HousingWireHousingWire
Following the passage of a bill in the House of Representatives that would establish a new partial claim option for veteran mortgage borrowers, the Senate is taking up a bipartisan bill with the same ultimate aim.
The Veterans Housing Stability Act of 2025 was introduced into the Senate on May 22, just two days after the upper chamber received the House-approved VA Home Loan Program Reform Act. The Senate version was primarily sponsored by Sens. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.).
Both bills are very closely tied together in that they each would establish a partial claim option for borrowers with mortgages sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
But there are some specific differences between the House and Senate versions that will need to be reconciled before the bill can go to President Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law.
The House version, for instance, includes a requirement asking for a report, within 90 days of the bill’s enactment, to assess difficulties veterans may encounter “when attempting to secure representation by a real estate agent or broker.” The Senate version contains no such provision.
The House version would also “sunset” the creation of this new partial claim program five years after the bill’s enactment, but the Senate version does not contain any time-limited attributes. And the House version includes no alternative repayment option for the borrower, while the Senate version allows for some flexibility if a situation calls for it.
One of the supporters of the upper-chamber version, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), said that the elimination of the Veteran Affairs Servicing Purchase (VASP) program — which stopped accepting new applicants on May 1 — necessitates its swift passage.
“Right now, potentially tens of thousands of veterans are at-risk of losing their homes as a direct result of [VA] Secretary [Doug] Collins’ reckless and reprehensible decision to end the VASP Program,” Blumenthal said in a statement.
“Our legislation will create a replacement program to avoid preventable foreclosures, and ensure our most vulnerable veterans have a last resort option to continue paying their mortgage and keep their homes.”
In his statement, Blumenthal also included a link designed to illustrate “how many veterans in every state are seriously at-risk of foreclosure as a direct result of the Trump administration’s cancellation of VASP.”
The link shows the number of serious delinquencies for VA home loans on a per-state basis as of May 1, 2025.
Passage of the House version happened relatively swiftly, but both chambers are mired in an ongoing debate around Trump’s domestic policy bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that is facing vehement opposition from Democrats and some fiscal hardliner Republicans.
