The bottom line
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced on February 17, 2026 that it is ending the practice of reporting veterans enrolled in the VA Fiduciary Program to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System. VA Secretary Doug Collins, working with Attorney General Pam Bondi, reversed a three-decade-old policy that stripped the Second Amendment rights of somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 veterans without any judicial determination that they posed a danger to themselves or anyone else. This should have happened decades ago. The fact that I had never even heard it discussed seriously in Second Amendment circles before it was reversed tells you something about where our movement puts its attention.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What the VA fiduciary program actually is
This is the part that needs explaining, because the policy never made any logical sense once you understand what the program actually does.
The VA Fiduciary Program exists for veterans who, for whatever reason, are not in a position to manage their own finances. The reasons vary. It might be a traumatic brain injury from combat. It might be severe PTSD that makes daily administrative tasks overwhelming. It might be terminal illness requiring total focus on treatment. It might be a physical disability resulting from service that just makes certain tasks difficult. In those situations, the VA appoints a fiduciary, which is essentially someone who helps the veteran manage their benefit payments, pay their bills, and keep their financial life in order.
Notice what this program is not. It is not a judicial proceeding. It is not a dangerousness determination. No judge reviews the veteran’s fitness. No court rules on whether they are a threat to themselves or others. A VA administrative official makes a determination that a veteran would benefit from assistance with their finances, and then a fiduciary is assigned.
Under a policy that originated roughly in the mid-1990s, that administrative determination triggered a NICS report. The VA sent the veteran’s information to the FBI’s background check system, flagging them as a prohibited person under the “adjudicated as a mental defective” category in 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(4). The category was written into the Gun Control Act of 1968 and operationalized through the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993, which created NICS and required federal agencies to submit records of prohibited persons. Somewhere in that reporting apparatus, VA administrative fiduciary appointments got swept in as qualifying mental defective determinations.
As of December 31, 2024, there were 199,454 VA-submitted entries in NICS. Not all of those came from the fiduciary program, but a substantial portion did. The policy affected hundreds of thousands of veterans who never stood before a judge, never had an opportunity to contest the determination, and never had any legal finding that they were dangerous.
This is the due process problem made concrete
I am genuinely passionate about this because it illustrates exactly why I am so skeptical of every “reasonable” gun restriction that doesn’t require a judicial finding of dangerousness.
The argument that gets made for every incremental gun restriction is that it only applies to people who probably shouldn’t have guns anyway. Red flag laws only get used on people who are genuinely dangerous, right? Mental health prohibitions only catch people who are actually a threat. If you’re not dangerous, you have nothing to worry about.
The VA fiduciary policy is the proof of concept for why that argument fails every time.
Nobody sat in a room and said “let’s disarm veterans who accept financial help.” The policy grew out of bureaucratic interpretation of statutory categories. The Brady Act required agencies to submit mental defective records. Someone at the VA decided that fiduciary appointments were close enough to that category. Nobody pushed back. Nobody required a judicial determination. And for thirty years, veterans who accepted help managing their VA benefit payments got flagged in a federal database and lost the right to buy a firearm.
If you have PTSD and you need someone to help you pay your electric bill on time because the administrative burden is too much right now, you are not a danger to anyone. But under this policy, you could not walk into a gun store and pass a background check. You fought for this country, came home with injuries that entitled you to VA benefits, accepted the help that was offered to you, and the federal government quietly treated you as someone who shouldn’t be trusted with a firearm. No trial. No hearing. No right to face an accuser. Just a database entry.
I did not serve. I am not going to pretend I have the standing to fully describe what that feels like. But I can tell you that as someone who studies constitutional law and cares deeply about the Second Amendment, this policy was a profound constitutional violation. The right to keep and bear arms, under Bruen and Heller, is an individual right of law-abiding citizens. Stripping that right without a judicial adjudication of dangerousness is not a reasonable regulatory measure. It is an administrative gun grab that happened to fall on some of the people in this country who most clearly earned that right.
