In this April 2021 photo, unhoused veterans occupy dozens of tents in a makeshift encampment called “Veterans Row” that formed outside the West LA VA campus during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. George Rose/Getty
Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump has sketched out a highly ambitious agenda to end veteran homelessness in America. His plan solidified in May via an executive order in which Trump pledged to swiftly build a sprawling housing and social serves complex at the West LA VA, a 388-acre campus originally deeded to house veterans that has since been scarred by systematic neglect, glacial redevelopment, and a long trail of broken promises.
Trump’s bold rhetoric, however, has been belied by a series of strange and, at times, confounding policy actions and legislative reversals. These include cuts by the administration’s newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that caused many veterans to lose their jobs, and the Big Beautiful Act’s work requirements for people (including veterans) participating in programs such as Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which can complicate their efforts to stay housed.
The Home of the Brave newsletter reports on how veterans are fighting homelessness through Powers v. McDonough, a class-action lawsuit filed against the Department of Veterans Affairs. Get updates on their case delivered to your inbox here:
A clear example of the new administration’s policy reversal involves the fittingly titled End Veteran Homelessness Act, which was first introduced in June 2024, during the dog days of the Biden presidency. Simply put, the legislation proposed to dispense with vexing eligibility hurdles in the HUD-VASH program, an interagency rental assistance initiative that provides housing vouchers to homeless veterans.
Traditionally, these vouchers have been strictly available to the neediest veterans, like those with mental health issues or addiction in need of case management and other support services. But thanks to years of progress in housing American veterans, fewer of these high-risk veterans have been needed, leaving roughly 10,000 HUD-VASH vouchers unused.
In collaboration with veteran advocates and subject matter experts, Congress crafted this bill to open the program to more people, while maintaining priority for the neediest veterans. The text also aims to improve case management efforts. “We got to a final product we’re really proud of,” one veterans’ committee staffer explained, who, like many sources in this story, requested anonymity to preserve their relationships with an administration they hope to work with productively.
Last summer, Biden’s VA strongly endorsed the legislation. In a subsequent hearing, Jill Albanese, the Director of Clinical Operations for the VA’s Homeless Programs Office, expressed her office’s gratitude for the bill. “We really do appreciate this very much,” she said.
To illustrate the act’s potential, Albanese referenced a real-life case of a veteran working a full-time job who couldn’t afford the skyrocketing rents in his region. As such, he was living out of his car. He couldn’t secure a voucher under the current regulations, even though there were unused ones at his local VA medical center. If the bill were to pass, Albanese explained, he would gain access to this help, which “would end his homelessness permanently.”
Best of all, Albanese explained, this positive outcome, and many more, could be achieved without spending a single additional cent. “There’s no cost,” she testified. “We’re just asking for more flexibility, really, to use the vouchers how we want to.”
Get the whole story: An epic government scandal hiding in plain sight
Home of the Brave is an award-winning, multimedia feature documenting the unhoused veteran crisis at the West LA VA campus, a 388-acre property deeded to the U.S. government in 1888 specifically to house disabled soldiers. Over the last 50 years, the land was carved up and leased to private interests, while development for veteran housing has been painfully slow. A land grab dating back to the U.S. Civil War, the history of this land is a story bursting with government malfeasance, neglect, graft, and even death.
Four months later, Trump coasted to re-election. Even as he promised to upend momentum on a slate of issues, it initially seemed that work on veteran homelessness might continue apace. During his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to end veteran homelessness on day one, albeit with a highly politicized plan. He pledged to shelter and treat homeless veterans by redirecting humanitarian funds spent by the Biden administration on immigrants. “The American veteran is one of our greats,” Trump declared. “These are great, great people. We have to take care of them.”
When, in early February, Trump’s VA Secretary, Doug Collins, delivered his inaugural message to veterans and VA employees, he pledged to do a “better job” tackling veteran homelessness. In a speech that same month before the Disabled American Veterans, Collins injected further urgency into the issue. “I’m ready to see results,” he said. “I’m ready to take whatever we have and say, ‘What can we do better?’”
Two weeks later, Albanese returned to Capitol Hill. She was before the same subcommittee, in the same room, testifying on the same bill. The only difference was that the VA was now opposed to it. The department was also in the midst of a massive purge of VA staff, first pegged at 80,000 firings, since scaled back to 30,000.
During the hearing, U.S. Representative Delia Ramirez strained to understand the VA’s sudden about-face. Ramirez herself came up in social service work in Chicago, first as executive director of the homelessness-focused non-profit Center for Changing Lives, then as president of the Latin United Community Housing Association.
“You would think,” Ramirez seethed during the hearing, “that at a time when the administration’s irresponsible firing spree is disproportionately impacting veterans — stripping veteran employees of the VA and other agencies of their gainful employment — we would be doing everything at our disposal to ensure more veterans are placed into, and retain, housing.”
Ramirez then directed a string of questions to a clearly uncomfortable Albanese, herself a trained social worker and respected housing advocate. (According to the congressional staffer, the VA’s change in position hadn’t been initiated within Albanese’s office, but from “directly within the administration.”)
