About a year ago, President Trump issued an executive order to address veterans' homelessness, with a centerpiece promise: house 6,000 homeless veterans on the sprawling VA campus in West Los Angeles. NPR reported on May 19, 2026 that his administration's VA budget request funds zero new beds on the campus for the year ahead.
The plan for the 6,000 beds was delivered to Congress the night before a scheduled House hearing on the topic — an unusual late-stage submission. At that hearing, Danielle Runyan, senior counselor to the VA secretary, blamed pending lawsuits over the land's use for the lack of funding. The lawsuits and the land-use disputes were known and ongoing when Trump issued the original executive order; they were known when his administration set the budget request; and they would have been known when the plan was sent to Congress.
Many Los Angeles veterans had welcomed the original announcement — the West LA VA campus is one of the country's largest, sitting on land specifically donated for veterans' care in the 19th century. The 6,000-bed plan was framed as the federal government finally fulfilling that donor intent. The gap between the executive-order promise and the budget request is now the most concrete piece of evidence in a wider documented pattern of broken veteran promises (see Trump Approval Craters to 33% as a Retired Air Force Captain Who Voted for Him Calls Him 'A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing', Trump's VA Killed a Mortgage Rescue Program; 10,000+ Veterans Have Lost Their Homes, and 90,000 More Are at Risk).