What Secretary Collins and Bondi actually did
VA Secretary Doug Collins, acting under direction from President Trump and in coordination with Attorney General Pam Bondi, reversed the reporting policy effective immediately on February 17th. The VA will no longer submit fiduciary program participants to NICS. The department is also working with the FBI to remove the existing entries from NICS, which means veterans who were flagged under the old policy will have those records purged from the background check system. Attorney General Bondi has directed the ATF to review its regulations and propose additional changes to prevent current and future violations of veterans’ rights in this same category.
The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs has also moved legislation that would codify these protections and retroactively restore rights to veterans who were caught up in the scheme under previous administrations. A legislative fix matters because an executive action can be reversed by a future administration. What Collins and Bondi did is right and it needed to happen, but the long-term protection for veterans in this program requires a statute.
I will say something I don’t say often: thank you, Pam Bondi. I have plenty of criticisms of the attorney general on Second Amendment issues. Her record as Florida AG is not good. She supported red flag laws in Florida. She supported open carry restrictions. She has not been a consistent friend of the Second Amendment at the broad policy level. But on this particular issue, she did the right thing and she did it quickly. Give credit where it’s due.
The pattern that this policy fits
I want to zoom out because the VA fiduciary example is not an isolated administrative accident. It is a predictable product of how incremental gun control works.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 established categories of prohibited persons. Congress wrote those categories broadly and left the implementation to executive agencies. Those agencies interpret the categories, submit records, and make determinations that affect whether you can buy a firearm. At every step, the determination moves further from the text of the statute and further from any judicial oversight. By the time you reach the VA fiduciary policy, you are decades removed from anything Congress actually voted on, operating under regulatory interpretation that nobody specifically authorized.
Red flag laws follow the same logic. The argument for them is that they only reach people who are genuinely dangerous, and the intervention is temporary and reviewed by a court. But the “court review” in most red flag schemes is an ex parte hearing where you are not present and cannot contest the allegations before your firearms are seized. In some states, a neighbor, a coworker, or a former romantic partner can initiate that process with a single accusation. Your rights are suspended while you prove you are not dangerous. The burden has been reversed.
I recently watched a clip circulate in conservative circles of a woman standing up at a school board meeting and announcing that she had filed a child protective services report against a Turning Point USA event attended by high school students because parents weren’t allowed to supervise it. The event was entirely legal. The report was frivolous. But CPS had to investigate regardless, because that is what the system requires when a report is filed.
That is the operating principle behind every system that allows someone other than a court to initiate a deprivation of rights. You create a mechanism. You tell people it exists. And then anyone with a grievance, an ideology, or just a desire to cause trouble can use it against you. The VA fiduciary policy operated on the same principle at a federal scale, except the people on the receiving end were veterans who never did anything to invite it.
What “small wins” actually mean
The Second Amendment community spends most of its energy, rightly, on the big fights. The NFA, the Hughes Amendment, the assault weapons ban proposals, the magazine capacity restrictions currently moving through state legislatures. Those are the battles that get the coverage and generate the organizing. I focus on them heavily because they matter.
But there is a large category of gun restrictions that operate below that threshold. They do not ban classes of weapons. They do not impose dramatic new requirements. They just quietly disqualify people from exercising their rights through administrative procedures that are easy to implement and difficult to challenge. The VA fiduciary policy lived in that space for three decades. As of last fiscal year, there were 66,050 veterans enrolled in the Fiduciary Program. Over the full history of the reporting practice, the number affected runs into the hundreds of thousands.
Those are real people whose rights were violated. Not abstractions. Not policy categories. People who served, came home, accepted help from the system built to support them, and got a quiet firearms prohibition as a result. The restoration of those rights matters in their actual lives in a way that no think piece about the NFA does.
Gun Owners of America does important work on the big legislative battles. The NRA-ILA flagged this policy change immediately and praised the administration for it. The NSSF saluted Secretary Collins. These are the organizations tracking both the headline fights and the administrative details, and they deserve support because both categories of work matter.
The VA fiduciary policy reversal will not generate the kind of attention that a Supreme Court case does. It should generate more attention than it gets. Hundreds of thousands of veterans just had their rights restored. The policy that took those rights was never lawful in the first place. The administration fixed it. That is exactly what a pro-Second Amendment executive branch is supposed to do, and it happened.
Get the Weekly Briefing
New analysis delivered every week. Court decisions, case updates, and expert commentary.