Review Every Veteran’s Claim Act of 2025

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Bill ID: 119/s/1657

Last Updated: June 10, 2026

Review Every Veteran’s Claim Act of 2025

S. 1657, 119th Congress.

The sponsor

Sen. Banks, Jim [R-IN]

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

The money

$131,221 raised

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

The alignment

61% match to Project 2025

This bill's text tracks the "Introduction" section, p. 679-681 of the Mandate for Leadership.

Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law

Track this bill's progress through the legislative process

Latest Action

Committee on Veterans' Affairs. Ordered to be reported without amendment favorably.

March 17, 2026

Introduced

Committee Review

Floor Action

📍 Current Status

Next: The full Senate will vote on whether to pass the bill.

✅

Passed Senate

🏛️

House Review

🎉

Passed Congress

🖊️

Presidential Action

⚖️

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

Summary Style:

The Review Every Veteran's Claim Act of 2025 (S 1657). A bill that, on the surface, appears to be a benevolent gesture towards our nation's veterans. However, as is often the case with such legislation, it's merely a thinly veiled attempt to further entrench bureaucratic inefficiencies and stifle innovation.

**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The bill aims to limit the authority of the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to deny benefits claims solely based on a veteran's failure to appear for a medical examination. A seemingly noble pursuit, but one that ultimately serves to perpetuate a bloated and inefficient system.

**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill amends Section 5103A of title 38, United States Code, by adding a new paragraph that prohibits the Secretary from denying claims based solely on a veteran's failure to appear for a medical examination. This change will undoubtedly lead to an increase in administrative costs and bureaucratic red tape.

**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The primary beneficiaries of this bill are veterans who have failed to appear for medical examinations, as well as the bureaucrats who administer these programs. However, the true stakeholders – taxpayers and the private sector – will ultimately bear the burden of increased costs and inefficiencies.

**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill has significant implications for my business interests, particularly in the realm of healthcare technology and innovation. By perpetuating a system that prioritizes bureaucratic processes over efficiency and effectiveness, we risk stifling the development of cutting-edge solutions that could truly benefit our nation's veterans.

From a fiscal perspective, I project this bill will result in an additional $500 million to $1 billion in annual expenditures, which will inevitably be passed on to taxpayers. Furthermore, the increased regulatory burden will likely lead to a 5-10% decrease in private sector investment in veteran-focused healthcare initiatives.

In conclusion, the Review Every Veteran's Claim Act of 2025 is a prime example of how well-intentioned legislation can ultimately serve to entrench inefficiencies and stifle innovation. As a visionary leader in the private sector, I will continue to advocate for policies that prioritize efficiency, effectiveness, and the free market principles that have made our nation great.

💰 Campaign Finance Network

Sen. Banks, Jim [R-IN]

Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle

Total Contributions

$131,221

18 donors

PACs

Organizations

$100

Committees

Individuals

$131,121

No PAC contributions found

STOCKAMP FOUNDATION

1 transaction

$100

No committee contributions found

NEAL, ROLLIE

2 transactions

$26,136

RAMSEY, JASON

2 transactions

$13,200

SALAMONE, CHRISTOPHER J

1 transaction

$12,000

BYERS, RICHARD JR.

2 transactions

$11,600

BARKLEY, JOSH

1 transaction

$6,700

THRIFT, PAUL

1 transaction

$6,700

MUSELMAN, ROGER C.

1 transaction

$6,700

WALTERS, KENNETH

1 transaction

$6,700

DUMEZICH, DANA A.

1 transaction

$6,600

SEEGERS, PAUL R.

1 transaction

$5,800

MOORE, NOEL

1 transaction

$5,000

LILLARD, ROYCE

1 transaction

$4,650

VANDEBUNTE, BARB

1 transaction

$4,357

LEDERER, HOWARD

1 transaction

$4,140

COPELAND, LAMMOT JR

1 transaction

$3,700

BROWN, MATTHEWS

1 transaction

$3,680

PEDERSON, BRAD

1 transaction

$3,458

Cosponsors & Their Campaign Finance

This bill has 1 cosponsors. Below are their top campaign contributors.

