What Congress and VA oversight can — and cannot — see

DOCUMENTED FACT A recommendation stays open until the agency acts on it. These are not disputes about what happened. They are findings the VA has accepted or declined to close, written by the two bodies Congress created to audit it.

The oversight witness put the practical point plainly: these open items are themselves the agenda. S191

These open recommendations provide an opportunity for the committee to conduct oversight. The committee should be asking the VA what they are doing to implement the remaining recommendations.

Tim Stretton, Project On Government Oversight, testimony to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, May 20 2026

PROJECT ANALYSIS For families in this record, that is the difference between an inquiry that closes with a letter and one that closes with a change. A congressional office asking VA to explain a specific open recommendation is asking a question the agency has already conceded the substance of.

DOCUMENTED FACT The Government Accountability Office has had no Senate-confirmed comptroller general since Gene Dodaro retired at the end of 2025. Under the GAO Act of 1980 the post is filled by presidential nomination from a slate put forward by a bipartisan congressional commission. As of the May 20 2026 testimony, no slate had been put forward and no nominee named. S191

DOCUMENTED FACT In the same period, the House Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee voted along party lines to cut GAO's budget by roughly 25 percent, about 200 million dollars, which the testimony estimates would mean eliminating around 1,000 jobs. GAO had requested a 5.9 percent increase. S191

DOCUMENTED FACT Across the federal government, 28 inspector general posts sit vacant, 21 of them with no nominee. Several have been vacant across more than one administration, one for nearly seven years. The VA is not among them: it has a permanent Senate-confirmed inspector general. S191

The return on that spending is not in dispute. Inspectors general across the government returned 17 dollars for every dollar spent in fiscal 2025, and the VA OIG reported 18 dollars for every dollar in its most recent semiannual report. S191

PROJECT ANALYSIS This is the part that touches this record directly. The reports families and congressional offices are waiting on are produced by offices that are losing staff, leadership, or both. A report that arrives late, or thinner than it should be, is not evidence that nothing was wrong. It is evidence about the office that wrote it.

DOCUMENTED FACT In fiscal 2025 the VA made 287.95 billion dollars in awards: 203.04 billion in direct payments, 90.74 billion in contracts, 3.12 billion in grants, 1.01 billion in loans and 2.47 billion in other assistance. S191

The testimony is careful that none of this is an allegation. Its argument is that the size of the taxpayer investment is what makes routine scrutiny necessary, and that sole-source and single-bid awards are where scrutiny usually starts.

DOCUMENTED FACT Congress has not reauthorized key components of the VA for roughly three decades; those parts operate under expired authorizations of appropriation. The Congressional Budget Office counted 1,326 authorizations that expired at the end of fiscal 2025, including 457 covering about 500 billion dollars of fiscal 2025 spending. S191

DOCUMENTED FACT The scale question has already been put to the Department and come back unanswered. At a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing on February 11 2026, Senator Richard Blumenthal asked VA Chief Financial Officer Richard Topping about the gap between two lines of the same budget: community care funding rose from 9 billion dollars in 2019 to more than 48 billion in the fiscal 2026 request, an increase of 530 percent, while direct care rose by roughly 200 percent over the same period. His office records that the Chief Financial Officer was unable to answer, and quotes the senator replying: "we need to answer those types of questions. You don’t have answers right now." S198

PROJECT ANALYSIS Read that alongside the recommendation counts above. The oversight bodies write down what needs fixing and the findings go unclosed; the Department, asked directly about its own spending, does not have the figure to hand. Neither fact is a scandal on its own. Together they describe a department that is difficult to check, which is the condition every failure in this record grew in. The words are the senator’s, from his own office; the Chief Financial Officer is described as unable to answer and is not quoted, so nothing here should be attributed to him.

DOCUMENTED FACT At the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee budget hearing on May 20 2026, in Dirksen G50, the Secretary appeared with the Department's Assistant Secretary for Management and Chief Financial Officer, Richard F. Topping. The committee's own hearing page lists both. S224

The chairman asked what benefit the Department expected from restructuring the accounts it reports its medical spending through. The answer, from the official who keeps those accounts, is the plainest statement in this record of the condition the page above describes.

