Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the Department of Veterans Affairs monitor derives from public records — the VA Budget-in-Brief, OMB's Historical Tables, the USAspending API, and reachable VA OIG and GAO oversight documents. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, validation, and every flag.
Method
Discretionary vs. mandatory (+ MCCF, RETF, advance approps)
VA's defining structural fact is that its budget is mandatory-heavy — roughly 69% of the FY2027 total is mandatory benefit funding (Compensation & Pensions, Readjustment Benefits, and the PACT Act Toxic Exposures Fund), and Compensation & Pensions alone exceeds the entire discretionary budget. This monitor keeps the two dialects strictly separate and never conflates them. The Medical Care Collections Fund (a collection) and the Recurring Expenses Transformational Fund (a fund balance that does not score as budget authority) are kept as separate topline lines. And VA Medical Care is funded one year in advance — the FY2028 advance appropriation is surfaced on the overview, not hidden inside the FY2027 figure.
The reconciliation
The discretionary accounts (Medical Care + non-medical) are asserted to sum to the Budget-in-Brief's published “Subtotal, Discretionary without MCCF”; the mandatory accounts (benefits + PACT Act Section 707 leases + the Toxic Exposures Fund) to the published “Total, Mandatory”; and their sum to the published “Total without MCCF or RETF.” These tie to the dollar (million), within a one- or two-million-dollar tolerance that comes only from the source independently rounding its own subtotals — and where that tolerance is used, the gap is flagged below, never absorbed into an account.
Source documents & validation ledger
The history layer is shown in nominal dollars only — OMB Historical Table 5.2 publishes no constant-dollar basis, and no deflator is synthesized. Spine figures are in $ millions (the VA Budget-in-Brief unit); USAspending figures are in dollars.