Denied Before the PACT Act? The VA Budget Shows Why You Should Refile

If VA denied your claim before 2022 for a condition tied to burn pits, Agent Orange, or contaminated water, the law governing that condition has changed. You can file again.

The money confirms it. VA is asking Congress for $488.2 billion in fiscal year 2027, and the fund created specifically to pay toxic exposure claims has gone from half a billion dollars in 2022 to $54.6 billion. That is not a rounding adjustment. That is the government budgeting to pay a debt it spent decades denying.

This page covers what to do about a prior denial, then walks through where the money goes, how VA processes a claim today, and what the staffing numbers say about how long you will wait.

Can I refile a VA claim that was denied before the PACT Act?

Yes. If VA denied a claim for a condition that is now presumptively service connected under the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022, you can file a supplemental claim, and the change in law supports readjudication.

Presumptive service connection removes the hardest part of the case. You no longer have to produce a private medical opinion linking the condition to your service; the statute makes the connection once qualifying service and a current diagnosis are established.

Effective dates are where these cases are won or lost, and the rule that applies depends on which exposure you are claiming.

For previously denied Agent Orange claims, the Nehmer rules codified at 38 C.F.R. § 3.816 can set the effective date back to the date of the original claim rather than the date you refile. That is the difference between benefits starting this year and benefits owed for a decade. Nehmer is specific to herbicide-agent exposure. It does not reach burn pit claims or Camp Lejeune claims.

For everything else, retroactivity generally runs through 38 C.F.R. § 3.114, the liberalizing-law rule, and through the PACT Act's own effective-date provisions for certain previously denied conditions. These produce different, usually shorter, retroactive periods than Nehmer.

Effective date rules are fact specific and are the single most commonly missed issue in veterans law. The difference between citing the right rule and the wrong one is measured in years of back pay.

Worth revisiting if you were denied for:

• A respiratory condition after service in Southwest Asia or Afghanistan
• A cancer of any kind tied to a deployment with documented toxic exposure
• An Agent Orange condition denied before the 2021 and 2022 presumptive expansions
• Any condition connected to service at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune

An old denial is not a final answer when the law underneath it has moved. Our VA disability claims page covers what a claim requires, and the comprehensive guide to appealing an adverse VA decision walks the routes available after a denial.

What is the Cost of War Toxic Exposures Fund?

The Cost of War Toxic Exposures Fund, or TEF, is a mandatory funding account created by the PACT Act to cover health care and benefits for veterans exposed to environmental hazards during service, above what VA was spending in 2021.

TEF has grown faster than any other line in the VA budget:

That is a hundredfold increase in five years. The fund covers conditions associated with burn pit exposure, Agent Orange, contaminated water at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, radiation exposure, and other hazards recognized under the PACT Act.

Congress does not appropriate $54.6 billion for claims it expects to deny.

How much is the VA budget?

The 2027 request for the Department of Veterans Affairs is $488.2 billion across all funds, discretionary and mandatory, a $34.9 billion increase (+7.7%) over the 2026 enacted level of $453.3 billion.

Source: VA fiscal year 2027 Congressional Submission, Budget in Brief, April 2026.

How has the VA budget grown over the last ten years?

Total VA funding has grown from $183.3 billion in 2017 to a requested $488.2 billion in 2027, roughly 2.7 times. VA reports growth of $179.4 billion, or 58.1%, since 2023 alone.

Dollars in billions. 2027 is a request; prior years are enacted. Mandatory funding includes $2.1 billion from the Veterans Choice Act of 2017 and $7.3 billion in 2018, plus resources from the PACT Act, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, and annual appropriations acts. Figures exclude the American Rescue Plan of 2021 and the Disaster Relief Supplemental of 2025. Totals may not add due to rounding.

Almost all of the growth sits on the mandatory side. Mandatory funding roughly tripled over the decade, from $105.5 billion to $337.6 billion. Discretionary funding roughly doubled.

What is the difference between mandatory and discretionary VA funding?

Mandatory funding is benefit payments required by entitlement law. Discretionary funding is money Congress appropriates each year to run the department.

Mandatory funding covers disability compensation, Special Monthly Compensation, Dependency and Indemnity Compensation, Veterans Pension, Survivors Pension, burial benefits, and related payments. Congress does not vote on the amount. Entitlement law defines who qualifies and how much they receive; the money follows. The Veterans Benefits Administration delivers these payments at an operating cost of roughly two cents per dollar of benefits paid.