"We always hear that direct care and community care and the facts are no one really knows because we do not track the data. The structure is a holdover from when we are primarily a direct care system. There are three primary costs: administrative costs, day-to-day operations; the contract cost, the fees we pay to contractors; the purchase pay cost is a reimbursement to providers. That is the only cost we actually show. The other two are co-mingled in other accounts. The account structure we propose for FY28 would break out a direct care cost vertical for the whole cost of care inside our medical centers and clinics. Right now based on the account structure, all I can tell you is it will cost more. We do not know what we are managing."

Richard F. Topping, Assistant Secretary for Management and Chief Financial Officer, Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, May 20 2026

DOCUMENTED FACT S225 S224

He was not caught out, and this page will not report it that way. He was making the Department's case for a new account structure in the 2028 request, and the sentence is his argument for why the change is needed. An official saying candidly what his own books cannot show is the system working, not failing. What follows from it is the point.

PROJECT ANALYSIS

Read it beside the section above. Three months earlier a senator asked the same official why one line of the budget had grown 530 percent while another grew 200 percent, and his office recorded that the Chief Financial Officer could not answer. That was reported as a gap. This is the reason for it. The two exchanges are separate, three months apart, and are cited separately here. S198 S225

Why a mortgage record carries a hospital accounting question. The reason given for ending the program that was keeping veteran families in their homes was cost. Cost is an argument from the books. When the Department's own accountant says the books cannot break out what is being spent, every claim resting on them, in either direction, has to be treated as a claim rather than a figure. That is not an accusation. It is what the page above is named for.

PROJECT ANALYSIS

The words above are the retained C-SPAN transcript for program 679573, pulled and kept by this project, and the register says so. They are not the certified hearing record, and when the printed transcript is published this passage should be checked against it. S225

Hours from that answer about the accounts, two senators put a different question to the Secretary at the same table.

DOCUMENTED FACT Senator Angus King asked "Can you tell me for the record point-blank there is no intention to gradually privatize V.A. health care?" The Secretary answered "There is no intention to gradually, to accelerate, to decelerate, there is no intention to privatize at all." S227

DOCUMENTED FACT Senator Tammy Duckworth put it as a statement: "You are increasing the budget significantly for privatization." The Secretary replied "We pay over twice as much in direct care than community care. We are following the law. Are you asking me to break the law? Do you not want me to follow the Mission Act?" S227

That reply cites a ratio between direct care and community care. The Department's own Chief Financial Officer, at the same hearing, described the costs behind those two lines as co-mingled in the accounts, with one of the three cost types the only one the structure actually shows. Read together, the record does not establish that the Secretary is wrong. It establishes that the figure he cited cannot be checked against the accounts his own Department keeps. S225 S227

PROJECT ANALYSIS

What this page is not doing. Whether the Department is moving care to the private sector is a contested question of policy. Two senators said it is happening, the Secretary said flatly that it is not, and the accounting testimony does not settle that in either direction. This record is not resolving it here and is not borrowing the CFO's words to do so. The checkable part is the part published.

And the reason it sits on a foreclosure record. The justification given for ending the program that was keeping veteran families in their homes was cost. Cost is an argument made from these books. When a figure drawn from them is put to a committee and the officer who keeps them says the structure cannot separate the lines, the right response is neither to believe it nor to disbelieve it. It is to ask for the accounting that would let anyone tell.

PROJECT ANALYSIS

The two sections above are about money that cannot be traced through the accounts. This one is about decisions that were never written down at all.

DOCUMENTED FACT The Government Accountability Office reported in March 2026 on the housing-voucher program the Department runs with HUD. Its finding, in its own words: "174,045 instances of veterans not being referred to the program in 2020 to 2024, VA did not document the reason in 151,296 (87 percent)." S230

Read the unit carefully, because it is easy to get wrong. Those are instances of non-referral, not individual people. One veteran can account for more than one. The figure is large enough without being restated as a count of veterans, and this page does not restate it that way.

DOCUMENTED FACT The Department’s own way of recording a COVID default was set on April 29, 2020, in Circular 26-20-17: servicers were told VA was “replacing the reason for default of ‘Energy/Environmental Cost’ with ‘National Emergency Declaration’” in its servicing system, effective June 1, 2020. The flag is a repurposed code, and it does not name COVID. Any later count of COVID-related defaults from VA’s own data rests on that field. S261

PROJECT ANALYSIS

DOCUMENTED FACT The same report gives a reason to expect it. In fiscal year 2024, more than a quarter of the Department's medical centres with multiple case managers had at least a fifth of those posts unfilled, and annual turnover among those case managers ran between 20 and 26 percent across the period. S230

What an undocumented reason costs the person it happened to. A decision with no recorded basis cannot be reviewed, cannot be appealed, and cannot be counted in any assessment of whether the program is working. It is not a decision anyone can check. It is an absence where a decision should be. That is the same condition this page is named for, one layer below the accounts.

