Research & Reports

False Equivalency

The double standard behind the veterinary shortage: how the AVMA decides which foreign-trained veterinarians match an American graduate, using a test its own accreditation standard does not require

NAVEC · September 2026 · 53 pages · 9 charts · 67 sources · PDF

The American Veterinary Medical Association holds both entrances to the profession: its Council on Education is the sole accreditor of American veterinary schools, and its Educational Commission for Foreign Veterinary Graduates decides whether a veterinarian trained abroad meets that same standard. The AVMA tells candidates, and all fifty state licensing boards, that its hands-on examination measures them “at the level of a day-one-ready graduate of an AVMA/COE-accredited veterinary school.” This report sets that promise beside the two documents that would have to match for it to be true: the AVMA’s own examination manual, which names the animal, the operation, the operator’s role, the clock and the error that ends the attempt; and the AVMA’s own accreditation standard, which states that “precise numbers are not specified” and that curriculum is “the purview of the faculty of each college.” They do not match, and the published graduation rules of nine accredited colleges confirm it. The association’s own bulletin concedes the examination tests only “a subset” of accredited training, and its own published answers state that finishing an American school’s clinical year “cannot be accepted” in its place. Both programs are run from one building, by one AVMA division, under one executive. Built entirely on public records, with a section-by-section crosswalk, the cost and capacity arithmetic shown in full, and the questions federal and state enforcers should put under compulsory process.

If you have taken part in the ECFVG program, we would like to hear from you. Whether you finished it, are still waiting for a seat, failed a section, ran out of time on the seven-year clock, or looked at the cost and never enrolled, your experience is the part of this record that no document can supply. We also want to hear from those who think we have this wrong. Share your story →

Accredited Into Scarcity

The case for terminating AVMA COE’s federal recognition—and opening veterinary education to independent accreditors that hold competence constant while cutting cost and expanding supply

NAVEC · August 2026 · 33 pages · Federal filing · PDF + web

Written for the Department of Education’s 2026 accreditation rulemaking, this policy report applies the federal independence, competition, evidence, cost, and outcomes tests to veterinary education. It argues that AVMA COE cannot validate its own structure, that its costliest institutional inputs have not been tied to better day-one outcomes, and that multiple independent accreditors plus common competence gates can expand training capacity without lowering licensing standards. The filing includes fully costed nonprofit school models, a five-year BS/DVM route, paid provisional practice, and a protected transition plan.

Illegal to Help

The Veterinary Lobby’s Invisible Hand: how the AVMA and state veterinary associations turn private trade preference into public law

NAVEC · August 2026 · 63 pages · 12 charts · 205 sources · PDF + web

A pharmacy technician can give your child a flu shot in all fifty states. In Texas, a trained shelter worker who gives your dog a rabies shot is breaking the law unless a veterinarian stands on the premises. This report documents who writes rules like that and how: the model practice act “intended for use in state statute,” the regulator lists handed to governors, and eight case files, from lay rabies vaccinators to telemedicine to the $2.4 million campaign against Colorado’s voters, drawn from the public records of more than twenty states, the District of Columbia, and Congress. With the independent clinic file: how the same program starves private practices of staff and leverage while scarcity fattens the consolidators buying them out, and why the charity clinic was never the threat. Ends with the counter-campaign and the legal remedies already on the table, from NC State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC to the Justice Department’s December 2025 filing.

The Veterinarians America Won’t License

The ECFVG, the Clinical Proficiency Examination, and the shortage’s fastest remedy — held behind a gate no one may audit

NAVEC · July 2026 · 39 pages · 9 charts · PDF

America is short roughly 37,000 veterinarians while more than 2,000 fully trained candidates — many of them U.S. citizens — wait years inside the AVMA’s own certification program: about 256 first-time exam seats a year, a 75% first-attempt failure rate, total costs doubled in 2026 without published justification, and no federal, state, or independent audit of any kind. Built entirely on public records: the AVMA’s own bulletins and statements, VIN News investigations, state materials, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s filing in LMU v. AVMA. With the fifty-year forecast ledger, the opposition ledger, case files, impact estimates, and a complete legal exposure map.

Build the Alternative

Blueprints for an Independent Veterinary Credentialing System

NAVEC · July 2026 · 4 documents · 59 pages · PDF

A complete construction plan for the alternative: an independent Examination Council governed by the state licensing boards on the nursing model, and an independent Credentials Commission for foreign-trained graduates on the model medicine has used since 1956. Governance, bylaw obligations, item development, security, budgets, fees, three adoption pathways, and the continuity plan under which licensure proceeds uninterrupted on any timeline. Blueprints, not institutions: NAVEC holds no seat, veto, contract, or financial interest in what is proposed.

