About fifteen months before VA ended it, the Department's top home loan official described VASP to a House subcommittee in writing. The statement is published on the committee's own website. It reads differently next to what the Secretary said about the same program in May 2026, higher up this page.
DOCUMENTED FACT S052
What VASP was. VASP stands for VA Servicing Purchase. Under it, VA bought a defaulted loan from the mortgage company and rewrote it at a fixed 2.5 percent over thirty or forty years. VA's estimate was an average payment cut of 20 percent, for more than 40,000 veterans already behind. Those are design figures given before the program opened, not counts of what happened.
DOCUMENTED FACT S052
The statement calls it, in as many words, the right answer:
"VA strongly believes the VASP Program represents VA's best course of action for Veterans, especially when compared with VA's temporary COVID-19 home retention options."
John Bell III, Executive Director, VA Loan Guaranty Service, written statement to the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity, February 15 2024, page 8
DOCUMENTED FACT S052
Then the sentence that matters most. It tells the subcommittee what a veteran could expect later on, if the new payment stopped working:
"Additionally, Veterans are not precluded from refinancing their loan in the future should interest rates decrease, nor are they precluded from participating in the VASP Program should they be unable to make their new mortgage payments and other home retention options are not feasible."
Same statement, page 9
DOCUMENTED FACT S052
In plain words, the door back in would still be there. VASP ended in May 2025 on about eight days notice. The partial claim program that replaced it did not begin operating until June 2026. For roughly thirteen months, the door that statement describes was not there to walk through.
PROJECT ANALYSIS S052
In May 2026 the Secretary described that same program as something that "was started non-stat[utorily] and out of VA that shouldn't have been there." Both descriptions are VA's own, given to Congress, about one program.
DOCUMENTED FACT S209
VA named the law at the time. Seven weeks before the program opened, the Department's own announcement said where the authority came from:
"VA has existing authority to establish and implement VASP under 38 U.S.C. 3732 and 3720."
VA press release, April 10 2024
DOCUMENTED FACT S211
Two sections, cited by the Department, in writing, on its own website. What the Secretary meant two years later by "non-statutorily" can be read two ways: that the program had no legal authority behind it, or that no law required VA to run it. The record does not settle which he meant and this page does not guess. It only puts the 2024 sentence next to the 2026 one.
PROJECT ANALYSIS S211
And VA said the program would save money, not cost it. From the same release:
"VA anticipates that VASP will result in a government subsidy spending reduction of approximately $1.5 billion from 2024 to 2033, making it beneficial for Veterans, taxpayers, servicers, and loan holders alike. This is because the savings associated with avoiding foreclosures outweighs the cost of purchasing these homes."
Same release
DOCUMENTED FACT S211
A subsidy spending reduction means the government expected to spend less. VA printed its reasoning in the same sentence: stopping a foreclosure is cheaper than paying for one. That is the Department's own forecast, made before launch, and it is worth having on hand whenever the program's end is explained as a saving.
PROJECT ANALYSIS S211
What an outside analyst saw at the time. Five months after that hearing, the Urban Institute's Housing Finance Policy Center published a study of what every federal mortgage program could offer a family in trouble. On VA it is blunt:
"The VA has the most limited loss mitigation options, lacking both a portfolio and partial claim authority."
Urban Institute, Preventing Foreclosures: How the Pandemic Reshaped the Loss Mitigation Toolkit, July 2024, page 9
DOCUMENTED FACT S053
Two terms in that sentence do a lot of work, so here they are in plain words. Loss mitigation is the industry name for the options a mortgage company can put in front of a family instead of foreclosing. A partial claim is one of those options: the missed payments are lifted out of the loan and parked as a separate debt with no interest, due later, so the monthly payment does not go up. FHA borrowers had that tool. Veterans did not.
That is why the report says the following about the program VA did build:
"But for most borrowers, VASP is the only option, as all the other options will increase their payment amounts."
Same report, page 9
DOCUMENTED FACT S053
The same report named the failure before it happened. Two sentences, on one page:
"Moreover, there is a lack of clear servicer guidance regarding the interpretation of 'exhausted all other options,' which gives servicers a good deal of discretion and assures that implementation will be uneven."
Same report, page 13
"Notably, VA borrowers cannot apply directly for VASP. Instead, mortgage servicers must first screen the loans and identify qualified defaulted borrowers."
Same report, page 13
DOCUMENTED FACT S053
Read those two together. A veteran could not ask for the program. The mortgage company picked who got screened for it, against a standard nobody had written down. The verb in that first sentence is "assures", not "risks", and it was published in July 2024.
PROJECT ANALYSIS S053
VA described that same screening itself. Not as a criticism. As the instructions:
"Veterans will not apply directly for VASP. Instead, beginning May 31, mortgage servicers will identify qualified borrowers and submit requests on behalf of Veterans based on a review of all home retention options available and qualifying criteria."