The watchdog made two recommendations for action, one to the Department on recording why referrals do not happen. Both were still open when this page was written. S230

PROJECT ANALYSIS

DOCUMENTED FACT Circular 26-24-12 of May 29, 2024 asked servicers to stop foreclosures through December 31, 2024, with exceptions. One exception was where “[t]he servicer has not received a monthly payment for at least 210 days, and the borrower is not responding to the servicer’s outreach attempts.” Change 1 of June 21, 2024 ordered that exception deleted. The base PDF VA serves, read on September 12, 2026, still prints it. S092 S197

DOCUMENTED FACT Circular 26-20-12 of April 8, 2020 set a COVID foreclosure moratorium “for not less than the 60-day period beginning on March 18, 2020.” Change 1 of September 9, 2020 ordered that phrase replaced with “through December 31, 2020.” The base PDF VA serves still prints the 60-day phrase, and still prints “loan refunding” in paragraph 5c, which the same change order told VA to replace with “VA Purchase.” S259 S260

PROJECT ANALYSIS This record holds 63 files from VA’s home loan circular library: 43 circulars, 15 change orders to a circular also on file, and 5 exhibits. For each pair, the text the change order says to remove or add was searched in the base circular, and each file was compared byte for byte with the copy VA served on September 12, 2026. In 14 of 14 pairs that could be checked this way, the base VA serves is the original: it still prints what the order removed, or it lacks what the order added. One change order restates the circular in full instead of quoting its edits, so it cannot be checked this way. None of the ten base circulars has been reissued with its change folded in. Every file VA serves matched the file on record here. S286

PROJECT ANALYSIS What this does and does not show. It shows that a reader of a base circular on VA’s website reads text VA itself has superseded, in every checkable case in this record’s holdings. It does not show that VA’s practice is the same across every circular it has issued; this record holds 63 files. It does not show that any servicer relied on a superseded base. And it is a check of text, not of law: a change order is in force whether or not the base file is reissued. What a reader cannot do is know that from the base file.

Method and full output: the measurement receipt (S286). The check was run by vfc_circular_change_diff.py, whose self-test carries the 26-24-12 pair as a known-stale control.

DOCUMENTED FACT The House Appropriations Committee addressed veterans found eligible for a benefit in error, at page 32 of the report accompanying the FY2027 MilCon-VA bill. Verbatim: "ending equitable relief for veterans who were deemed eligible for benefits in error would place an unfair burden on veterans and their families. The Secretary is encouraged to continue to grant or extend equitable relief to eligible veterans initially deemed eligible in instances of administrative error." S195

DOCUMENTED FACT Two limits travel with that passage. The operative verb is "is encouraged to." Two pages earlier the same committee "directs" the Department to report on VASP and the Partial Claim Program, so the softer verb at page 32 is a choice and not the committee's house style. And the report names no statutory authority for equitable relief at all: the string "503" does not appear anywhere in its 121 pages, so this report cannot be cited as the source of that authority. S195

DOCUMENTED FACT The second instrument is VA Circular 26-24-12, "Loan Repayment Relief for Borrowers," issued May 29 2024. It announced a targeted foreclosure moratorium on VA-guaranteed loans running through December 31 2024, to give servicers time to stand up VASP. The circular strongly encourages servicers to implement it. It does not require them to. It was rescinded January 1 2025. S092

DOCUMENTED FACT The PDF the Department still serves at that circular's published address prints paragraph 3c, an exception for a servicer that has received no monthly payment for at least 210 days from a borrower who is not responding to outreach. Change 1, dated June 21 2024, deletes that paragraph in a single instruction. The base file was never reissued. S197 S092

PROJECT ANALYSIS That is why it matters. Anyone reconstructing a 2024 servicing timeline from the document at the address VA publishes will credit a servicer with an exception that had already been removed. Both files were retrieved and read on August 22 2026 and they disagree with each other. Only the June 21 2024 version is current.

