The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is accelerating the processing of disability claims and improving accuracy, and agency officials are giving credit to expanded use of automation.
The VA said it completed a record 3 million claims in fiscal year 2025, and in fiscal year 2026, it completed 1 million completed disability claims by Feb. 2, faster than any prior year. The department also reported that its average claim processing time has dropped from 141.5 days to 80.7 days since the start of the second Trump administration, a 43% decrease.
At the same time, the department said its claims-processing accuracy has increased to 94.02%, the highest 12-month rate in the past two years.
In February, the VA announced that the backlog of veterans waiting for VA benefits fell to less than 100,000 claims for the first time since May 2020.
Margarita Devlin, principal deputy under secretary for benefits at the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), told lawmakers that automation has played a central role in accelerating claims processing by handling routine, administrative tasks.
“By using new automated tools, we were able to streamline routine tasks and process claims more efficiently, ensuring that our experts, our employees, could focus on the decisions that require human judgment,” Devlin said during a House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs hearing on Wednesday.
Devlin said automated systems now assist with tasks such as gathering medical records, organizing evidence, and routing claims through the agency’s national work queue.
The automated systems allow the VA employee to “have all the information in front of them,” Devlin said, “without having to look through thousands of pages of medical records.”
Devlin also emphasized that despite increased reliance on automation and emerging artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, the VA maintains strict guardrails around decision-making authority.
“There is no artificial intelligence in our systems that makes a denial decision. Everything gets presented to a human claims processor to make a decision,” she said, adding that VA plans to continue implementing AI tools to expedite claims processing further.
Despite the encouraging numbers from the VA, the narrative drew pushback from Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., ranking member of the House VA Committee.
“The victory lap that’s being touted in this hearing is not the result of some extraordinary turnaround by the new administration,” Takano said. “It’s largely the system and hard-working VA employees performing as expected under the weight of expanded eligibility and long overdue access. That context matters.”
He pointed to the surge in claims following the 2022 PACT Act – legislation that expanded eligibility and encouraged more veterans to file – as well as pandemic-related disruptions that temporarily inflated the backlog.
According to Takano, VA projections from 2022 had already anticipated both the spike and the subsequent decline, meaning the current improvement reflects the system working through that expected cycle rather than a sudden operational breakthrough.
“We need a clear understanding of what is actually happening in claims processing, not just how quickly decisions are issued, but whether those decisions are accurate, durable, and fair to the veterans who depend on them,” Takano said.
“Veterans deserve both speed and accuracy, because one without the other is not success,” he added.