Adam Ruege found Frank living under a bridge in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Frank had served 15 years in the Marine Corps. After he got out, he fell on hard times, developed a serious mental illness, and started drinking to cope.

Ruege visited him every week for a couple of years. "Frank, man, when are you ready? When are you ready to come inside?" he would ask. Frank didn't want a shelter, and back then a shelter was the only option Ruege had.

Then a VA housing voucher program gave him something better to offer. Frank became the first veteran housed through it in Columbus, and he stayed housed for years.

There are a lot more Franks now. A new analysis projects that veteran homelessness fell 8.2% in 2026, the biggest one-year drop in a decade. The nationwide count is on track to fall below 30,000 for the first time since the government started counting homeless veterans in 2009.

The timing matters. The January 2025 count, taken at the end of the Biden years, found 32,495 homeless veterans, down only about 1% from the year before. Veterans were the slowest-improving homeless population in America.

The January 2026 count is the first taken after a full year of President Trump's VA, and it shows the steepest drop in ten years.

Under VA Secretary Doug Collins, the department permanently housed 51,936 homeless veterans in fiscal 2025. That's its best year since it started tracking individual veterans, and 4,011 more than in the last year of the Biden administration.

"This is life-changing and in many cases life-saving work," Collins said. "We are proud of the progress VA is making to get Veterans off the streets and are redoubling our efforts to continue this momentum moving forward."

The VA has since announced a record $1.17 billion in grants to 680 organizations fighting veteran homelessness. In May 2025, Trump signed an executive order creating a National Center for Warrior Independence on the West Los Angeles VA campus. It aims to house up to 6,000 homeless veterans by 2028, using money previously spent on housing and services for illegal immigrants.

Los Angeles posted the biggest drop in the country. Its veteran count fell from 3,050 to 2,257, which by itself accounts for 30.5% of the national decline.

Community Solutions, a nonprofit that works with more than 170 communities, built the projection from the 2026 counts already published. Of 135 communities with comparable data, 87 counted fewer homeless veterans, 44 counted more, and 4 were unchanged. The five biggest improvers delivered 56.5% of the national drop, and the top 20 delivered 90.5%.

The official report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development won't come out until early next year, so the group ran three projections. They range from about 28,000 to 30,600 homeless veterans, and the middle estimate produces the 8.2% drop. Adam Ruege, the group's principal of policy and evaluation, said the organization is "very confident." In past years, he said, its projections have landed within one or two percentage points of the final count.

Ruege has watched this problem for a long time. He worked at the VA around 2011, when about 75,000 veterans showed up in the count. "We actually thought that was an undercount, right?" he said. "To go from 75,000 to now below 30,000... something has happened, something has worked, right?"

At the start of the Obama administration, veterans made up 9.3% of American adults but 16% of homeless adults, which made them nearly twice as likely as other Americans to be homeless. By 2022 that had flipped, and veterans became less likely than other Americans to end up homeless.

Ruege credited the "continued investment and focus of the VA," along with states like New Jersey, Minnesota, and Maine, which have built statewide networks to catch veterans who fall through the cracks. In June, HUD and the VA announced new housing vouchers for more than 2,500 additional homeless veterans.

"We do not want to let off the gas here," Ruege said, "because we do have a ways to go."

When Ruege was knocking on Frank's door under that bridge, about 75,000 veterans were homeless on a given night. After one year of Trump's VA, the number is on track to fall below 30,000.