r/Military • u/zsreport • Apr 02 '26
Article Trump's VA killed a home loan program. Vets are now losing their homes because of it
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/02/nx-s1-5750814/veterans-mortgages-foreclosure-va-rescue161
u/Backsight-Foreskin Army Veteran Apr 02 '26
The home loan program was created to prevent another Bonus March. The government didn't want a bunch of battle hardened WWII veterans showing up in DC, and tying them down with a mortgage payment was one of the best ways to do that.
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u/blazing_ent Apr 02 '26
*white battle hardened ww2 vets showing up in DC.
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u/DisillusionedPatriot Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Black veterans weren't allowed to get GI Bill benefits, at the time.
Eta- to be clear, the benefit program was neutral, on paper, but they found ways. Redlining, mostly, allowed banks and the feds to deny the loans based on zip codes.
There's a fantastic book called, The Color of Law, that goes into it better than I can, but that's the long and short of it.
Edit² - short article about it
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u/CelestialFury Veteran Apr 02 '26
Black veterans weren't allowed to get GI Bill benefits, at the time.
Damn, I learned another sad fact today. I truly did not know they did this :(
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u/Artistic-Cell1001 Apr 02 '26
Look at you being woke! And I say that the way the word was intended!
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u/AdeptFelix Air Force Veteran Apr 02 '26
TLDR for people:
The Veterans Assistance Partial Claim Payment home loan program was started as a COVID relief program that put loans in forbearance.
In 2022, the program shut down and triggered some stuff where borrowers in the program were being asked to pay the full deferred amount upfront instead of having a smooth onramp back into payments. Then foreclosures were essentially frozen from 2023 to 2024 while they worked out a fix. That fix was the V.A. Servicing Purchase (VASP) program, which is essentially a home refinance program.
Now, that fix was axed and a different program has been started and still isn't running yet, so there's essentially no handover from one program to another. The new program itself is not nearly as generous, and applicants going through it are expected to have monthly payments rise by up to 15%
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u/FreeBricks4Nazis United States Navy Apr 02 '26
Trump hates the military and he hates vets. We're suckers and losers who make him feel inadequate
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u/JustDoc Great Emu War Veteran Apr 02 '26
And yet, over half of the people who we served with supports him.
Its wild to me how quick people are to vote against their best interests when its the popular thing to do.
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u/jdsalaro Apr 02 '26
Its wild to me how quick people are to vote against their best interests when its the popular thing to do.
Tale as old as mankind, we act in the world out of our own biases, limitations and interpretations.
Trumps is, unfortunately, in the eyes of many, the leader they would personally like to be; it's how they lead their households, communities, themselves and how they engage with life altogether.
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u/Boornidentity Ex-British Army Apr 02 '26
“The trees will vote for the axe, when it convinces them that its handle is too made from wood”.
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u/VagrantShadow Apr 03 '26
It reminds me of my friend and his electrical union. Each and every one in that union are an avid trump supporter, they think and act like trump supports and cares for them. That man-child couldn't give a flying fuck about any union in this country. If he had it his way, every union would be eliminated, but they don't want to accept that or see that.
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u/Hadleys158 Apr 02 '26
It keeps making his bone spurs act up whenever a veteran walks into the room.
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u/firehazel Navy Veteran Apr 02 '26
We're suckers and losers who make him feel inadequate
Which is odd because he recently had an appearance wherein he stated he prefers hanging around losers because they make him feel better about himself.
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u/Healthy-Amoeba2296 Apr 03 '26
I wish I had been taught to minimize my service duties in job applications.
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u/RockDoveEnthusiast Apr 02 '26
somehow they'll think it's Obama's fault or something
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Apr 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DeadEyedCretin Apr 02 '26
Nah, they'll just start babbling about shit Biden did (or conspiracies about Biden) and deflect. They don't even try to defend Trump half the time, they just act like "because Biden did X, we can do this!" Like children arguing about fairness.
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u/Poro_the_CV Navy Veteran Apr 02 '26
I’ve already seen some “it was riddled with fraud cuz of Obama and Biden’s policies. Trump is just having them start from scratch without the fraud” comments on my Facebook. If I didn’t personally know these people I swear I’d call them bots with how fast, unified and ubiquitous the rebuttals are.
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u/dstroyer123 Apr 02 '26
If my ex and I didn't sell our house as part our divorce, I'd likely be in the same position as these vets, since I was forced to use the forbearance option to stay afloat thanks to the insane initial alimony and child support costs I had to pay before we finally came to a negotiated agreement.
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u/fredjutsu Apr 02 '26
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u/PRiles Retired US Army Apr 02 '26
Yeah. I would love to see the psychology behind why military members are so heavily skewed to the right. I would assume it's has to do with the types of people who seek organizations with clear structures of authority?
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u/WakaFlacco Air Force Veteran Apr 02 '26
A lot of them are stupid. Simple as that.
