Gray v. Secretary of Veterans Affairs
United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
875 F.3d 1102 (2017)
The VA's internal Adjudication Procedures Manual guided claims processors on which Vietnam veterans qualified for a statutory presumption of herbicide exposure; a 2016 revision excluded veterans who served only in bays, harbors, and ports (rather than on land or navigable inland waterways) from that presumption, without notice-and-comment rulemaking or Federal Register publication, and the manual bound only frontline claims processors, not the Board of Veterans' Appeals. Veteran Gray and an advocacy association (plaintiffs) sued to invalidate the revision.
Whether courts lack jurisdiction to review agency rule revisions appearing exclusively in administrative staff manuals that lack binding regulatory force on the agency's board.