For what its worth, this further makes directly suing the government in Federal Court a better option in my opinion.
A couple of thoughts on this. In several cases where I have sued on behalf of clients, the government has proposed a "Remand" to the BCMR/BCNR/PDBR. This is not a bad option as it requires an expedited response from the board (not greater than 6 months, but sometimes sooner), allows for recovery of attorneys fees for work at the admin board (which is not the case if you file directly with one of the admin boards), puts the board on notice that the Federal Courts are watching, and if you get a bad result, you can continue the lawsuit in court. I think of it as a "free bite at the apple." It is not always the case that accepting a remand is a great idea, but in many cases, this is a viable option.
I tend to think that the backlog will continue to grow, too. The plaintiffs in the Sabo case have discussed asking the court to just rule in their favor, which may change things (though, I tend to think any such solution may only be workable as far as awarding the initial 50% rating...the later adjudication of a final rating strikes me as more difficult, though, I think one solution to that problem would be to order the military to conduct a TDRL re-evaluation before reducing a rating. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out, but I can see an additional issue of this potentially slowing down PEB adjudications, too).