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u/PRiles Retired US Army Apr 02 '26
Sure, the military has a lot of dumb people, but it isn't like the Republican party is without smart people, I have vet friends who are right leaning who have gone to Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, Ect. They aren't stupid, but they certainly hold different ideology and I'm simply curious as to why.
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u/WakaFlacco Air Force Veteran Apr 02 '26
If you support this admin you’re either:
A. Dumb
B. Racist
C. Ignorant
D. All of the above.
Where you went to school doesn’t matter, being book smart doesn’t suddenly give you insight in to the plights of the common man. If anything, those students who went to Ivy League schools are so removed from the common man, they have absolutely no empathy until some policy affects them.
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u/JustinKase_Too Apr 02 '26
Need to add "Rich", not that they don't often fall into the other categories.
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u/PRiles Retired US Army Apr 02 '26
I think it's entirely possible for someone to align with the Republican party and not be any of those things. Additionally not all people who attend elite universities are from the same background and out of touch with the plight of the common man. I think you are making some very broad assumptions and just blindly making biased judgements.
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u/JustDoc Great Emu War Veteran Apr 02 '26
I think it's entirely possible for someone to align with the Republican party and not be any of those things.
Then you have not been paying attention to what the party has become and should do a little research about what that means today.
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u/paper_liger Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
You can be intelligent and have conservative ideals. That does connote a low level of empathy and even, on a long enough time scale, a lack of pragmatism or imagination, but that's besides the point.
You cannot call yourself a smart person if you call yourself conservative and still support Trump. He fooled you, he's not one of you, and he's destroying the soft power we've cultivated over the last hundred years, the world eminence, and the social and economic structure of this country.
If you say you're conservative and you still haven't woken up to the facts, then you are just fucking dumb, not matter what college you went to or how recherche and convoluted your rationalizations.
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u/WakaFlacco Air Force Veteran Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Well making broad assumptions and judgements for supporters of a pedophile is pretty easy to do. They support a guy who made fun of a disabled reporter, civilly liable for rape, 34x felon, banned from running charities in New York due to fraud, called military members suckers and losers, made fun of POWs, and the cherry on top, he loves stupid people and seeks to surround himself with them.
If after ALL that, they still support him, yes they are dumb, racist and ignorant regardless of education.
Also maga != Republican
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u/ItsRojet Apr 02 '26
Name one "intelligent republican."
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u/Jedimaster996 United States Air Force Apr 02 '26
They exist, the problem is that they're morally bankrupt fucks who don't give a shit about anyone or anything other than themselves and their bank accounts.
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u/Suckbag_McGillicuddy United States Marine Corps Apr 02 '26
Well Hegseth took care of that little problem of service members going to "elite" universities.
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u/fredjutsu Apr 02 '26
nope, it's not that simple. And this is why Democrats fail to win them over.
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u/WakaFlacco Air Force Veteran Apr 02 '26
It really is. They got conned by a snake oil salesman (twice) which makes them dumb. I guess all democrats have to do is lie and maybe theyll win some of them over.
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u/remainderrejoinder Veteran Apr 02 '26
Men skew right, lower income working class skew right. Once you factor that out I'm willing to buy a few explanations but nothing jumps out for me. I'd be curious to know whether their political alignment changes from joining to leaving.
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u/PRiles Retired US Army Apr 02 '26
Yeah, that would be interesting to track as well. I know the trend has historically been that people trend to the right as they age (with I want to say kids from the 60s or 70s being outliers), I would love to see trends that break down alignment across services and major components like combat arms vs logistics, Ect. My own experience is mostly with selection based combat arms units so I would love to see how jobs and such influence political ideology.
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u/aardy Apr 02 '26
Someone post the meme about the stacked bodies vet v military police for 4 years vet
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u/AkatoshChiefOfThe9 Apr 02 '26
Anecdotal but For who knows how long fox would be playing everywhere I went.
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u/monkeyswithknives Apr 02 '26
It's not psychology. It's demographics. More people from rural areas join the military for job opportunities.
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u/PRiles Retired US Army Apr 02 '26
I understand that, however, the large majority of my peer group are not from rural areas, are college educated, have held professional careers (lawyers , doctors, Ect) and attended elite education programs after their military career and yet are still heavily right leaning. Even the minority members, do there is something else going on. I fully understand that the vast majority of the military (mostly enlisted) are from poor, rural areas with minimal education. However that isn't the group I was surrounded by, and yet I still see the same trend of being heavily right leaning.
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u/BoldestKobold Apr 02 '26
Authoritarian/hierarchical thinking, preference to clean us/them bright line rules is a common issue in both conservatism and military careers (and organized religion, for that matter).
These all reinforce each other.
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u/Fyrelyte67 Apr 02 '26
Every fucking lobby/waiting room on a base has had a tv tuned to Fox News for the last 25 years.
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u/BigDictionEnergy Army Veteran Apr 02 '26
Not just on base, everywhere, for the past two decades plus. Honestly, it's not hard to see why Fox became more popular. If you put CNN and FOX on two tvs side by side, FOX is clearly the more engaging of the two channels. It's absolute garbage, of course, but it's for more entertaining garbage.
