Veteran- and family-led, unfunded, and on the record
About this project
This is public-interest documentation, run by affected families, cited evidence, investigative research, fiscal analysis and oversight. It records what happened to veteran families caught between two federal failures: families who took COVID-19 forbearances were left without a workable way back, the replacement built to fix that was terminated on roughly eight days’ notice, and when Congress passed an emergency replacement authority the Department sat on implementation and did not use the additional statutory authority it had been given. The mortgage industry, consumer advocates, national press and members of Congress each warned in advance what would follow. This project documents that foreseeability, and presses for a cohort-wide remedy, benefits reversal, restored eligibility, and remediation for every family left behind. It makes cohort-level demands, never seeks a result in any one family’s matter, and holds itself to published editorial and privacy standards.
Who compiles this
Leann Ledford compiles and edits this record
She is a master’s-level social work student and a Washington State Certified Victim Advocate, and was named a 2022 Elizabeth Dole Foundation Caregiver Fellow. She is the caregiver-spouse of a service-connected disabled Marine veteran, and her own family’s VA-guaranteed loan is one of the cases documented here. She has worked inside this record for four years.
Funding & organizational disclosure
Independent and family-led
VFC has no institutional funder. Public support links may support directly affected families. No contributor reviews or controls the editorial record. If the funding structure changes materially, this disclosure changes with it.
How we handle facts
Editorial standards
The Trust Project standard
This project follows the eight Trust Indicators: who we are, who funds us, how we work, how we source, how our claims are checked, and how mistakes are corrected are all stated on this page or linked from it.
Minimum-source rule
Every public number traces to a primary source with a date. Nothing goes for-the-record on a single unverified figure; unverified items are labeled and held.
The three-layer rule
Documented fact, project analysis, and community-reported illustration are kept visibly distinct and labeled. See policy.
Content type & evidence state
The claim register currently uses two content classes: DOCUMENTED FACT and PROJECT ANALYSIS. COMMUNITY-REPORTED is a broader content type used outside the claim register. VERIFIED, PUBLICLY UNREPORTED, and UNVERIFIED · HELD describe evidence state rather than claim type. Each is defined at Data & Methods →
Do not manufacture a cohort total
Published affected-population counts overlap, so VFC does not add them into one unduplicated total. C003 preserves the corrected historical arithmetic and explains why it is not used as a total.
Foreseeability, not intent
The record shows the harm was warned of and proceeded. We never assert intent to foreclose.
Review cadence
Facts carry a last-verified date. Stale figures are framed as stale, not restated as current.
Why a source counts
Sources are weighed by what they are, not by who published them. A statute, a regulation, a VA manual, a hearing transcript, a court filing or a document VA itself issued is a primary record. A committee's own video is the record of that hearing. A news report is a pointer to a record, not the record, and it is cited only until the record it points at is found. The source register says which kind each entry is.
No borrowed attribution
This record does not say "reportedly," "officials say" or "it is understood that." A statement is attributed to the person who made it, on the date and in the venue they made it, or it is not published. Where another outlet is the only source for a statement, the outlet is named as the source. The statement carries the outlet's date, not ours.
Two sources for a characterisation
A number needs one primary source with a date. A characterisation of what a person or agency did needs two independent records, and one may be a document.
Officials, agencies and servicers are named, and their motives are not
Naming is what an oversight record is. What is not published here is why anyone acted.
This record documents what officials, agencies and servicers said and did, on dates, in venues, measured against the standards they set for themselves. It is not an accusation and it is not softened.
What is not published here is motive. This record does not claim to know what anyone intended, believed or privately decided. Where the record shows an action and a date, the action and the date are what appear. Where the wording of a finding goes beyond a citation, it is labelled as analysis and carries its own limitation, so a reader can see exactly where the document ends and the reading begins.
If you are named here and the record is wrong, it gets corrected. Email veteransforeclosurecrisis@gmail.com with the page and what is inaccurate. Corrections of fact are made on the correction record with a date, on the same standard applied to everything else on this site, and the original wording stays visible.
That standard applies to everyone equally, and it is the standard this project has been asking of the Department for a year.
No right of review. No official, agency, servicer, organization or funder reviews this record before it is published, and none has a right to. Anyone named may ask for a correction on the terms above, after publication, in public.
