Board Attorney Quotas Go National: What 311 Attorneys Told Us

When management raises your workload without bargaining, refuses to process the grievance, and the door to arbitration has been shut from the outside, what is left?

This week, the answer turned out to be 311 attorneys and a reporter.

Welcome to this Monday’s edition of Local 17 in Action, our weekly look at how your union is protecting employees across VA Central Office. Two items this week: growing national scrutiny of VA’s push to shrink its benefits backlog through production quotas, and a Local 17 win securing interim telework for a disabled Veteran.

How the quota fight got here

The Board of Veterans’ Appeals has long carried some of the lowest employee-engagement scores anywhere at VA. Under Secretary Doug Collins and Acting Board Chairman Ken Arnold, it got worse.

After Secretary Collins stripped employees of collective bargaining rights in August 2025, the Board substantially increased attorney quotas without bargaining with Local 17. When a federal judge restored our Master Agreement in March 2026, we demanded the prior standards be restored, and filed a grievance seeking a return to the status quo ante.

What the new standards actually changed is worth stating plainly:

• The annual quota rose from 156 to 182 decisions
• Issue counting was eliminated, along with most proration categories
• Rigid biweekly productivity monitoring was imposed

The Board refused to participate in the grievance process.

Why we could not simply go to arbitration

Ordinarily a dispute like this goes to a neutral arbitrator, and we know exactly how powerful that can be. In 2024, after the Board unilaterally changed attorney performance standards, Local 17 won a resounding arbitration victory that produced grade promotions with full back pay for more than 40 attorneys.

That avenue has effectively been blocked. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service issued a policy restricting arbitration access for federal employees affected by the administration’s national-security executive order. AFGE and other unions have sued FMCS to restore it.

So the situation was this: bargaining rights stripped, management refusing to resolve the grievance, arbitration blocked. We did not give up. We pivoted.

What 311 Board attorneys said

We surveyed Board attorneys to document what the new standards were doing to the work. 311 responded, and the results were alarming:

• 97% said the standards increased the risk of factual or legal errors
• 93% said they lacked sufficient time for meaningful de novo review
• 64% reported cutting back on evidence review just to keep pace

Read that middle number again. De novo review is not a courtesy the Board extends to Veterans. It is the entire reason the Board exists: an independent, fresh look at an appeal. Nine out of ten attorneys are saying they no longer have time to do it properly.

The third number is what that looks like in practice. When the clock wins, something gets skipped, and what gets skipped is the evidence.

Taking it public

Armed with those results, we began shining a public spotlight on the consequences.

On August 12, NOTUS reporter Eric Katz published a national story on VA’s emphasis on production over quality, prominently featuring our survey: The VA’s Race to Shrink Its Backlog Is Leading to ‘Egregious’ Mistakes.

The article is a welcome development, and it is only the beginning. We will continue bringing these concerns to the media, to lawmakers, to Veterans Service Organizations, and to anyone else positioned to demand change. We will not rest until Board attorneys have reasonable and realistic performance standards that let them do their jobs properly.

Because ultimately this fight is not about quotas. It is about whether every Veteran who comes before the Board receives the fair, careful, and meaningful review of their appeal that they have earned.

A telework win for a disabled Veteran

The second item this week is smaller in scale and immediate for the person it happened to.

Telework requests, including those involving employees with disabilities, have become one of the most significant workplace issues at VA. An employee at VA Central Office, a disabled Veteran who relies on a mobility scooter, had his request for an interim telework accommodation denied.

Local 17 advocated on his behalf immediately, emphasizing that he needed an effective interim accommodation while the interactive process continued. He was granted 100% telework pending resolution of his reasonable accommodation request.

Reasonable accommodations are not special treatment. They are a legal right protected by the Rehabilitation Act. Secretary Collins may be determined to bring employees back to the office, but that determination does not override federal law. Local 17 will keep fighting to ensure employees with disabilities receive the accommodations they are legally entitled to.

If your reasonable accommodation has been denied, delayed, or rescinded, contact us. Do not wait to see how it plays out.

In solidarity,

Douglas E. Massey, Esq. President, AFGE Local 17, AFL-CIO

Related reading: For background on the standards at issue, see Proposed Changes to Performance Standards: A Threat to Workforce Morale and our Amended Step 3 Grievance on behalf of Attorneys at the Board of Veterans’ Appeals. On the 2024 arbitration win referenced above, see Arbitration Victory: 10 Critical Takeaways. On the executive order behind the arbitration restrictions, see Executive Order 14284: 9 Alarming Facts Board Attorneys Must Know. And on the wider accommodation fight, see VA Telework Accommodation Crackdown: 4 Illegal Tactics Exposed.