The Gatekeepers and the Gate

How a Half-Century of Surplus Forecasts and Control of the Licensing Gate Built the Veterinary Shortage

NAVEC · June 2026  ·  19 pages  ·  PDF

Two private organizations stand between a veterinary student and a license to practice: the AVMA Council on Education, the sole federally recognized accreditor of veterinary colleges, and the ICVA, which owns the single examination every U.S. and Canadian jurisdiction requires for licensure. This study assembles, for the first time in one place, a fact the public record can carry on its own weight — that the institution controlling the accreditation half has, for roughly fifty years, repeatedly forecast a surplus of veterinarians, even as the forecasts whose target years have now arrived were largely not borne out. It alleges no conspiracy and imputes no intent. It documents a structure — interested private bodies regulating the conditions of their own competition, insulated from the market correction scarcity would normally produce — and characterizes that structure as the one the Supreme Court addressed in NC State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC, and into which the Justice Department intervened on December 15, 2025, telling a federal court the arrangement is “not exempt from the antitrust laws.”

Fifty Years of Surplus Forecasts, A Record Shortage

The NAVEC briefing deck — the accountability case in presentation form

NAVEC · July 2026 · 24 slides · PDF

The two studies, one document. This 24-slide deck compresses Report No. 4’s fifty-year forecasting record and Report No. 1’s need-based reconstruction of the shortage into a single presentation: the forecast ledger of 1978–2024 tested against independent BLS, USDA, and GAO records; what it costs to hire a veterinarian in 2026 — and why job-market offers exceed the BLS wage figure; the three assumptions behind the official projections; NAVEC’s modeled 37,000 → 83,000 shortfall trajectory with disclosed ±25% bands; and the legal architecture, from NC State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC to the Justice Department’s December 2025 Statement of Interest — every load-bearing claim carried to a linked primary source. Built for state officials, journalists, and coalition partners who need the full case in fifteen minutes.

Reform on the Medical Model

How Adopting Human-Medicine Policies Would End the Veterinary Shortage

NAVEC · June 2026  ·  21 pages  ·  PDF

The United States is roughly 25 percent short of the veterinarians it needs, and the gap widens every year — yet the country opens only about five new veterinary schools a decade, admits around 168 internationally trained veterinarians a year, and licenses every entrant through a single privately owned exam with no government oversight and sole-discretion control over every score. This study argues the shortage is not an accident of demand but the engineered result of a credentialing architecture built around three supply-restricting gates. Human medicine faced the same pressures and opened all three — competing accreditors, a scalable national credential for foreign-trained graduates, and the 2021 elimination of its own hands-on bottleneck exam — without lowering the standards that protect patients. The reform is therefore not speculative; it is observed, at scale, in the larger profession next door.

The Gatekeeper No One Can Audit

How an Unaccountable Private Monopoly Built a Black Box Around the One Exam That Decides Who May Practice Veterinary Medicine

NAVEC · June 2026  ·  24 pages  ·  PDF

A single private organization — the International Council for Veterinary Assessment (ICVA) — writes, scores, and owns the NAVLE, the one examination every veterinarian in the United States and Canada must pass. This study documents how that monopoly answered a wave of fairness complaints not by opening its records, but by rewriting its candidate agreement and adopting a sole-discretion ethics policy that lets it investigate, withhold scores from, ban, and silence the very people who might testify. Measured against the four accountability features common to other major licensing exams — auditable questions, published fairness data, an external check on sole-discretion score cancellation, and verifiable scoring — the NAVLE fails all four, leaving neither the allegations nor ICVA's denials independently testable from the outside.

The Veterinary Shortage

A Need-Based Assessment

NAVEC · June 2026  ·  20 pages  ·  PDF

Official projections describe a veterinary shortage that is modest and self-correcting — the AVMA forecasts a surplus of roughly 8,200 companion-animal veterinarians by 2030. This report rejects that conclusion. Rebuilding demand from raw animal populations and published standards of care, and measuring supply by hours of work actually delivered rather than license count, it finds a 2026 shortfall equal to roughly 37,000 full-time veterinarians, widening toward 83,000 by 2031.

Despite Equal Merit

Evidence and Allegations of Racial and Ethnic Targeting in the NAVLE

NAVEC · July 2026 · 26 pages · PDF

This report is not a study of demographic disparities. It examines a different kind of evidence: specific allegations and documented irregularities of score outcomes correlated with race and ethnicity among candidates of demonstrated equal merit — candidates who trained at accredited programs, passed the examiner’s own official predictive instrument, and were failed by an examination whose scoring no party outside the examiner can inspect or independently verify. It documents effects, structures, timelines, and statistical patterns from the public record; it asserts no intent and alleges no proven misconduct, and every contested claim is attributed to its named source. The central case is Tuskegee, whose first-time NAVLE pass rate fell from roughly nine in ten to barely half in six years while the national rate moved only a few points.

The Shortage Is Structural. And It Is Solvable.

Fifty years of “surplus” forecasts, a record shortage, and a plan to open the gates of the profession

NAVEC · July 2026  ·  9 slides  ·  PDF

First delivered to the United Spay Alliance’s Vet Shortage Task Force, this short presentation carries the accountability case in nine slides written for any audience — every acronym explained in place, every claim in plain language. The forecast record of 1978–2024 set against what actually happened; NAVEC’s need-based 37,000 → 83,000 shortfall trajectory; how medicine keeps its gates open — two accreditors, two exams, and an independent gateway that licenses 9,682 internationally trained doctors a year — against veterinary medicine’s one hand on every gate and roughly 220; the documented record, from the Lincoln Memorial University intent-to-deny to Tuskegee; and the plan: state Attorneys General first, medicine’s model as the destination.