PROJECT ANALYSIS The third instrument is the partial claim itself, and the verbs are worth reading side by side. The ceiling on relief is written as a hard limit: the statute says a partial claim "may not exceed" its cap. The duty to provide relief is written as a suggestion in both documents above: "encouraged," and "strongly encourages." A cap phrased in mandatory language, sitting on top of a duty phrased in discretionary language, is a design choice, and it is the one families run into. The ceilings themselves, the March 1 2020 to May 1 2025 window and the CBO estimate behind them are set out on What the policy says; the bill that would change the operative verb from "may" to "shall" for equitable relief is tracked on Who is engaged.

The Department's loan modification regulation is usually quoted for its rate limit. Two paragraphs later it does something harder to answer. It sets an order of operations. If a proposed modification fails any of the conditions the regulation lists, the servicer must send the loan file to the Department for approval before entering into the agreement. Not eventually. Before.

DOCUMENTED FACT The rate limit itself is two separate tests and both have to hold. A modified loan carries a fixed rate that may not exceed the most recent Freddie Mac weekly survey rate for 30-year fixed conforming mortgages plus 50 basis points, and, separately, is not more than one percentage point higher than the existing rate on the loan. S021

DOCUMENTED FACT The sequencing requirement is the next paragraph, and it is short: "If a loan fails to meet one or more of the conditions identified in paragraph (a), the holder must submit the loan file to the Secretary for approval before entering into any loan modification agreement." The Department then grants or withholds that approval by weighing the risks of approving against the risks of not approving. S021

Read the verb. The duty is not "obtain approval." It is "submit the loan file for approval before." A servicer that exceeds the cap and gets approval afterward has not cured the sequence. It has documented it.

PROJECT ANALYSIS S021

Why the order matters more than the ceiling. "The offer exceeded the cap" invites a reply that ends the conversation: we obtained approval under paragraph (b). Asking when that approval was obtained does not have that exit. Paragraph (b) is written as a sequence, approval dates are recorded, and a date cannot be cured after the fact.

What nobody checks. This is a condition on the servicer, enforced by the Department that also guarantees the loan, pays the claim, and takes the property. No public record shows the sequence being verified in any individual case. A requirement written in a regulation and checked by nobody is the shape this whole page is about.

DOCUMENTED FACT One documented sequence, from a loan file this project holds. On June 13 2025 a servicer sent a family a modification agreement at 7.25 percent, with 17 days to sign and return it notarised. The existing rate on the loan was about 2.25 percent. That is five percentage points above the existing rate, against a limit of one, which is the circumstance paragraph (b) exists for. A Department loan technician stated the modification was approved on July 24 2025, roughly four weeks after the signing window had closed. The loan was referred to foreclosure on July 22 2025, two days before that reported approval.

PROJECT ANALYSIS The point is not that the family declined a bad offer. It is that the offer as written could not be accepted lawfully. Signing by the deadline meant executing a non-conforming modification weeks before the approval the regulation requires existed. That is a defect in the offer, not in the response to it.

Where this argument is weaker than it looks, said here rather than left for someone to find. The regulation's trigger is "before entering into any loan modification agreement," not before making an offer. A servicer can say that sending a proposed agreement is not entering into one, and that approval obtained before signature would satisfy the rule. That is a fair reading and it narrows the claim. What it does not answer is an offer whose own signing deadline falls before the approval exists, because that offer cannot be accepted in compliance with the rule as written.

PROJECT ANALYSIS

One of the most common things families say about the years before they lost the house is that nobody at the mortgage company ever stayed with their file. A new name each call, the same documents sent again, and a clock running the whole time. That reads like bad service. It is also a rule the mortgage company was already required to follow.

DOCUMENTED FACT The rule is part of Regulation X, the federal mortgage servicing rule the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau writes. It requires a mortgage company (the loan servicer) to have policies and procedures reasonably designed to "Assign personnel to a delinquent borrower by the time the servicer provides the borrower with the written notice required by § 1024.39(b), but in any event, not later than the 45th day of the borrower's delinquency." S232

DOCUMENTED FACT Assigning someone is not the end of it. The same paragraph requires the servicer to "Make available to a delinquent borrower, via telephone, personnel assigned to the borrower ... to respond to the borrower's inquiries, and as applicable, assist the borrower with available loss mitigation options until the borrower has made, without incurring a late charge, two consecutive mortgage payments in accordance with the terms of a permanent loss mitigation agreement." And where the borrower calls and does not reach that person, the servicer must "ensure that the servicer can provide a live response in a timely manner." S232

Read the end date. The duty does not stop when a family is handed an option. It runs until two consecutive payments have been made under a permanent agreement, which is to say it is written to cover exactly the stretch where these families were lost: after the paperwork, before anything was settled.