In her back-and-forth with Ramirez, Albanese repeatedly acknowledged the bill’s positive elements without explicitly endorsing it. Then Ramirez asked broadly if the legislation would “help communities end veteran homelessness? Yes or no.”
Albanese paused briefly, then leaned toward the microphone. “Yes,” she said.
“Leadership and institutional knowledge can be really make or break in big bureaucracies like VA…. And when you lose that, things can fall apart.” — Kathryn Monet, CEO of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.
The VA’s unexplained opposition to this bill is at direct odds with their purportedly productive focus on the West LA region. The End Veterans Homelessness Act would be game-changing for the region, with one West LA VA official saying the bill would free up thousands of unused HUD-VASH vouchers for veterans in southern California alone.
Rather than expand HUD-VASH offerings, the White House and Congressional Republicans are now aiming to scramble the program entirely. The VA’s current budget proposal, as well as the House version of the MIL-CON VA appropriations bill, would move the administration of these vouchers from HUD to VA, a seemingly innocuous shift sold as a streamlining of processes. Still, some lawmakers and advocates worry this is meant to hobble the program by freighting the already-overloaded VA with a new power — public housing authority. Some also speculate that the move to sequester housing vouchers at VA is meant to make more politically palatable a series of deep cuts to other HUD housing programs, though, as one official pointed out, 400,000 veterans rely on other forms of HUD assistance, like Section 8 housing.
Then there’s the Trump executive order to build a so-called “National Center for Warrior Independence” on the West LA VA grounds. While light on details, the order pledges to erect housing and stand up treatment and job-training programs. The order has spurred both deep skepticism and cautious optimism from advocates. “I’m watching it closely and giving them the benefit of the doubt,” says one LA-based veteran housing official. “But obviously there’s lots of opportunities for things to go awry. This is some of the most valuable land in the country.” The May executive order was then further complicated by one signed in July which, according to Military Times, “would allow local officials to remove homeless individuals from public areas and permit those authorities to commit those Americans to drug treatment centers or other public health institutions.”
“For veterans — many of whom live with service-connected trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder or other mental health conditions — forced treatment can retraumatize rather than heal,” the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans said in a statement. “They have earned the dignity of a hand up in the way of investments in housing, mental health, and substance abuse treatment, and additional supportive services — not surveillance and detention.”
During his first term, Trump evinced a similar pattern of positive rhetoric on veteran homelessness that was contravened by damaging policy efforts. In 2017, his first VA Secretary, Dr. David Shulkin,and then-Housing and Urban Development Chief Ben Carson appeared at a Washington D.C. shelter to tout Trump's commitment to ending veteran homelessness. Four days later, Shulkin privately told staff that he was killing the $460 million HUD-VASH program he’d just publicly bragged about. His decision came shortly after federal data indicated a 1.5 percent increase in veteran homelessness — the first bump up since 2010. (Shulkin quickly reversed course under pressure from veterans’ advocates.)
Trump later invited a formerly homeless veteran named Tony Rankins to his 2020 State of the Union address. In his remarks, he said Rankins had moved out of his car and into housing thanks to a construction job secured through one of the administration’s so-called “Economic Opportunity Zones.” “He is now a top tradesman,” Trump bragged, “drug-free, reunited with his family.” There was a problem, however, with Trump’s rosy story: It wasn’t quite true, according to reporting by the Associated Press.
Trump’s second VA Secretary, Robert Wilkie, was caught in a leaked recording calling the Brentwood School lease on the West LA campus a “fraud,” and insinuated that the long struggle to house veterans was informed by a city with a history whose land was “carved up” by the Hollywood elite.
The Biden administration similarly made a series of well-publicized moves to elevate housing, and yet actual progress on units came slowly. His White House aggressively opposed Powers v. McDonough, an ultimately triumphantclass-action lawsuit launched by a coalition of homeless veterans and LA-area advocates. The Biden administration appealed the ruling, and the Trump administration has continued to pursue the appeal, despite his executive order, which explicitly acknowledges that major agency failings had allowed “this crown jewel of veteran care to deteriorate over the last few decades.”
Despite its own patten of delays in housing construction on the West LA VA campus, the Biden Administration had secured some fragile improvements, thanks largely to effective leadership appointments. They included a new medical director for the West LA VA named John Kuhn, who led development in the Bronx of one of the first veteran-specific housing projects in the nation back in 1992. Later, at the VA, Kuhn developed and launched the VA’s highly effective homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing initiative. Another major staffing move involved Keith Harris, who was given a new special role to coordinate veteran housing efforts between Los Angeles and the office of the VA Secretary, in Washington D.C. Harris, a trained clinical psychologist, had spent two decades at the VA, mostly on housing issues, including as the department’s National Director of Clinical Operations for Homeless Programs.
Watch: “The Promised Land”
In the Telly Award-winning documentary short “The Promised Land,” Bronze Star Army veteran and documentary filmmaker Rebecca Murga provides an unflinching look at LA’s homeless veteran crisis, letting unhoused heroes provide a street-level view of what life is like when your government leaves you behind.
Learn more about these veterans, their lives, and their struggles, watch “The Promised Land” today.
