Eight asks. No new appropriation.
What your office or organization can do
Every request uses authority that already exists, and every request covers the whole cohort, because the whole cohort was harmed the same way.
Want the office-by-office record of who’s already engaged? See the tracker. Have a story to add? Share it safely →
The current asks
PROJECT ANALYSISAsk 1 · Pause & count
Pause VA-guaranteed foreclosures and the VA’s own eviction actions until the partial claim program is actually available, operational at the veteran’s servicer, not merely announced. This is the NCLC’s request and the request of 28 members of the House. The Department controls the timing of its own lawsuits.
No new appropriation, authority already exists
Ask 2 · Use 3(h), remove the gates
Use the Section 3(h) emergency authority now, and remove the administrative gates so the program reaches families already put out of their homes and families trapped in modifications they cannot afford. The exclusions are the VA’s manual, not the statute; the VA can reverse them without legislation. For families already displaced, explore leaseback or resale under 38 U.S.C. § 3732: the VA owns the property after foreclosure, and selling it back to the displaced family, or leasing it back at fair-market rent, saves REO carrying costs while keeping the family housed.
No new appropriation, authority already exists
Ask 3 · Publish the counts
Direct the VA to publish monthly counts of VA-loan foreclosures and VA-as-plaintiff eviction filings, plus servicer-level partial-claim uptake, denial, and compliance data. Congress cannot verify the launch narrative without the numbers, and families should not be the only ones keeping score.
No new appropriation, authority already exists
Ask 4 · Clocks & IG oversight
Fixed processing clocks and Inspector General oversight of servicer systems, now proposed for loan assumptions, should reach loss mitigation and partial-claim processing, where the harm is happening now. Audit VALERI on the affected loans while you are there. The VA says servicers never submitted required events; servicers say they offered modifications. Both cannot be true, and the VALERI logs resolve it. The records establishing servicer failures sit in the VA’s own systems and can be directed for production.
No new appropriation, authority already exists
Ask 5 · No pay-fors off veterans
Remove the disability rating reductions and home loan fee increases from pending legislation, and reaffirm that veterans organizations may oppose legislation without retaliation against their accreditation.
No new appropriation, authority already exists
Ask 6 · Warm referrals to housing
Warm referrals to veteran-friendly landlords, property managers, and real estate professionals, and case-management capacity that can walk displaced families from intake to lease. This is the immediate, practical need every week.
No new appropriation, authority already exists
Ask 7 · GAO investigation
Request a GAO investigation covering three linked questions: the H.R. 1815 implementation delay, servicer VALERI-bypass patterns, and the connection to the HUD-VASH identification gap documented in GAO-26-107517, which found 174,045 homeless veterans were not referred to supportive housing between 2020 and 2024. The three are one pattern of non-implementation, and GAO is the body that can say so on the record.
No new appropriation, authority already exists
Ask 8 · The Dexter Amendment, Senate side
Co-sponsor or vote for a Senate-side version of Rep. Maxine Dexter’s Amendment #60 V2 to H.R. 8469, which pairs the Secretary’s travel-budget withhold with VA Circular 26-24-12, the moratorium framework VA Loan Guaranty designed in May 2024, and with Partial Claim Program implementation under 38 U.S.C. § 3737. It was not made in order under H. Res. 1275 and remains available as a Senate model.
No new appropriation, authority already exists
④ What you can do · By audience
What moves this, and who moves it
Member offices, casework
When a veteran foreclosure case reaches your district office: open a constituent inquiry to the VA and confirm it stays open until a substantive written response arrives (at least one cohort inquiry was administratively closed with no response sent). Request the VALERI record and the servicer’s complete loss-mitigation file. Do not accept the “modifications were offered and declined” response without asking whether any offer complied with the rate cap. Refer the family to this project for peer navigation, and to their state AG and state DFI for parallel complaints.
Member offices, legislative
Co-sign or renew the moratorium demand (Ask 1); back the counting requirement (Ask 3), the cheapest ask here and the hardest to argue against; extend processing clocks and IG oversight to loss mitigation (Ask 4); and insist any benefits package drops the rating cuts and fee increases (Ask 5).
