated using a hybrid approach: initial candidates are found using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text, then an AI model (Llama 3.1 70B) provides detailed alignment ratings and analysis. Ratings range from 1 (minimal alignment) to 5 (very strong alignment). This analysis does not imply direct causation or intent.

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