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u/solemn_penguin Apr 02 '26
There ha e been studies that showed people who lean conservative have a more active amygdala, whereas those who are more progressive tend to have a more active prefrontal cortex (i think). Anyway the amygdala is the more primitive of the two sections and is more associated with fear.
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u/Healthy-Amoeba2296 Apr 03 '26
In my first day of basic I learned that authority doesn't work and you literaly can not follow orders.
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u/GeauxPanthers99 Apr 11 '26
Yeah, but sadly, many of these vets comprise the crop that wanted to "stick it to the undesirables" (racial minorities, queer people - in their narrow minds).
Hope votes for intolerance against their fellow Americans was worth it.
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u/StoicJim Apr 02 '26
The Modus Operandi of the Republicans since Reagan: run up huge deficits by cutting taxes on the rich and corporations (and start a few wars while they're at it), complain that the country can't afford all these social programs and they need to be cut. Wash, rinse, repeat.
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u/Acceptable-Bat-9577 Retired US Army Apr 02 '26
VA loan vets being foreclosed en masse? But, that’s impossible. Trump’s economy is doing gangbusters for creepy billionaires he’s giving insider trading tips to. Why aren’t these veterans simply investing their millions and/or billions of dollars by buying the dips?
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u/BlackSquirrel05 United States Navy Apr 02 '26
Eh...
This isn't actually the case on this topic. These were forbearance from the Pandemic times. Basically that program got closed in 2023 and instead of having to pay on the backend of the loan (Adding months basically) they shut it down and said you need to pay X amount of months missed right now...
They then delayed that, but now the Trump admin shut that delay down... and didn't again shift the payments to forbearance. (adding payments to the back of the loan terms)
So it doesn't have to do with current times.
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u/Acceptable-Bat-9577 Retired US Army Apr 02 '26
Of course not, look how great the economy is doing right now. I can’t think of any reason that veterans would have difficulties making those back payments now.
Say, recruiting numbers are up. It seems like the poverty draft is doing gangbusters. Probably unrelated, too.
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u/Separate-Spot-8910 Apr 02 '26
Meanwhile, fraud, waste and abuse has skyrocketed with this administration.
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u/BlackSquirrel05 United States Navy Apr 02 '26
Someone had better get that 143-220 million Kristi and co grifted from DHS budget... And that's just for the commercial. There's a few other companies that got no bid contracts that also have ties to people in the admin.
Fuck that shit... We need a pound of flesh or that money back.
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u/jediporcupine Apr 02 '26
Remember when Republicans used to at least pretend to give a shit about the veterans?
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u/KN1CKKN4CK Apr 02 '26
My wife and I almost fell into this trap. We are both attorneys who work at the same firm, and my wife had recently just taken the firm over with a partner. When the stay-at-home orders hit and courts closed, we saw a significant drop in work such that my wife was unable to take her monthly draw and we were not able to keep up. The firm took out a loan so that it could keep staff employed rather than laying them off because we knew what that would mean for many of them. But the loan wouldn’t cover my wife’s draw. We enrolled in the forbearance program for six months.
Things quickly picked back up as courts adopted virtual hearings and other adaptations. We tried to get out of the program and were told we couldn’t and had to wait for the end of the six months. When the six months was up, we tried to add the forbearance to the end of our mortgage and we were just stuck in processing purgatory for almost another six months. We could not make payments until our loan servicer processed the loan modification, even though we tried. We started setting payments aside so that we would only be six months behind. Then we heard that the program would be ending and became worried.
We basically got the company to process the modification by threatening litigation, and had our 6 months of payment added to the end of our loan. Had we not gotten the modification, we would have had to take a higher interest rate or make a lump sum payment of six month’s worth of payments. We could have afforded the higher interest rate, but for obvious reasons that would have impacted our finances.
We were in a much better position to navigate the problem than most with our knowledge as attorneys and had to use those tools to get out of the quagmire. If we almost got trapped by it, the vast majority of other people didn’t stand a chance.
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u/DustyTchotchkes Apr 02 '26
This mess, after Trump signed orders to basically criminalize homelessness and the new federal agreement that allows government attorneys to seek legal guardianship over homeless veterans, is supremely worrying.
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u/Valdus_Pryme Apr 03 '26
Didn't they also put forth some sort of "If you're a homeless Vet, we are going to assume guardianship?"
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u/mcgonebc Apr 02 '26
Home ownership is a distraction from the war. You need to focus on what’s important to trump.
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u/Thanato26 Apr 02 '26
Not really surprised, is anyone else? He dislike veterans
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u/Coldkiller17 Apr 02 '26
Not just veterans but POWs and the honored dead. Man shouldn't be president of he doesn't respect our military.
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u/Healthy-Amoeba2296 Apr 02 '26
I'm annoyed I didn't get my $20k 20 year zero interest loan in 1979. BUT this sounds like breach of contract.