Committee staff, oversight
Three document productions resolve most factual disputes: (1) VALERI records for loans foreclosed January 2025 to present; (2) servicer loss-mitigation files and borrower-disclosure documents for forbearance exits; (3) the VA’s internal counts of foreclosures and VA-as-plaintiff eviction filings (Ask 3). Family witnesses remain prepared; recorded testimony is available to any committee that will take it.
VSOs
Add the foreclosure cohort to your legislative agenda alongside the benefits fight (Asks 1 and 5). They are the same members. Offer accredited-representative time for the benefits consequences that follow foreclosure-driven collapse. Share this brief with service officers so families calling about foreclosure get routed, not turned away. Your housing and emergency-assistance funds reach further paired with this project’s intake.
Landlords, property managers & neighbors
The single highest-impact act available to anyone reading this (Ask 6): agree to take warm-referral calls for screened veteran families whose credit damage traces to this documented federal failure, and say so to this project. A list of willing landlords, growing one name at a time, is currently the difference between housed and homeless. What this asks of you, in detail →
The briefs
The same record, written for five different desks
One to three pages each, print-ready, every figure sourced and dated. Take the one that matches the desk you are walking into. Nothing is asserted in a brief that is not already on this site, and the asks in each one are the asks above.
Contact your representatives
Find your member and make the call
Your U.S. Representative
Find your House member by ZIP code and ask them to co-sign the moratorium demand (Ask 1) and back the counting requirement (Ask 3).
house.gov → find your rep ↗Your U.S. Senators
Find both of your senators and ask them to keep the rating cuts and home-loan fee increases out of any Senate vehicle (Ask 5).
senate.gov → contact ↗A 20-second script
“I’m a constituent. Veteran families are losing homes because the VA’s rescue program excludes the already-harmed and isn’t available until servicers implement it. Please ask the VA to pause foreclosures and evictions, use its Section 3(h) authority, and publish the counts.”
Phone script for calling your member
A word-for-word script for a two-minute call to your representative’s office.
Find your rep: house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
If your member sits on one of these committees, your call carries more weight
Who has already acted, what to reference when you call, and where the full record of each position lives.
| Member | Committee role | What they have already done |
|---|---|---|
| Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL-12) | HVAC Chair | Declined to make the amendment striking the home-loan fee increase in order, calling it a poison pill, May 19, 2026. The record → |
| Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA-39) | HVAC Ranking Member | Filed two amendments at Rules to strike the funding-fee provisions of H.R. 6047; both were not made in order on party-line votes, May 19, 2026. What happened at Rules → |
| Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH-1) | HVAC Economic Opportunity Subcommittee Ranking Member | Led the 28-member letter demanding a moratorium and the VA’s legal basis for declining one, May 26, 2026. Led the HVAC markup moratorium amendment, May 6, 2025. The letter → |
| Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI-3) | HVAC member, lead sponsor of H.R. 1815 | Asked the Department for its word that it would pause foreclosures, March 26, 2026. The request was still unanswered 57 days later, as of May 22, 2026. Unanswered demands → |
| Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY At-Large) | House member | Submitted a formal congressional inquiry on a cohort family’s case in Wyoming. |
| Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) | SVAC Chairman | Raised the proposed reduction to Inspector General funding as damaging to oversight capacity, May 20, 2026. The exchange → |
| Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) | SVAC Ranking Member | Anchored the Secretary’s June 15, 2026 partial-claim standup date on the record and put the 15,000+ figure into the hearing record, May 20, 2026. Commitments → |
| Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) | SVAC member | Raised the VA foreclosure issue at SVAC, May 2025. |
| Sen. John Boozman (R-AR) | SVAC member, Senate Appropriations MilCon-VA Subcommittee Chair | Asked how the VA plans to help veterans at risk of foreclosure, May 2025. Hosted the April 30, 2026 Senate Appropriations hearing. Position tracker → |
| Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) | Senate Appropriations MilCon-VA Subcommittee Ranking Member | Secured the Secretary’s verbal commitment to work with the subcommittee on foreclosure prevention, April 30, 2026. |
| Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) | Senate Appropriations Chair | Pressed the Secretary on the law being a law and not a suggestion, and on the Mann Grandstaff record system, May 20, 2026. Submitted congressional inquiries on a cohort family’s case in Washington State. The exchange → |
| Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-OR-3) | House member | Filed Amendment #60 V2 to H.R. 8469 pairing the VA’s own Circular 26-24-12 moratorium framework with a travel-budget withhold. Not made in order under H. Res. 1275. See Ask 8. |
Positions are held in one place, on the Accountability Tracker. This table is the contact view of that record. Find your members: House · Senate
The credit damage is the barrier, and the foreclosure that caused it is the reason they need the rental
A family displaced by this crisis can usually pay the rent and usually cannot pass the screening. If you own a rental, work in real estate, or simply know someone who does, that is the gap you can close.