Discretionary funding covers operations: hospitals, medical staff, information technology, and construction. Congress sets a fixed number and VA works inside it.

In the 2027 request, mandatory funding is about 69% of the total and discretionary about 31%. The discretionary side breaks down like this:

This distinction matters for claimants. A disability award is paid from mandatory funding, which is not capped by an annual appropriation. Your entitlement is a legal question decided under Title 38, not a budget question. A claim is not denied because VA ran out of money that year.

Where does VA health care money go?

VA requests $180.1 billion for medical care in 2027, including collections, up from $169.0 billion enacted in 2026 and $145.3 billion in 2025.

Watch the Medical Services line. Discretionary Medical Services fell from $69.1 billion in 2025 to $57.2 billion in 2026, while mandatory Medical Services rose from $11.9 billion to $35.4 billion. Combined, Medical Services grew. What changed is which pot pays for it: care is increasingly funded through the Toxic Exposures Fund rather than through annual appropriations. That is not a cut, but discretionary and mandatory dollars do not carry the same protection when Congress fights over a budget.

How large is the Veterans Health Administration?

VHA is the largest integrated health care system in the United States. It treated 7,665,003 unique patients in 2025 out of 9,219,062 enrolled veterans, and projects 8.1 million patients and 169.9 million outpatient visits in 2027.

Installations and portfolio, as reported in the 2027 submission (facility counts as of September 30, 2025):

Will a bigger budget make my claim move faster?

Not automatically. Medical care obligations rise from $150.7 billion in 2025 to a projected $184.5 billion in 2027, an increase of about 22%. Medical care staffing over the same period goes the other direction.

More dollars, fewer people than two years ago. VA attributes part of this to productivity gains and a deliberate shift of workload toward community care.

On the benefits side the recent trend is genuinely good and worth stating plainly. VA completed more than three million disability compensation rating claims in fiscal 2025, a record, and processed them 17.8% faster than in 2024 while receipts rose 10%. The backlog of claims older than 125 days peaked above 400,000 in early 2024 as PACT Act filings landed, then fell sharply; VA's stated goal is 75,000 by the end of 2026.

Appeals are the pressure point. The Board of Veterans' Appeals decided 123,962 appeals in 2025, its third consecutive record year, but its 2027 request funds 1,163 full-time employees, down from 1,300, and projects about 102,000 decisions. The Board's own table shows pending appeals rising from 182,758 at the end of 2026 to 194,191 at the end of 2027.

Read that as a planning fact: build the record at the regional office level, because the appeal queue is projected to grow, not shrink. The VA Appeals Navigator walks the lanes and deadlines if you are already past a denial.

What is VBMS and what happened to my C-file?

VBMS is the Veterans Benefits Management System, the electronic database VA uses to process claims. If you filed before 2015, your claim file existed as physical paper, often thousands of pages, sitting in one regional office. That paper has been scanned. What veterans and their representatives once called the C-file is the eFolder referenced in decision letters today.

The migration off paper started in 2012 and was effectively finished by late 2015. Development has cost the government north of $1.5 billion so far. Nearly every compensation claim is now adjudicated electronically.

What is the National Work Queue?

The National Work Queue routes individual steps of a claim to whichever regional office has capacity to take them, instead of keeping one claim in one building from filing to decision.

Government Accountability Office report GAO-19-15 diagrams the change. A claim moves through five phases: initial development, supplemental development, rating, award, and authorization. Those five steps used to happen under one roof. They can now land in five different offices scattered across the country, assigned by workforce capacity in real time.

The same report found something veterans rarely hear. GAO reported that 88% of claims completed in fiscal year 2017 were processed at more than one office, while VBA attributed decision accuracy to the office that finished the claim. An error introduced during development at one office therefore lands in the accuracy statistics of a different office entirely. GAO concluded that VBA's timeliness and accuracy measures do not adequately capture regional office performance, and VBA officials acknowledged the limitation.

Two consequences follow. First, published accuracy rates are not a reliable guide to the quality of the work done on any particular claim. Second, when an error appears in your decision, there is no single office that owns it, which is exactly why a clean, complete evidentiary record at filing matters more than it did under the old system.

