A Message from NACVSO President - August 2026

Greetings NACVSO Members and Partners,

It has been another busy month of stakeholder engagement for the NACVSO leadership team. At first, these items felt somewhat unrelated, but the more I sat with them, the more they took the shape of a familiar story, just told from different angles: the systems serving veterans still have gaps, and closing those gaps is where we need to focus.

Earlier this month, Ranking Member Mark Takano convened a roundtable titled "Bad Paper & Bureaucracy: How Character of Discharge Affects Vulnerable Veterans". We shared it across our social channels because it’s a scenario you know well: a veteran walks into your office and the first thing standing in the way is a discharge status received, often before the neurons of decision making had matured enough to understand what they had signed. That is exactly the kind of obstacle our profession knows how to untangle.

That same idea, that veteran service systems work best when the people inside them are working together, is why I keep coming back to the relationship between NASDVA—whose annual conference we attended earlier this month—and our state associations. NASDVA and NACVSO are not the same organization and do not play the same role, but we are pulling in the same direction. When that relationship is strong, veterans everywhere benefit. When it is not, veterans feel that, too. Strengthening stakeholder partnerships rarely makes the news, but it is some of the most important work we do, and I want to keep investing in it.

On the healthcare side, I want to bring to your attention the Written Informed Consent Act, bipartisan legislation that would require VA to obtain a veteran’s written, informed consent before prescribing high-risk psychiatric meds. It serves as a transparency measure that puts veterans back at the helm for important decisions in their own care. Thirty-five national veterans’ organizations have now endorsed it, and I understand why and am honored to count NACVSO among them.

Looking ahead, our Executive Board will convene in DC this coming October, and never-too-soon planning is already underway for next year’s Leadership Summit and Annual Conference.

As always, if you are seeing something in your community that connects to our national efforts, I want to hear about it. Your work on the ground is what makes us credible everywhere else.

Very Respectfully,

Andrew Tangen

President, NACVSO