The rule's second half sets out what those assigned staff are supposed to be able to do. In this project's words rather than the regulation's, because the full text of that paragraph has not yet been read from the primary source: give the borrower accurate information about what options exist, what the borrower has to do, where their application stands and what deadlines apply; pull the payment history and the documents the borrower already sent; get those documents to whoever is evaluating the file; and tell the borrower how to raise an error or request information. S232

PROJECT ANALYSIS S232

Why this belongs on a page about oversight rather than on a page about advice. Every requirement above is written as policies and procedures. That is a standard about how a company is set up, not a promise to any one borrower, and it is checked by examination rather than by a family. So the question this page keeps asking applies here too: who looked? This project has found no published examination finding, enforcement action or supervisory reference applying this rule to a VA-guaranteed loan in the period these families were in default. Searched for: 1024.40, continuity of contact, single point of contact, assigned personnel, and the section number alongside VA and Department of Veterans Affairs.

What it does not establish. A family describing a revolving door of representatives is describing their experience, and this project holds those accounts. It is not the same as a finding that any named company broke this rule, which would take that company's policies and procedures and an examination of them. The gap between those two is the whole reason this record exists, and it is not closed by wanting it closed.

Twice now the Department has stood up a way out of default, and twice there has been a stretch between the day the program existed and the day servicers could actually run it. Families fall into foreclosure inside that stretch. What differs is what the Department did about it.

DOCUMENTED FACT In 2024, standing up its purchase program, the Department published a circular that strongly encouraged servicers to run a targeted foreclosure moratorium on VA-guaranteed loans through December 31 2024. The circular gives the reason in its own text: to buy the time needed to stand the program up. It was rescinded on January 1 2025. S092 S197

DOCUMENTED FACT In 2026, the Department issued its final partial-claim policy on June 1, called the program live on June 15, and in the same transmittal set full servicer implementation at no later than 180 days from publication, which is November 28 2026. The gap between live and required is stated in the Department's own document. S148

So the 2024 gap was bridged and disclosed. The 2026 gap is disclosed and not bridged. That is the whole comparison, and it rests on two documents the Department wrote itself.

PROJECT ANALYSIS S092 S148

Two things that cut against the comparison, said here rather than left for someone to find. The 2024 circular encouraged a moratorium; it did not require one, and a servicer that ignored it broke no rule. And whether the two situations are alike in any legal sense is this project's reading of the record, not a finding by any court or oversight body.

What is left is a narrow question, and a narrow question is the useful kind. The Department bridged the first gap and explained why in writing. What changed between 2024 and 2026 that makes a bridge right the first time and not the second? That is answerable in a sentence by anyone who has the answer, and this record does not have it.

PROJECT ANALYSIS

The section above sets the two moratoria beside the gap that was not bridged. Reading the circulars themselves adds something the comparison does not show on its own.

DOCUMENTED FACT Neither circular claims any power to impose a moratorium, because neither imposes one. The verbs are strongly encourages and urges, in both years. S092 S197

DOCUMENTED FACT The only legal citation in either document is the same footnote, and it sits on the OVERSIGHT paragraph rather than the moratorium one. It names 38 U.S.C. 3704(d) and 38 C.F.R. 36.4336, cited for special audit and potential enforcement action against a servicer that is not properly servicing loans. S235 S236

So the question of what authority was relied on has a cleaner answer than expected: none was needed, because nothing was ordered. What the Department asserted, in both documents, was the power to audit and to penalise. It asked for the pause and reminded servicers it was watching, in the same document, twice.

DOCUMENTED FACT And there is a distinction in those two citations that decides who the lever reaches. The statute reaches a lender or holder. The regulation reaches a servicer, by name, and gives the Secretary power to refuse to guarantee that company's loans and to bar it from servicing guaranteed loans at all. Its words: the Secretary "may refuse either temporarily or permanently to guarantee or insure any loans made by such servicer and may bar such servicer from servicing or acquiring guaranteed loans." The regulation has read the same since May 2021, which is before the 2023 circular, before the 2024 circular, and before the current implementation window. S236

PROJECT ANALYSIS The publishable sentence is narrow and it is enough. The Department twice asked servicers to pause foreclosures, and in the same documents reminded them it can bar a servicer from the program. Both circulars point at the same regulation. That regulation is unchanged. Facing a gap it disclosed itself, the Department has neither asked nor pointed.

