Veterans losing their homes in droves after Trump ignored major warning: report

The Trump administration ignored warnings from policy experts when they changed a major policy at the Department of Veterans Affairs — and the result is a wave of foreclosures against veterans.

According to NPR, "More than 10,000 veterans lost their homes to foreclosure since May of last year, when the Trump administration shut down a key safety-net in the VA home loan program, according to the latest industry data. That is the highest pace of foreclosures for VA loans in a decade. Another 90,000 vets are heading towards foreclosure. This comes after a years-long debacle inside the VA has whiplashed thousands of vets between various enacted and cancelled programs and left many of them on the brink of losing their homes — often through no fault of their own."

One such family profiled by NPR included the family of Leann Ledford, whose husband is a former Marine carrying PTSD and a brain injury after fighting in Afghanistan and lives on disability because he is unable to work. Their mortgage lender told them a federal program would let them skip several months of mortgage payments to make needed, costly home repairs — but then due to the policy change, they were ordered to pay those skipped mortgage bills as a lump sum, which they couldn't do, ultimately leading to foreclosure.

The issue actually began under the Biden administration, when a pandemic relief program that allowed some veterans to skip mortgage payments was terminated, causing the bill to come due for thousands of people at once.

"After an NPR investigation exposed the problem, the VA halted foreclosures for a year while it rolled out a fix," noted the report. "Republicans in Congress, citing costs, wanted to kill that fix and replace it with something else. But last spring, the mortgage industry warned that shutting down the program without first replacing it would be a disaster." Despite this, the Trump administration shut down the program anyway — and now tens of thousands of veterans are getting their homes seized.

"It's unclear how many of those vets could have avoided foreclosure through the rescue plan, called VASP, or the VA Servicing Purchase program," noted the report. "But mortgage industry insiders told NPR it's clear that some of those vets had enough disability pay or other income and would have been able to keep their homes had VA not shut down VASP with virtually no warning."

Trump has long been accused of a callous attitude toward servicemembers, most famously dismissing those who died during a war as "losers and suckers."