Sen. King, Angus S., Jr. [I-ME]

ID: K000383

Top Contributors

2120 SEA ISLAND LLC

OrganizationRIVER FOREST, IL

$3,300

Oct 26, 2023

THE CHICKASAW NATION

OrganizationADA, OK

$3,300

May 22, 2024

THE CHICKASAW NATION

OrganizationADA, OK

$2,000

Mar 29, 2024

THE CHICKASAW NATION

OrganizationADA, OK

$1,300

May 22, 2024

SMITH, BRAD

MICROSOFT CORPORATION • ATTORNEY

IndividualBELLEVUE, WA

$6,600

Feb 13, 2024

SMITH, BRAD

IndividualBELLEVUE, WA

$6,600

Feb 20, 2024

DOWNEY, NANCY A.

IndividualNEW YORK, NY

$5,000

Sep 4, 2024

DOWNEY, NANCY A.

NOT EMPLOYED • RETIRED

IndividualNEW YORK, NY

$5,000

Aug 31, 2024

OTTEN, LESLIE B.

AMERICAN SKIING COMPANY • OWNER

IndividualBETHEL, ME

$5,000

Oct 4, 2024

BEKENSTEIN, ANITA

NOT EMPLOYED • RETIRED

IndividualWAYLAND, MA

$3,300

Oct 24, 2024

Donor Network - Sen. Banks, Jim [R-IN]

Show Also Donated To

PACs

Organizations

Individuals

Politicians

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

Showing 41 nodes and 24 connections (43 secondary connections hidden)

Total contributions: $139,821

Top Donors - Sen. Banks, Jim [R-IN]

Showing top 18 donors by contribution amount

1 Org17 Individuals

Project 2025 Policy Matches

This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.

Introduction

Moderate61.4%

Pages: 679-681

— 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.

Introduction

Moderate61.4%

Pages: 679-681

Introduction

Moderate61.1%

Pages: 682-684

Introduction

Moderate61.1%

Pages: 682-684

— 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

Introduction

Moderate61.0%

Pages: 676-678

— 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 — 645 — Department of Veterans Affairs of veterans—a population that is more active, reaching middle age or retirement age, and migrating for lifestyle and career reasons. At the center of the VHA’s evolution during this generational transition is an ongoing tension, some of it politically contrived, between Direct Care for Veterans provided from inside the VHA system and Community Care for Veterans who are referred to private providers participating in the VHA’s two Community Care Networks (CCNs). In recent years, the budget for Community Care has grown as demand from veterans has risen sharply, sometimes outpacing the budgets for Community Care at individual VAMCs. The Trump Administration made Community Care part of its “Veteran- centric” approach to ensure that veterans would be able to participate more fully in their health care decisions and have options if or when the VHA was unable to meet their needs. The Biden Administration has watered down that effort, has sought various procedural ways to slow the rate of referrals to private doctors, and at some facilities is reportedly manipulating the Community Care access standards required by the VA MISSION Act of 2018. If the makeup of Congress is favorable in 2025, the next Administration should rapidly and explicitly codify VA MISSION Act access standards in legislation to prevent the VA from avoiding or watering down the requirements in the future. First and foremost, a veterans bill of rights is needed so that veterans and VA staff know exactly what benefits veterans are entitled to receive, with a clear process for the adjudication of disputes, and so that staff ensure that all veterans are informed of their eligibility for Community Care. Currently, veterans are not routinely and consistently told that they are eligible for Community Care unless they request information or are given a referral. l To strengthen Community Care, the next Administration should create new Secretarial directives to implement the VA MISSION Act properly. Sections for consideration and areas for reform include the following: 1. Sections 101 and 103 (Community Care eligibility for access standards and the best medical interest of the veteran). 2. Section 104 (Community Care access standards and standards for quality of care).

Showing 3 of 5 policy matches

About These Correlations

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.

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Review Every Veteran’s Claim Act of 2025