Sponsored by
Sen. Moran, Jerry [R-KS]
ID: M000934
Follow the money
The bill
S. 1533, 119th Congress — read as touching Hospitals & Health Systems.
The sponsor
Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.
The money
20 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.
The alignment
This bill's text tracks the "Introduction" section, p. 682-684 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
Latest Action
Committee on Veterans' Affairs. Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably.
July 29, 2025
📍 Current Status
Next: The full Senate will vote on whether to pass the bill.
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!
Another bill, another exercise in futility. Let's dissect this mess.
**Main Purpose & Objectives**
The main purpose of S 1533 is to make permanent a pilot program that allows the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to hire contract physicians for disability examinations. Because, you know, the VA's own medical staff isn't competent enough to handle these exams on their own. The objective is to "improve" the efficiency and timeliness of these exams, because God forbid our veterans have to wait a few extra weeks for their benefits.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law**
The bill amends title 38 of the US Code to codify the pilot program, allowing the VA to contract with private physicians to conduct disability exams. It also establishes a mechanism for transmitting new medical evidence introduced during these exams. Oh, and it terminates the pilot program, because who needs a trial run when you can just make it permanent?
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders**
The affected parties include veterans seeking benefits, the VA, contract physicians, and taxpayers (because someone has to foot the bill for this boondoggle). The stakeholders are the usual suspects: politicians looking for ways to "support our troops," lobbyists representing medical interests, and bureaucrats who want to justify their existence.
**Potential Impact & Implications**
The potential impact of this bill is a further erosion of accountability within the VA. By outsourcing disability exams to contract physicians, the department can wash its hands of any responsibility for ensuring these exams are thorough and accurate. It's a classic case of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses." The implications are clear: more opportunities for corruption, cronyism, and waste.
In short, S 1533 is a symptom of a larger disease: the VA's inability to manage its own affairs. Instead of addressing the root causes of inefficiency and incompetence, Congress is opting for a quick fix that will only exacerbate the problem. It's like treating a patient with a Band-Aid instead of antibiotics – it might look good on paper, but it won't cure the underlying infection.
Diagnosis: Legislative malpractice. Prognosis: More of the same bureaucratic bungling and waste. Treatment: A healthy dose of skepticism and outrage from the public, followed by a thorough overhaul of the VA's management structure. But don't hold your breath – that would require actual leadership and accountability, two qualities sorely lacking in Washington.
Sen. Moran, Jerry [R-KS]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
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This bill has 1 cosponsors. Below are their top campaign contributors.
ID: K000383
Top Contributors
10
Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
Showing 50 nodes and 23 connections (46 secondary connections hidden)
Total contributions: $89,800
Showing top 17 donors by contribution amount
Which industries are materially affected by specific provisions in this bill. 2 helped.
Section 1(a)(1) allows contract physicians (including those from hospitals/health systems) to conduct disability examinations for VA benefits, expanding their market.
Section 1(a)(1) permits contract physicians to conduct disability exams, potentially increasing use of medical devices in examinations, though indirect.
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.
— 649 — Department of Veterans Affairs approaches and technology tools that currently exist in the private sector could be employed to improve existing VBA activities. This problem is most pronounced in the disability claims process, which needs more and better management attention focused on streamlining the procedures involved in processing claims and administering benefits. The VA must improve timeliness of claim adjudication and benefits delivery: Veterans want the VBA to provide timely responses to requests for benefits support, render empathetic customer service and understandable explanations of those benefits, and deliver those benefits without frustrating delays (weeks, not months). l Identify performance targets for benefits, report publicly on actual performance each quarter, and use these metrics to drive consistent improvement. l Develop a new pilot “Express 30” commitment for a veteran’s first fully developed disability compensation claim and organize the VBA to complete the first claim in 30 days. l Hire more private companies to perform disability medical examinations. Delays in completing the examinations could be eliminated with more external capacity. l Increase automation. Hiring additional staff to process claims is costly, is inflexible, and has yielded mixed results. Attempting to change laws and regulations simply to adjudicate claims would be a herculean effort given their complexity. The best way to provide benefits faster and more accurately is by using technology to perform most of the work. Technology currently exists in the private sector, but the VBA lacks the expertise to use it. This would be more of an organizational challenge than a technology hurdle. l Reduce improper payment and fraud. About $500 million is improperly paid out each year. Better tools, training, and management could reduce this substantially, but rule changes at the departmental level would be needed. Budget The VA’s Schedule for Rating Disabilities (VASRD) has assigned disability ratings to a growing number of health conditions over time; some are tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service. The further growth in presumptive service-connected medical conditions pursued by Congress and Veteran Service Organizations, begun with Agent Orange and most recently for Burn Pits/Airborne