The section above turns on a verb. The limit on relief is written in mandatory language and the duty to give it is written as encouragement. The natural reply is that Congress simply did not write a mandate, and that where it does, the Department acts. There is a place to test that, and it has nothing to do with mortgages.

DOCUMENTED FACT Public Law 116-315 was enacted on January 5 2021. Among its provisions is Section 5107, "Programs on assistance for child care for certain veterans." S226

At the Senate budget hearing on May 20 2026, Senator Patty Murray put that section to the Secretary. What follows is her account of it, given on the record.

"Section 5107 says the Secretary shall provide a form of child care assistance by January 5, 2026 to all veterans during their VA appointments. Last year your budget requested $22 million to open KidsCare sites at 13 VA medical facilities. Congress delivered on that request. But you are only planning to use $1 million in FY26, and this year's budget request has one sentence about the program... VA's data shows 58% of veterans with children have no-showed or canceled their appointment due to a lack of child care. What is your plan to restart this program and comply with the law?"

Sen. Patty Murray, Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, May 20 2026

The Secretary answered "The previous administration did move forward with it. We are trying to move forward." The Chief Financial Officer added "We have two sites up and running." The senator's reply was "Let me be clear, this is a law. It is not a suggestion."

DOCUMENTED FACT S225

DOCUMENTED FACT The section has now been read, on August 28 2026, from the enrolled law itself. Section 5107 adds a new section 1709C to title 38, and its first line is "The Secretary shall carry out a program to provide, subject to subsection (b), assistance to qualified veterans described in subsection (c) to obtain child care." The verb is shall. The senator's account of it was right. S226

The deadline is real, and the statute writes it as a period rather than a date. Subsection (d) reads "Not later than five years after the date of the enactment of the Deborah Sampson Act of 2020, the Secretary shall carry out the program at each medical center of the Department." Title V of this law is the Deborah Sampson Act of 2020, and the law was enacted January 5 2021, so the five years ran out on January 5 2026. The date is correct. It is derived from the statute rather than printed in it, and anyone quoting it onward should say so.

One correction, and it widens the gap rather than narrowing it. The statute sets the standard at "each medical center of the Department." Thirteen sites is the senator's account of what was funded, not what the law requires. The $22 million, the $1 million in FY26 and the 58 percent remain her account, reported here as that. Section 5107 carries no dollar figure at all. S225

PROJECT ANALYSIS

Take the exchange at its own level and the shape is still the point. A member of the committee of jurisdiction says a statutory duty came due and was not met. The answer is that the Department is trying. That is the same answer this record has collected on the home loan side, in a program where none of the mortgage arguments apply, which is what makes it worth carrying here. A mandate is not self-executing. It is a sentence in a law until somebody makes it happen, and the record of who was asked and what they said is how anyone finds out whether that occurred.

PROJECT ANALYSIS

DOCUMENTED FACT Two provisions of the same law work together. Section 3732(d) says the Secretary shall prescribe loss mitigation procedures, including a mandatory sequence a loan holder must offer a veteran, and that sequence must include a partial claim option. S183

DOCUMENTED FACT Section 3720(h) says the Secretary may not act under paragraphs (2) through (5) of subsection (a) before the completion of that sequence. Those paragraphs cover modifying loan terms, paying or compromising a claim, releasing a lien, and purchasing at a sale. That last one is what the VA does at a foreclosure auction. S010

DOCUMENTED FACT The law was signed July 30 2025. The handbook chapter prescribing the sequence, M26-4 Chapter 22, took effect June 1 2026. S184

So for roughly ten months there was a sequence the law required, and no sequence anyone could complete. A condition that does not exist cannot be met. That window is closed now, and it is the window in which thousands of foreclosures happened.

PROJECT ANALYSIS The obvious reply is that the bar simply waited, dormant, until the sequence existed. Two general legal principles cut against that, and this record states plainly that neither is a ruling about veterans, mortgages, or the VA.

