VA News Releases
active Ingestion health: delivering Executive · Tier 1 · RSS feed · Department of Veterans Affairs
Official site (opens in a new tab) · All sources
What this source is
The Department of Veterans Affairs provides health care, benefits, and memorial services to veterans. This WordPress feed carries VA news releases and feature stories with teaser-length descriptions (30 most recent items, ~140 characters each; article pages extract at ~6,000 characters).
The Department of Veterans Affairs publishes news releases and feature stories on veterans benefits, health care programs, and veteran services.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the federal executive agency responsible for providing health care, disability compensation, education benefits, home loan assistance, life insurance, burial benefits, and other services to veterans and their eligible family members. The VA operates the largest integrated health care system in the United States, with medical centers and clinics nationwide, and administers a portfolio of benefit and service programs serving millions of veterans.
Through its news site, the VA publishes press releases, announcements, and feature stories on departmental programs, policy changes, and initiatives affecting veterans. Readers will find content covering topics such as new or expanded benefits programs, benefits program changes and eligibility updates, health care facility announcements and service expansions, new initiatives to serve specific veteran populations or address veteran needs, policy implementations affecting veteran services, departmental leadership announcements, ceremony and commemoration announcements, and stories about individual veterans and VA programs.
The VA news content serves multiple audiences: veterans seeking information about available benefits and services, veterans organizations and advocates, government employees administering veterans benefits, and the broader public with an interest in veterans affairs. The feed includes both official press releases announcing policy or program changes and longer feature stories providing context about veterans' experiences and VA services. The content emphasizes official program information, eligibility details, implementation timelines, and statements from departmental leadership. Content dates reflect the VA's publisher-supplied publication dates for each release or story. The news site serves as the primary official channel for departmental announcements, though specific VA medical centers and regional offices also communicate program-level updates and local services through their own channels.
Model-written orientation, generated 2026-08-04 by haiku, prompt version 1. It may draw on general knowledge of public institutions and is not official-record content.
Identity and registry record
- Registry id
va-newsroom- Agency / parent organization
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- Branch
- executive
- Type
- RSS feed
- Status
- active
- Tier
- 1
- URL (feed)
- https://news.va.gov/feed/ (opens in a new tab)
- URL (home)
- https://news.va.gov/ (opens in a new tab)
- Registered
- 2026-07-26
- Registry notes
- Probed 2026-07-26: RSS verified end-to-end — 30 items, avg description 144 chars, sample article extracted (6366 chars text). Sampled item was a feature story, not a press release — the feed mixes both; a content evaluation should decide filtering. Email sibling registered 2026-07-29: va-email (GUIDE §3 email class; the web status here is unchanged).
How we ingest it
- Channel
- RSS feed
- Method
- Would poll the VA news site RSS feed daily for new items.
- Poll cadence
- about every 60 minutes while the collector runs
- Request budget
- the agency class: at most 3,000 requests per day shared across every agency web source, counted from the fetch log (failed requests count too)
- Politeness
- robots.txt is honored as observed — including each host's crawl-delay, exactly — and every request identifies itself as fapd/0.1 (Free Agentic Publication Digester; +https://fapd.info/bot.html; contact: hustleyourcity@gmail.com); a refusal is recorded, never evaded
- Capture and hash
- captured raw content is hashed (SHA-256) into the day's committed provenance manifest, hash-chained day to day (PROVENANCE.md)
Ingestion health
Ingestion health: delivering 38 item(s) in the last 14 days; most recent 2026-09-28; 0 of 390 request(s) to news.va.gov returned no content.
This label has held since 2026-08-03T18:46:01Z (UTC) and was last re-checked 2026-09-29T09:47:01Z (UTC).
Counts are of our own requests, retries included. A 4xx or 5xx is the server declining to return content — that may be load, maintenance, on-demand generation, or a limit the publisher sets, and we cannot tell which from outside. Nothing here is a measurement of the publisher.
Ingestion statistics
These figures describe this project's ingestion of this source — items we recorded and requests we made — and nothing else. They are not a measurement of the publisher.
Last 24 hours
Last 24 hours: 31 request(s) (31 answered, 0 returned no content) · 3 item(s) ingested
Last 14 days
Items ingested: 38 in 14 days (2.71 per day) · most recent 2026-09-28
Content length: 7,424 characters average, 7,098 median (shortest 5,477, longest 10,394)
Delivery mode: full — full article text, fetched from the item's own page
Our requests to news.va.gov: 390 request(s) · 390 answered · 0 declined (4xx) · 0 server declined (5xx) · 0 no response — 0.0% returned no content
last answered request 2026-09-29T09:16:05.478+00:00 UTC.