— 649 — Department of Veterans Affairs approaches and technology tools that currently exist in the private sector could be employed to improve existing VBA activities. This problem is most pronounced in the disability claims process, which needs more and better management attention focused on streamlining the procedures involved in processing claims and administering benefits. The VA must improve timeliness of claim adjudication and benefits delivery: Veterans want the VBA to provide timely responses to requests for benefits support, render empathetic customer service and understandable explanations of those benefits, and deliver those benefits without frustrating delays (weeks, not months). l Identify performance targets for benefits, report publicly on actual performance each quarter, and use these metrics to drive consistent improvement. l Develop a new pilot “Express 30” commitment for a veteran’s first fully developed disability compensation claim and organize the VBA to complete the first claim in 30 days. l Hire more private companies to perform disability medical examinations. Delays in completing the examinations could be eliminated with more external capacity. l Increase automation. Hiring additional staff to process claims is costly, is inflexible, and has yielded mixed results. Attempting to change laws and regulations simply to adjudicate claims would be a herculean effort given their complexity. The best way to provide benefits faster and more accurately is by using technology to perform most of the work. Technology currently exists in the private sector, but the VBA lacks the expertise to use it. This would be more of an organizational challenge than a technology hurdle. l Reduce improper payment and fraud. About $500 million is improperly paid out each year. Better tools, training, and management could reduce this substantially, but rule changes at the departmental level would be needed. Budget The VA’s Schedule for Rating Disabilities (VASRD) has assigned disability ratings to a growing number of health conditions over time; some are tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service. The further growth in presumptive service-connected medical conditions pursued by Congress and Veteran Service Organizations, begun with Agent Orange and most recently for Burn Pits/Airborne — 650 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise Toxins, has led to historic increases in mandatory VBA spending in recent years. The VA has a time-phased plan to reassess the VASRD and its ratings for com- pensation, but this internal process can be slow and laborious, requires Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approvals, and can become politically charged both in Congress and with VSOs. l The next Administration should explore how VASRD reviews could be accelerated with clearance from OMB to target significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants while preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants. l The VBA’s Information Technology top-line budget should be reexamined and reassessed in light of the need for expanded automation across the enterprise. l Traditionally, VHA captures the large majority of VA IT funding. The VBA needs to make the case for a larger IT budget with clear requirements to support that request. Personnel l Pursue reforms of the Human Capital Management process and operations within the VBA to build a more blended workforce with more contractors to process claims. This would free federal employees to perform other duties and be involved solely with the final decision to award benefits. l Improve the VBA acquisition workforce. The VBA needs more world-class contractor support. Currently, few of the top companies have contracts with the VBA, and the VBA needs to conduct more outreach to the private sector through senior leader engagement and industry conferences. l To identify more effective and efficient ways to complete claims, establish a knowledge exchange program with top-tier private-sector companies that do similar work. The VBA is fundamentally a financial services organization. A significant amount of its work has a private-sector analogue that could be leveraged to improve service to veterans. l For most of its existence, the VBA has been a risk-averse, insular, paper-based organization, implementing technology only over the past decade. This insularity has led to a predominantly “build it ourselves” approach, partly because VBA staff has limited experience or insight into current private- sector tools and methods and partly because the VBA struggles to compete
— 646 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 3. Section 121 (developing and administering an education program that teaches veterans about their health care options available from the Department of Veterans Affairs). 4. Section 152 (returning the Office for Innovation of Care and Payment to the Office of Enterprise Integration with a joint governance process set up with the VHA). 5. 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). l Require the VHA to report publicly on all aspects of its operation, including quality, safety, patient experience, timeliness, and cost-effectiveness, using standards similar to those in the Medicare Accountable Care Organization program so that the government may monitor and achieve continuous improvement in the VA system more effectively. l Encourage VA Medical Centers to seek out relevant academic and private- sector input in their communities to improve the overall patient experience. Budget l Conduct an independent audit of the VA similar to the 2018 Department of Defense (DOD) audit to identify IT, management, financial, contracting, and other deficiencies. l Assess the misalignment of VHA facilities and rising infrastructure costs. The VHA operates 172 inpatient medical facilities nationally that are an average of 60 years old. Some of these facilities are underutilized and inadequately staffed. Facilities in certain urban and rural areas are seeing significant declines in the veteran population and strong competition for fresh medical staff. In 2018, Congress authorized an Asset Infrastructure Review (AIR) of national VHA medical markets to provide insight into where the VA health care budget should be responsibly allocated to serve veterans most effectively. However, the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee lacked the political will to act on the White House’s nominations of commission members, and this ultimately led to termination of the AIR process. The next Administration should seek out agile, creative, and politically acceptable operational solutions to this aging infrastructure status quo, — 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.
Showing 3 of 4 policy matches
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.