DOCUMENTED FACT An agency has only the power Congress gives it. The Supreme Court in 1986: an agency "literally has no power to act, let alone pre-empt the validly enacted legislation of a sovereign State, unless and until Congress confers power upon it." That case was about telephone regulation. S238

DOCUMENTED FACT A party cannot benefit from a condition it failed to bring about. The Fourth Circuit in 2017 held that where a party materially contributes to a condition not happening by failing to bring it about, the condition is excused, and it rejected the argument that this reaches only deliberate obstruction. That case was a contract dispute about stock options. S237

PROJECT ANALYSIS Putting those beside each other is this project's reading, and it is the whole of the argument. The Department was the party required to write the sequence. Until it did, the condition on its own power could not be satisfied. No court has said this about the VA. We are saying the question has not been asked.

On May 20 2026 a nonpartisan oversight group testified to the House Veterans Affairs Committee about how Congress checks on VA. Most of that testimony is not theory. It is a list of things a committee, or a member's office, can do on a Tuesday morning, each attached to a number somebody has already published. Those are set out below, in the witness's order, with the figures as the testimony gives them.

DOCUMENTED FACT S191

One thing to know before the list. Under a 2017 legal opinion the executive branch does not fully recognise an individual member's authority to demand information, which is why several of these work far better with a committee's name on them. Why routine congressional oversight matters for VA programs and mortgage servicing sets that out.

DOCUMENTED FACT S191

Rows one and two are the ones a family can use without a staff of ten. An open recommendation is a fix somebody official already wrote down and VA has not made. Naming one in a letter turns a personal story into a question the Department has to answer on its own record.

PROJECT ANALYSIS S191

Every lever in the section above works by asking. A letter, a question at a hearing, a request for a report. They are useful and they are voluntary on the Department's side, which is why a commitment given at a hearing can be given sincerely and still produce nothing.

A smaller set of instruments does not depend on agreement. They are ordinary congressional procedure, they are not extraordinary, and none of them is a scandal measure. What separates them is that refusing carries a consequence.

PROJECT ANALYSIS

One duty on this list already exists and is not a request at all. Where a statute requires the Department to report to Congress, the obligation runs whether or not anybody asks, and a report that has not arrived is not an outstanding request. It is an unmet statutory duty. This project's watch page records one such report and the date it was due.

Why that distinction is worth a staffer's time. Asking again for a report that is already overdue restarts the clock and concedes that the thing was optional. Naming the duty as unmet does neither, and it is the predicate for every instrument in the table above.

This record exists because a program failure ran for years while the bodies meant to catch it were asking about other things. The oversight testimony makes the same point from the institutional side, and it is worth stating in its own words.

However, the most important oversight Congress can conduct is frequent routine oversight. This includes regularly asking agencies how laws are being implemented, how taxpayer dollars are being spent, and whether programs are functioning as intended.

Tim Stretton, Project On Government Oversight, testimony to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, May 20 2026

PROJECT ANALYSIS Two things on this page are usable by anyone with a congressional office on the phone. First, an open OIG or GAO recommendation is a question the agency cannot answer with a denial, because the finding is already on its own books. Second, a bipartisan request is treated differently from a one-party one, and requests from individual members who do not chair a committee can be, and are, declined outright under a standing executive branch legal opinion.

DOCUMENTED FACT That last point is not a matter of custom. A 2017 Office of Legal Counsel opinion does not recognise individual members of Congress as having oversight authority, and the executive branch treats their requests case by case. Senator Grassley's stated position is that the opinion has, in his words, no legal or Constitutional basis, and that the Constitution does not mention committees or committee chairmen at all. S191

PROJECT ANALYSIS For a family whose case is being carried by one member's office rather than a committee, that opinion is the reason a request can go unanswered without anyone breaking a rule. It is worth knowing before you conclude that silence means your case was weak.

Source for this page: the testimony of Tim Stretton, director of the Congressional Oversight Initiative at the Project On Government Oversight, to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs hearing on H.R. 6733, the VISN Reform Act of 2025, and other pending legislation, May 20 2026. Registered as S191. Every figure above is stated in that testimony as of the date shown, and is a watchdog's reading of the agencies' own public trackers rather than a government finding. The Senate hearing at which the Secretary named the June 15 2026 partial claim date was the same day; his written statement for it is registered as S190 and the exchange itself is on Who is engaged.