38 item(s) in the last 14 days; most recent 2026-09-28; 0 of 390 request(s) to news.va.gov returned no content.
All time
Our requests to news.va.gov, all time (since 2026-07-30): 1,928 request(s) · 1,926 answered · 2 returned no content
Request counts begin 2026-07-30, the day this service went into production; earlier development-machine traffic is excluded. Counts before 2026-08-03 include unmarked source-probe traffic; probes are labeled and excluded thereafter.
Last 30 days, day by day
Each day runs midnight to midnight on Eastern time (Washington, D.C.), the publication day the digests use; the stored request stamps remain UTC.
| Day | requests |
|---|---|
| 2026-08-31 | 29 |
| 2026-09-01 | 31 |
| 2026-09-02 | 30 |
| 2026-09-03 | 29 |
| 2026-09-04 | 28 |
| 2026-09-05 | 34 |
| 2026-09-06 | 28 |
| 2026-09-07 | 29 |
| 2026-09-08 | 30 |
| 2026-09-09 | 32 |
| 2026-09-10 | 29 |
| 2026-09-11 | 29 |
| 2026-09-12 | 31 |
| 2026-09-13 | 26 |
| 2026-09-14 | 35 |
| 2026-09-15 | 30 |
| 2026-09-16 | 31 |
| 2026-09-17 | 27 |
| 2026-09-18 | 30 |
| 2026-09-19 | 28 |
| 2026-09-20 | 28 |
| 2026-09-21 | 32 |
| 2026-09-22 | 30 |
| 2026-09-23 | 28 |
| 2026-09-24 | 30 |
| 2026-09-25 | 30 |
| 2026-09-26 | 30 |
| 2026-09-27 | 28 |
| 2026-09-28 | 31 |
| 2026-09-29 | 7 |
| Day | items |
|---|---|
| 2026-08-31 | 4 |
| 2026-09-01 | 4 |
| 2026-09-02 | 4 |
| 2026-09-03 | 3 |
| 2026-09-04 | 3 |
| 2026-09-05 | 1 |
| 2026-09-06 | 1 |
| 2026-09-07 | 3 |
| 2026-09-08 | 4 |
| 2026-09-09 | 5 |
| 2026-09-10 | 3 |
| 2026-09-11 | 4 |
| 2026-09-12 | 1 |
| 2026-09-13 | 1 |
| 2026-09-14 | 5 |
| 2026-09-15 | 4 |
| 2026-09-16 | 4 |
| 2026-09-17 | 1 |
| 2026-09-18 | 4 |
| 2026-09-19 | 2 |
| 2026-09-20 | 2 |
| 2026-09-21 | 4 |
| 2026-09-22 | 4 |
| 2026-09-23 | 3 |
| 2026-09-24 | 3 |
| 2026-09-25 | 4 |
| 2026-09-26 | 2 |
| 2026-09-27 | 2 |
| 2026-09-28 | 3 |
| 2026-09-29 | 0 |
| Day | ms |
|---|---|
| 2026-08-31 | 224 |
| 2026-09-01 | 253 |
| 2026-09-02 | 232 |
| 2026-09-03 | 278 |
| 2026-09-04 | 295 |
| 2026-09-05 | 340 |
| 2026-09-06 | 337 |
| 2026-09-07 | 207 |
| 2026-09-08 | 335 |
| 2026-09-09 | 268 |
| 2026-09-10 | 205 |
| 2026-09-11 | 298 |
| 2026-09-12 | 328 |
| 2026-09-13 | 240 |
| 2026-09-14 | 441 |
| 2026-09-15 | 228 |
| 2026-09-16 | 266 |
| 2026-09-17 | 251 |
| 2026-09-18 | 332 |
| 2026-09-19 | 231 |
| 2026-09-20 | 241 |
| 2026-09-21 | 282 |
| 2026-09-22 | 243 |
| 2026-09-23 | 237 |
| 2026-09-24 | 285 |
| 2026-09-25 | 288 |
| 2026-09-26 | 321 |
| 2026-09-27 | 266 |
| 2026-09-28 | 305 |
| 2026-09-29 | 250 |
Our ingestion assessment
VA news releases and feature stories arrive through RSS feed with full article extraction. Over 14 days we collected 37 items averaging 7,460 characters at 2.64 per day, most recent on September 4. The feed mixes both press releases and feature content. The news.va.gov host shows 0% request failure across 382 requests, indicating stable delivery. Compared to the prior assessment (47 items at 3.36/day, 0.4% failure, 8,084 average characters), collection volume and daily rate have both declined slightly while host performance has improved to perfect availability.
Model-written assessment of our own ingestion, generated 2026-09-05 by haiku, prompt version 1, trigger: age-30d. It restates our measured figures and is not official-record content.