President Donald Trump at the 2025 U.S. Military Academy commencement in West Point, New York on May 24, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr)
The Trump Administration, from President Donald Trump to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, often claims that it is revitalizing the U.S. military — which, they claim, has been undermined by "woke" policies enacted by Democrats. But according to reporting from National Public Radio (NPR), "more than 10,000 veterans" have "lost their homes to foreclosure" since May 2025 — while "another 90,000" are "headed toward foreclosure."
The Trump Administration, according to NPR reporters Chris Arnold and Quil Lawrence, "shut down a key safety net" in the U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs (VA) home loan program — a move that has left many veterans "on the brink of losing their homes — often through no fault of their own."
"The roots of the crisis go back to a mistake made during the Biden administration, when the VA abruptly shut down a pandemic assistance program while thousands of vets were still in the middle of it," Arnold and Lawrence report in an article published by NPR on April 2. "Struggling homeowners who used the program to skip some mortgage payments suddenly had to pay those payments back all at once — an unaffordable burden for many of them. After an NPR investigation exposed the problem, the VA halted foreclosures for a year while it rolled out a fix."
The NPR reporters add, "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."
During a hearing in March 2025, Elizabeth Balce, representing the Mortgage Bankers Association sounded the alarm and warned, "Foreclosure, period — that's really where it's gonna come to." But the Trump administration, according to Arnold and Lawrence, "shut down the rescue program anyway."
"Since then, more than 10,000 veterans have lost their homes through foreclosure sales, according to ICE Mortgage Technology, which tracks such data," Arnold and Lawrence report. "It's unclear how many of those veterans could have avoided foreclosure through the rescue plan, called VASP, or the VA Servicing Purchase program. 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…. Meanwhile, 90,000 more veterans are currently behind on their mortgages or in the foreclosure process."