Practically: no regional office owns your claim, and calling the one nearest you may reach a building that handled one step. Check status through VA.gov, which draws from VBMS.

Which VA claims still have to be filed on paper?

Four still cannot go in online: Survivors Pension, Dependency and Indemnity Compensation, burial benefits, and accrued benefits. Those applications travel on paper to VA's intake center in Janesville, Wisconsin, where staff scan them into VBMS.

Once scanned, a survivor's claim sits in the same National Work Queue as everything filed electronically and moves at the same speed. The lost time is entirely on the front end, in the mail and at the scanner. Send survivor filings by a method that produces proof of delivery, and keep a complete copy of what you sent.

Claims filed through VA.gov feed directly into VBMS and the National Work Queue. Veterans can sign in with a Login.gov or ID.me account.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a deadline to file a supplemental claim?

No filing deadline, but two different clocks affect how far back your benefits reach, and refilings after a change in law run on the second one.

The first clock is continuous pursuit. File a supplemental claim within one year of the decision you disagree with and you generally preserve the effective date tied to that earlier claim. This is the clock that matters for a recent denial, and for a denial from years ago it has long since run.

The second clock is the liberalizing-law rule at 38 C.F.R. § 3.114, which governs when entitlement arises because the law changed rather than because the evidence changed. Under that rule, how soon you file after the law takes effect determines how much retroactive benefit is available, and waiting generally shortens the retroactive window rather than closing the door. Agent Orange claims are the significant exception, governed by the Nehmer rules at 38 C.F.R. § 3.816.

The practical takeaway is the same under either clock: a past denial does not bar a new filing, and filing sooner protects money that filing later forfeits.

Will VA contact me if a condition it denied is now presumptive?

VA has said it would attempt to reach veterans whose previously denied conditions became presumptive. Do not wait on that letter. Contact information goes stale, outreach lists are imperfect, and nothing stops you from filing first.

Does a supplemental claim require new evidence?

Yes. A supplemental claim must include new and relevant evidence. A change in law that makes your condition presumptive works alongside that requirement, and a current diagnosis plus proof of qualifying service is often the substance of the filing.

Do survivors get anything under the PACT Act?

Yes. Surviving spouses, dependent children, and dependent parents may qualify for Dependency and Indemnity Compensation when a veteran's death is connected to a condition now recognized as presumptive. Previously denied survivor claims deserve a second look for the same reason veteran claims do.

Can I get a copy of my own claims file?

Yes. Your eFolder, the electronic successor to the paper C-file, is available on request, and an accredited representative can pull it directly. Read it before you file anything. The rating decision summarizes the evidence; the eFolder is the evidence.

How long is the Board of Veterans' Appeals taking?

Faster than it used to be, on the newer dockets. The Board reports average days pending on the Direct Docket below 220 days and on the Evidence Docket below 300 days, both inside their published goals. The Hearing Docket still runs near two years. Legacy appeals, filed before the 2019 modernization, take far longer.

Does more VA funding mean a faster decision on my claim?

Not by itself. Appropriations fund benefit payments and operations; they do not automatically add adjudicators. Medical care staffing is below its 2025 level and the Board projects a shrinking workforce and a growing pending inventory in 2027. Build the record yourself and file it complete.

Official sources

• The PACT Act and your VA benefits, Department of Veterans Affairs
• VA Form 20-0995, Decision Review Request: Supplemental Claim, Department of Veterans Affairs
• PACT Act Performance Dashboard, Department of Veterans Affairs
• FY 2027 Budget Submission, Budget in Brief, Department of Veterans Affairs
• FY 2026 Budget Submission, Budget in Brief, Department of Veterans Affairs
• Veterans' Disability Benefits: Better Measures Needed to Assess Regional Office Performance in Processing Claims (GAO-19-15), Government Accountability Office

A note on these figures

Budget figures on this page come from VA's fiscal year 2027 Congressional Submission, Budget in Brief, published April 2026. Columns labeled 2026 and earlier are enacted amounts with transfers; 2027 is a request and 2028 is an advance request, neither of which is final. Enacted amounts can differ from requests, sometimes substantially.

The claims workload distribution analysis and the accuracy-measurement findings come from Government Accountability Office report GAO-19-15, published October 2018. Both are United States Government publications.

This page provides general information about VA funding and claims processing. It is not legal advice about any individual claim.