Army veteran Raymond Queen stands with his wife Rebecca Queen outside their home in Bartlesville, Okla.
Michael Noble Jr. for NPR
A group of U.S. senators is asking the Department of Veterans Affairs to put an immediate stop to foreclosures on the homes of veterans and service members.
The senators cited an investigation by NPR that found thousands of veterans who took what’s called a COVID forbearance – a program that allowed them to defer paying their mortgages and keep their homes during the pandemic – are now at risk of losing their homes through no fault of their own.
“Without this pause, thousands of veterans and servicemembers could needlessly lose their homes,” Sens. Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, Jack Reed, and Tim Kaine, all Democrats, wrote in a letter to VA Secretary Denis McDonough. “This was never the intent of Congress.”
The forbearance program was set up by Congress after the pandemic hit in order to let people who suffered a loss of income skip mortgage payments for 6 or 12 months, and then have an affordable way to start paying their mortgage again.
But in October 2022, the VA ended the part of the program that allowed homeowners an affordable way to get current on their loans again, which has left many veterans facing foreclosure. The VA has a new program to replace it, but says it will take four or five months to implement.
That’s too late to help many of the 6,000 people with VA loans who had COVID forbearances and are currently in the foreclosure process. 34,000 more are delinquent according to the data firm ICE Mortgage Technology.
“In the meantime, tens of thousands of veterans and…
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