A new national center for homeless veterans is being planned for the Department of Veterans Affairs Campus in West Los Angeles.
An executive order signed by President Donald Trump on May 8 directs VA Secretary Doug Collins to establish the National Center for Warrior Independence, which will allow veterans from around the nation to seek and receive care, benefits and services to which they are entitled on the campus, the White House said.
The Trump White House says the funding will be redirected to construct, establish, and maintain the facility from money previously spent on housing or other services for illegal aliens. The order also comes as the administration has proposed large cuts to VA staffing, which critics claim will cause widespread disruption to veteran care.
There are approximately 3,000 homeless veterans in Los Angeles - more than any other city in the nation and comprising about 10 percent of all homeless veterans in America, according to the White House.
VA is currently in a legal battle over whether the campus can be cleared of non-veteran tenants and used to build housing for the homeless.
“After decades of mismanagement, VA has been leasing parts of its 388-acre West Los Angeles VA Medical Center campus to a wealthy and exclusive private school and the University of California, Los Angeles, baseball team,” said Collins. “Today’s executive order will enable us to ensure VA’s West Los Angeles Campus is being used as intended: to benefit veterans.”
He said the goal is “to turn the campus into a beacon of hope and a destination for homeless veterans from across the nation who can travel there to find housing and support and start their journey back to self-sufficiency.”
The center will promote self-sufficiency through “housing, substance abuse treatment, and support for productive work for the veterans housed there," the White House said.
The goal is to house up to 6,000 homeless veterans at the center by 2028.
The order also directs Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner to use vouchers to support homeless veterans and instructs Collins to restore accountability at VA.
“Under President Biden, VA failed to hold its employees properly accountable and actively fought congressional attempts to make it easier to fire poor-performing workers – even as health care wait times and benefits backlogs increased,” Collins said. “With this executive order, VA will become the most accountable agency in the entire federal government.
"We’re going to celebrate the vast majority of VA employees who do a great job every day, hold employees accountable when they fall short of the mission and work to fix the wait-time and backlog issues that developed during the Biden Administration.”
The order also directs a feasibility study at Manchester VA Medical Center to expand services to support a full-service medical center in New Hampshire.
“New Hampshire is the only state in the contiguous United States without a full-service VA medical center,” Collins said. “In response to this executive order, we will develop a plan to ensure that is no longer the case.”
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.