Every claim traces to a primary document, and the document is reproduced so it can be checked
Four things travel with every claim: an identifier, its source, the date it was last checked, and what it does not prove.
The work behind that is reading hearing transcripts, pulling statutes and circulars, filing records requests, screenshotting agency guidance before it changes, sitting on hold with servicers, and checking one document against another until the timeline holds. It is done by a social worker and MSW graduate student who is also a spouse and caregiver in one of the households documented here.
The limitation on each claim is not a disclaimer. It is what stops a figure being carried further than the document behind it can hold. Registers list every claim and every source, and both are downloadable.
Software is used for the mechanical parts of a project this size. Formatting and structuring pages, turning a register into a table, checking a file for broken links or inconsistent dates, searching a large archive for a document already known to exist, and producing a first draft of writing that is then rewritten. That includes AI tools, and they are named here for the same reason every source is named.
They are not used for:
- Sourcing. No claim here rests on something a model produced. Every figure traces to a primary document, linked and reproduced.
- Establishing what is true. Where sources disagree, a person resolves it. Where it cannot be resolved, the page says so and the figure is held rather than published.
- Producing quotes, dates, statute numbers or citations. These are transcribed from the primary source, and the source is linked.
- Judgement. What matters, what leads, what a family needs to hear first, and what is fair to say about a named official.
How each document was obtained. Where a claim rests on a document rather than a public statement, the source register says how the document was obtained. The routes are: a public website, a records request, a court docket, a hearing archive, a family's own file shared with consent, or a screenshot taken on a stated date before a page changed. A document whose route cannot be stated is held, not cited.
The verification structure is the safeguard, and it is why the registers exist. No claim survives on this site by assertion, from any source. Anything unverified is labelled and held, in public, rather than quietly published. If something here is wrong, this structure is built so a reader can find it, and the correction record shows it when they do.
The correction log
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we fix it in public and log it on the correction record, with the date, what it said before, what it says now, and why it changed. That page is the only correction log on this site. Spotted an error? Tell us →
Entity-neutral: this project is not published under any sponsoring organization pending an entity review.
Two lanes, kept strictly separate
Privacy & the litigation firewall
Public / project lane
- Systemic policy evidence
- Public records
- De-identified cohort examples (state + situation)
- Cohort-level asks
Private / case lane. Never public
- Individual case evidence & strategy
- Court filings, deadlines, discovery
- Case, loan, court, or agency file numbers
- Any detail that could identify a household
Personal experience appears only as de-identified illustration. The minor child in any household is never referenced. Consent is recorded before any example is published. See how to share safely.
Mission
We are veteran families harmed by a foreclosure crisis inside the VA home-loan program, not because anyone stopped paying, but because the government changed the rules underneath them.
This project exists to map the crisis, preserve the record, connect families to vetted help, and press for administrative fixes that already exist in law, without exposing any family to further harm. The full story: What Is Happening · Timeline
This record documents a federal program failure and what it did to the families caught in it
The standards below describe how the record is kept: how claims are sourced, how they are labelled, and how errors are corrected. They are not a statement about who is answerable for what the record shows.
Congress wrote the authority. The VA wrote the exclusions. The gap between those two sentences is what this record documents.
Voices in this record
This record is built from more than one family, in more than one state, under more than one servicer
The site is written in one voice. The record behind it is not.
The cohort is weighted toward veterans on fixed VA disability income and their caregivers, for whom a required payment increase was not survivable. What differs is when and how each case failed. Some entered COVID forbearance and were never given a workable exit. Some were denied, or still waiting, when Veterans Affairs Servicing Purchase (VASP) was terminated on May 1, 2025. Some took a modification at a rate they could not carry and are in default again. Some lost the home before the replacement program Congress ordered was finalized on June 1, 2026, and some after, since servicers are not required to offer it until November 28, 2026.
State law then decides what happens after a sale. Washington is non-judicial with no redemption period. Wyoming has one. The same facts, one state line apart, are not the same case.
More than one servicer appears in these files. That is why this reads as a program failure rather than one company’s. Families have continued to come forward through 2026.
Three pages sit under About. The correction record lists every published correction, with its date and what the page said before. Accessibility is our WCAG 2.1 AA commitment and how to report a barrier. Privacy explains contact information, family intake, consent, private documents, and publication choices.