H.R. 2954, Veterans Transition to Trucking Act of 2025

H.R. 2954 would allow the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to approve the use of VA education benefits for apprenticeship programs that are offered in multiple states by commercial truck driving schools.

VA provides education benefits for eligible veterans, military personnel, and their spouses and children. Those benefits can be used for approved programs of education, including multistate apprenticeship programs that meet standards developed by the Department of Labor. Under current law, those multistate apprenticeship programs must be approved by the State Approving Agency in the state in which they are headquartered.

VA provides those agencies with funding from mandatory appropriations to subsidize the cost of approving programs; that funding was capped at $27 million in 2024, and the limit is adjusted annually for inflation. Those agencies indicate that VA funding does not cover all the costs of approving education programs; thus, CBO expects that any savings from reducing the number of approvals for multistate apprenticeship programs offered by commercial truck driving schools would be used to cover other unreimbursed expenses. As a result, CBO estimates that implementing H.R. 2954 would not affect direct spending.

VA would incur additional administrative expenses to the extent that it approves multistate apprenticeship programs offered by commercial truck driving schools; however, based on information published by VA, CBO expects that there would be few such approvals and that costs would increase by less than $500,000 over the 2025‑2030 period. Such spending would be subject to the availability of appropriated funds.

The CBO staff contact for this estimate is Paul B.A. Holland. The estimate was reviewed by Christina Hawley Anthony, Deputy Director of Budget Analysis.