In the last 12 months, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs paid out $395.3 million to accredited attorneys and private claims agents working on veterans’ disability cases. That is roughly $33 million every month. That number does not include the billions in retroactive compensation flowing through the system annually, nor does it capture the full financial ecosystem at stake. What it does capture, unmistakably, is the reason why three powerful lobbying forces are fighting a national battle—simultaneously in statehouses and on Capitol Hill—over who is permitted to help veterans navigate the VA claims process.
Unfortunately, the veteran whose claim is pending waits sometimes for years for results.
Three types of organizations are federally accredited by the VA to help veterans file disability claims: attorneys, private claims agents, and Veterans Service Organizations, better known as VSOs. All three have a substantial financial stake in what has become a multi-front competition over pending state legislation, federal court challenges, and administrative decisions by the VA's own Office of General Counsel, all converging on a single question: who is ultimately permitted to assist veterans in the claims process.
Legacy VSOs will tell the public their claims services are “free.” In the narrowest technical sense, that is true: the veteran sitting across the table from a VSO representative will not be handed a bill. But VSOs commonly omit that federal and state governments fund claims-assistance operations through grants that amount to millions of dollars annually. Government awards contain language describing claims assistance as an expected service:
"Assistance with obtaining and coordinating other benefits provided by the federal government, a state or local government, or an eligible entity."
These veterans' organizations have coined the phrase "claims sharks" to lobby both Congress and the Executive to limit—through executive action, an act of Congress, and even through judicial activism—who can be permitted to assist veterans with obtaining their earned benefits. Legacy VSOs are not the only lobbyists on the Hill with this mission.
The American Association for Justice (AAJ), also known as the Trial Bar, which represents VA-accredited attorneys, also has a stake in the matter: close to $400 million, to be exact. The AAJ is straightforward, transparent, and honest about its lobbying. Its disclosures confirm that H.R. 3132 was a specific topic of discussion with lawmakers, and the AAJ spent more than $3.5 million lobbying in 2025. The financial interest is not difficult to identify: H.R. 3132 caps attorney fees at $12,500, and caps are not something AAJ members want.
The Trial Bar’s opposition to fee caps is not new, and veterans’ benefits are not its only battlefield. The AAJ has fought liability protections for organizations donating menstrual products, worked to preserve mass-tort litigation in asbestos, talc, and PFAS cases, and consistently deployed experienced attorney-lobbyists to protect its members’ earning potential. Their mission has arrived in the veterans’ benefits space, and it has arrived with serious money.
The veteran in the administrative waiting room, or even before the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, did not ask for any of the lobbying. He filed a claim, described his injuries, submitted his service records, and then waited for a system that still carries almost 100,000 claims in its backlog to respond.
Every organization currently enthralled in the court of public opinion will tell you its sole mission is to serve the veteran. But lobbying disclosures, grant records, IRS Form 990 filings, and VA fee data tell a more complicated story, one of a national pool of federal funds and the sophisticated organizations competing for their share of it.
Veterans did not ask for a lobbying campaign over their benefits. They simply asked the country they served to keep its promise.
Matthew Feehan, J.D. is a twice-deployed U.S. Army National Guard veteran and former infantry officer with more than a decade of combined military, legal, and federal contracting experience.
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