According to four sources, both Kuhn and Harris are departing the agency, leaving some of their signature programs in jeopardy. Two sources say that Dr. Carma Heitzmann, the National Director of the VA’s Homeless Veterans Community Employment Services program, is also retiring. (Neither Kuhn nor Harris responded to requests for comment, and a VA spokesperson would neither answer questions nor accommodate any interview requests for this story.)
“Leadership and institutional knowledge can be really make or break in big bureaucracies like VA,” says Kathryn Monet, the CEO of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. “And when you lose that, things can fall apart.”
Four sources expressed worry over the future of various initiatives these officials were working on. One of them, spearheaded by Harris, aims to build a tool to better assess the characteristics and housing needs of veterans in the region, as well as the available housing stock. “That information is a really crucial piece in figuring out how many units we actually need on the West LA campus,” one official explained. (Trump’s Executive Order sets out a massive and seemingly arbitrary construction goal of 6,000 units on campus.)
As part of this work, Harris and others were working to improve on a vital data set plugged into this tool: the HUD-VASH’s program’s so-called “by name” list, which is a comprehensive list of every known veteran experiencing homelessness in the region.
Internal agency communications show that VA is also tweaking with the internal Homeless Operations Management and Evaluation System, or HOMES, forcing all veterans to be categorized by their born sex rather than their gender identity, a change the Hill staffer says “raises extreme health and safety concerns” for transgender veterans in the shelter system.
Various housing-related VA contracts have also been axed as part of Elon Musk’s so-called DOGE initiatives. Among other things, VA cancelled a contract used to ensure housing for formerly homeless veterans meet all relevant safety standards, including around lead-based paint. A West LA official says another contract with Technical Assistance Collaborative and ABT, two firms specializing in social services and housing, was axed. That contract provided a team that worked daily with VA staff to run meetings and provide guidance on best practices around housing policy. This official also says another administrative contract with a group called Concourse was greatly scaled back. Officials under this contract helped VA housing leaders organize meetings, set agendas, and take notes. “They were masterful at that work,” the VA official says. “Those are huge losses.”
There are other worrying developments, too, from quiet cuts to sweeping orders. As Rep. Ramirez alluded to in her testimony, the administration’s federal firing blitz is taking a heavy toll on American veterans, who make up a disproportionate number of federal officials, especially at the VA, where they comprise a full third of the workforce. If the administration ultimately follows through on its promise to fire more than 80,00 VA employees — or even its since-revised figure of 30,000 staffers — many will surely end up homeless. The VA’s own data indicates that low income is one of strongest and most consistent factors for veteran homelessness.
The Trump administration has also pledged to end enrollment in a VA home loan rescue program, implemented under the Biden administration, that has so far helped more than 17,000 veterans avoid foreclosure. House Republicans have also opposed a technical amendment, authored by Rep. Ramirez, that would increase budgetary authorization for the VA’s Grant and Per Diem program, which provides support for local agencies battling homelessness.
The Trump administration has also gutted the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness and, according to two knowledgeable sources, also ordered the suspension of the Veterans and Community Oversight and Engagement Board, or VCOEB, which was chartered to oversee implementation of the West LA VA’s master plan to build housing for veterans. In late April, long-time VCOEB board member Rob Begland abruptly resigned. He subsequently penned a sharp letter to Congress calling for oversight hearings and alleging that the VA has, over his tenure, “repeatedly disregarded sensible advice by the VCOEB or, even worse, reneged on promises or commitments made to the VCOEB in public hearings.”
Moving forward, VA seems to be seeking to navigate its housing plans largely in private. When, for instance, the VA submitted testimony earlier this year expressing vague “concerns” about the End Veteran Homelessness Act, policy staff spent four months seeking a meeting with VA to understand their position. When that confab finally happened, in July, it was “short, tense, and filled with platitudes.” Two sources also say the VA has taken the unusual step of placing NDAs on both the principal housing developer at the West LA VA and the VCOEB. “We haven’t heard anything from them in about six months,” griped one official.
Rob Reynolds, an Iraq war veteran and long-time veteran housing advocate, was initially thrilled by Trump’s order, but is concerned it may become an initiative that fails to secure veteran input or buy-in.
“The White House has been reaching out to a select group of people but have not been including veterans who live on the property or veterans who have been advocating for returning the property to its original purpose,” he says. “That’s concerning to all of us, because we know how this goes. Discussions happen behind closed doors and then there’s problems in the plan that could have been easily addressed if we had been included beforehand. We’d prefer to be proactive and help make the Trump administration’s plan successful.”
A ruling on the appeal of Powers v. McDonough could be issued any day. An action plan outlining how more housing will be built at the West LA VA is supposed to be completed by September 6, per the Trump administration’s executive order.
Thanks for writing this. Most folks don’t see how deep this really cuts, but you put it out there straight. These policies aren’t just numbers on a page—they’re lives. Appreciate you shining light on it.
Thanks for writing this. Most folks don’t see how deep this really cuts, but you put it out there straight. These policies aren’t just numbers on a page—they’re lives. Appreciate you shining light on it.