The shortage was built by policy choices. It can be unbuilt the same way — and human medicine already shows how.
The veterinary workforce crisis can feel too structural to fix. It isn't. It was produced by specific policy choices that handed control of the profession's gates to private organizations, and it can be reversed by specific policy changes. Human medicine — which faced the same shortage warnings and chose to expand — is the proof of concept.
Right now, the bodies that decide who can train, test, and practice operate without meaningful public supervision. Under a 2015 Supreme Court ruling, a board controlled by active market participants isn't automatically immune from antitrust law unless a state actively supervises it — and most states don't. States can close that gap by requiring transparency, published decisions, and genuine oversight of veterinary boards and accreditation.
Human medicine has two competing accreditors and opens roughly two new schools a year. Veterinary medicine has one accreditor and has been stuck near 34 schools for 45 years. Allowing more than one accountable accreditor — or requiring the existing one to meet public standards — would break the single-gatekeeper logjam that keeps schools from opening.
At 23 states — plus Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands — now allow qualifying internationally trained physicians to reach full licensure without repeating accredited North American residency training, with another 18 considering it. Veterinary medicine has no equivalent fast lane — instead, a two-site, $12,804 hands-on exam bottlenecks about 168 qualified veterinarians into the country per year. States can recognize alternative licensing pathways for qualified internationally trained veterinarians, as a few have begun to do.
Veterinary school leaves graduates deeply in debt, pushing them toward the highest-paying urban practice and away from rural and food-animal work. Targeted loan forgiveness for service in designated shortage areas — which the federal government already maps — would direct new veterinarians to the communities that have none.
None of these lowers the standard of care. Each moves a lever that's currently frozen by a private gatekeeper. The December 2025 Department of Justice statement — that accreditors "cannot erect anticompetitive hurdles" restricting the number of veterinarians — signals that federal antitrust authorities now see the same structural problem.
You can push these forward: add your name to the call for public oversight, contact your legislators, and press your elected officials to treat the veterinary shortage as the policy failure it is.
← Back to the Newsroom