VA’s homelessness budget: Where the dollars go

Each year, the federal government devotes billions of dollars to the noble goal of ending Veteran homelessness.

It's a big chunk of change and many wonder where exactly the money goes. That's why we decided to break it down for you on the Ending Veteran Homelessness podcast.

What we're spending

We turned the tables a little bit in this episode with host Shawn Liu, director of communications in the Homeless Programs Office (HPO), hopping into the guest chair.

With the help of the finance team, Liu penned an article analyzing the spending on Veteran homelessness and was ready to share what he learned with the audience.

For this fiscal year-Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025-the VA budget for Veteran homelessness programs is $3.2 billion. These funds will go to care for about 300,000 Veterans in FY25 who are all at different stages in their journey out of homelessness.

How we're spending it

Liu presented the budget in two ways. First, he divided it by type of intervention and service:

• Prevention services, which keep Veterans from becoming homeless in the first place ($825 million or 26% of the budget).
• Transitional housing, which provides Veterans with safe places to stay temporarily ($603 million or 20%).
• Permanent housing supportive services, like the HUD-VA Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) program that gets Veterans into rentals and provides wraparound services ($1.1 billion or 34%).
• Treatment, which includes counseling, medical care, substance treatment and other services that help Veterans stay housed ($370 million or 11%).
• Employment and job training to help Veterans prepare to seek employment ($250 million or 8%).
• Administrative costs, including research and evaluation ($27 million or 1%).

His second approach broke it down into four categories of spending:

• Direct services and staff and operating costs for local patient care, which includes funding for the staff who support homeless Veterans and health care costs for homeless Veterans ($2 billion or 61%).
• Grants and contracts to community providers and programs that provide homelessness prevention, rapid rehousing, transitional housing, and supportive services and case management ($1.1 billion or 34%).
• National administrative costs for the VA Homeless Programs Office ($41 million or 1%).
• Miscellaneous costs associated with transitional housing and care for homeless Veterans with chronic mental health conditions ($114 million or 4%).

The largest portion goes to direct services, which are provided by the frontline staff at VA who are helping Veterans in need of support. But Veteran homelessness is such a large complex issue that they can't do it alone. That's why grants and contracts make up the next largest portion of the budget.

"If we limit ourselves to just the VA hospitals, that's just not enough bodies to do the work," said Liu. "We award grants and contracts to other organizations as an extension of us to increase our capacity to make sure that we're able to help even more Veterans."

How it's making a difference

How do we know that the money is being used effectively? We can look back at the progress we've made in ending Veteran homelessness-reducing the number of Veterans experiencing homelessness on a given night by 52% since 2010.

We often exceed our housing goals early. In fiscal year 2024, we met our goal of housing 41,000 Veterans by August.

"The most important thing that I want to convey to you is that we're not done. We're not satisfied. We believe that we have done great work but we're not satisfied. We're not going to throw up the peace sign, drop the mic and go home. This is a down payment on the work that we're going to continue to do," Liu added.

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