VA press release, April 10 2024
DOCUMENTED FACT S211
The independent analyst and the Department agree on the mechanism. They part company on what follows from it. VA's release presents servicer screening as the ordinary way the program runs. Urban, three months later, called the undefined standard inside that screening the reason uneven results were certain. Nothing here needs either to be wrong about the design. The point is that the family in trouble was never the one holding the form.
PROJECT ANALYSIS S211
One more thing about the 2024 statement, and it is what is not in it. VALERI is the VA Loan Electronic Reporting Interface. It is the system mortgage companies report into, and the system VA uses to check whether a company followed the rules before a foreclosure. That name appears nowhere in the eleven pages. Neither does the word escrow.
DOCUMENTED FACT S052
So the Department's account of its own home loan program, written for the committee that oversees it, never names the tool VA uses to check the companies doing the servicing, and never mentions the account that pays the taxes and insurance. Neither absence proves anything by itself. Both are worth a committee question.
PROJECT ANALYSIS S052
The same question was put to VA out loud two months earlier, and VA answered with a section number. At the February 15, 2024 hearing, the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Derrick Van Orden, told the Department he did not believe it had the power it was claiming: "I am concerned that you do not have the authority statutorily, in the governing statues for the home loan program and that you are simply making this up." He then asked for the authority directly, saying he did not care who was in the White House because the question was not political.
DOCUMENTED FACT S056
Bell answered: "Yes, sir, 38 USC 3732, as an authorization for VASP, as well as our current regulation at 38 CFR 4320." Asked whether he read those to allow VA to make the American public responsible for billions of dollars in debt, he answered "Those are our thoughts, yes, sir." The chairman told him "we are going to talk about that in detail later because you are wrong."
DOCUMENTED FACT S056
Two months after that exchange, VA said the same thing in writing, in the announcement quoted above: VASP rested on 38 U.S.C. 3732 and 3720.
DOCUMENTED FACT S211
What this settles, and what it does not. It does not decide what the Secretary meant in May 2026 by "non-stat[utorily]". That phrase still reads two ways, no authority or no requirement, and nothing in the record chooses between them. What it does show is that the question was put to the Department in public in February 2024, by a chairman who believed the answer was no, and that the Department named a statute and a regulation and stood on them.
PROJECT ANALYSIS S056 S211
VA's separate objection at that same hearing, the one about partial claims rather than VASP, is set out at the record of that disagreement.
How the transcript was read. The committee's published transcript is a scan with no text layer, so an ordinary text search of it returns nothing at all. Its 81 pages were converted to images at 300 dots per inch and read by optical character recognition on August 24, 2026, and the exchange quoted above was then checked by eye against the page image, word for word. Two oddities are the printed transcript's own and not reading errors: it prints "governing statues" for statutes, and prints the regulation as 38 CFR 4320.
DOCUMENTED FACT S056
What cuts the other way
Three things in these same two documents work against a simple reading. They are here because leaving them out would make this page less accurate, not more convincing.
One. The Urban Institute also wrote that under VASP, veterans got "a home retention program that is more generous than the one the GSEs offer." The GSEs are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two companies behind most ordinary mortgages. That sentence is true, and it is the reason the argument on this page is about timing rather than a flat claim that veterans always had less. Veterans had the fewest options before VASP, then briefly had the most generous modification of anyone, and then had neither.
Two. The 2024 statement says VA-backed mortgages carry "some of the lowest historical foreclosure rates in the mortgage industry", and reports that "more than 145,000 Veterans and their families have been able to retain their homes and avoid foreclosure because of VA's assistance" in the prior year. Those are VA's own figures and they belong on the record next to everything above.
Three. That same statement argues against partial claims. Its objection is that the deferred balance behaves like a hidden second debt, one a family runs into years later when it sells or refinances. Congress later required a partial claim program for VA loans anyway. That is a real disagreement about how to design relief, and it should be read as one.
How this was checked
The written statement was read in full from the committee's own PDF, all eleven pages, and the page numbers cited are the document's own. The Urban Institute report was read the same way; its printed page numbers run four behind the PDF page numbers, and the printed numbers are the ones cited here.
The two zero results above were each produced on August 24 2026 by a search tool that opens PDF text rather than scanning the file as if it were plain text, run against that single PDF. Each run reported one file opened and read, zero hits, and nothing unreadable. That distinction matters more than it sounds: an ordinary text search returns zero inside a PDF and reports no error, so a search can look clean and be wrong. This project got that wrong once and built the tool afterward.
One date in the Urban report contradicts itself. Page 9 says VA's partial claim funds "expired in October 2022" and, four sentences later, "expired in July 2022." The February 2024 statement gives October: "the COVID-VAPCP Program expired on October 28, 2022." October is the date this project uses.
Author disclosure, from the report's own back matter: Laurie Goodman "serves on the board of directors of MFA Financial and Arch Capital Group Ltd. and is a consultant to the Amherst Group." The report was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Noted here because a reader should not have to find it somewhere else.