This is the only ask on this site that does not require a member of Congress, a regulator, or a lawyer. It requires one person deciding to take a phone call.
The mechanism, plainly
Foreclosure reporting is automatic. When the rescue program ended and foreclosures ran at scale, credit scores fell at scale with them, in a batch, for a reason that had nothing to do with whether a family could pay. Those same scores are now the gate on almost every rental application in the country. The event that damaged the credit is the event that created the need for the rental. A tenant-screening algorithm cannot see that distinction. A person can.
Income is usually not the problem. Most of these households have stable, verifiable income, often including VA disability compensation, which does not stop and is not contingent on employment. The problem is a score, and a score is a summary of a history that in this case is a documented federal failure. PROJECT ANALYSIS
Why the networks are not there
There is a public assumption that veteran families have deep support networks, and that a disabled veteran family in particular has an organisation standing behind them. In this cohort that has generally not held. Households organised around caregiving are frequently down to one income and one driver, with the caregiver’s own work and social life narrowed for years. Medical relocations, deployments and service moves cut the local ties most people rely on. By the time the foreclosure arrives, the family often has fewer people to call than a neighbour with no service connection at all would have. PROJECT ANALYSIS
This is why a warm handoff works where a resource list does not. A list assumes someone to call. The handoff supplies the call.
If you own or manage a rental
The ask is bounded, and it is not charity:
- Take one referral call. Not a commitment to rent. A conversation with a family this project has already spoken with.
- Look at the file, not the number. Verifiable income, rental and payment history before the foreclosure, and a written explanation of what happened, with the dates and the federal record behind it.
- Say what would make it work. A larger deposit, a co-signer, a shorter initial term, a landlord reference from the prior mortgage servicer. Families would rather hear a condition than a no.
- If it is not a fit, say so, and say why. A specific reason is worth more than a polite decline, because it tells the next family what to fix.
If you do not own a rental, you are still the person who can do this
This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that has actually worked. Most housing in this country is not held by large management companies. It is held by individuals, and individuals are reached through the people who already know them.
- Ask the landlord you already have. A current or former landlord who knows you is a warmer introduction than any cold application.
- Ask the agent who sold you your house. Real estate agents and property managers know who holds rentals in a given town, which is exactly the knowledge a displaced family does not have and cannot buy.
- Ask in the rooms you are already in. A union hall, a congregation, a small-business group, a neighbourhood page. One post asking “does anyone here rent out a house” reaches further than a family applying cold to twenty listings.
- Offer to be the reference or the first call. Vouching costs nothing and is often the whole difference.
What this project does on its side
Families are spoken with before any referral. What a landlord receives is the household’s own verifiable income, its rental and payment record before the foreclosure, and a plain written account of what happened with the documentary record behind it. No case numbers, no minor children, nothing a family has not agreed to share. Anyone who prefers to be a name on a list without taking calls can be exactly that.
To offer, or to ask
Email veteransforeclosurecrisis@gmail.com with the town or region you can cover. If you are a family who needs this, use the same address and say which state you are in. The list grows one name at a time, and one name is currently the difference between housed and homeless for somebody.
Sixty-second video script
A one-minute script you can read to camera, written for someone hearing about this for the first time.
Thirty-second version
The same explanation cut to thirty seconds for a short-form video.
Copy-paste captions
Ready-to-post captions for each platform, so you do not have to write your own.