The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs indefinitely postponed Tuesday’s planned markup of a bill that would increase mortgage fees for veterans and active-duty U.S. military personnel who take out a VA loan.
The delay comes a day after the Community Home Lenders of America (CHLA) sent a letter of concern to Rep. Michael Bost, R-Ill., chairman of the committee, and to ranking member Mark Takano, D-Calif., opposing the fee hikes for loans backed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Kathleen McCarthy, Bost’s communications director for committee matters, told Scotsman Guide the markup on H.R. 6047 had been postponed “to a later date.”
“The Committee has received the letter from CHLA,” McCarthy told Scotsman Guide. “Chairman Bost is collecting feedback from all stakeholders on the path forward for this bill, including industry — as well as disabled veterans’ groups.”
She added that as the committee gets closer to a new date for consideration of the bill, the proposed text will be posted on its repository.
The postponement was welcome news to Scott Olson, executive director of CHLA.
“Again, the underlying benefits they’re seeking to confer are admirable, but we continue to ask for no mortgage fee offset to pay for this, since affordable homeownership for our veterans is so important,” Olson told Scotsman Guide.
The fee hikes are intended to increase veterans benefits in the form of disability compensation and dependency and indemnity compensation. They had been included in an “amendment in the nature of a substitute” to H.R. 6047, also known as the “Sharri Briley and Eric Edmundson Veterans Benefits Expansion Act of 2025.”
The proposed amendment would have raised some VA mortgage fees for 10 years — including a 30-basis-point increase in guarantee fees to 2.45% for a first-use VA mortgage and a 100-basis-point increase to 4.3% for a subsequent-use VA mortgage.
In the CHLA letter, the group pointed to VA mortgage fee increases enacted in 2019 and then retired in 2023.
“We were informed then that these temporary fees were needed to fund non-housing benefits for a limited time. Now, it appears that such extraneous fee hikes are back on the table, for a period of another 10 years,” the letter stated.
The trade association asked the committee to look elsewhere for the budget offsets. It added that in the case of the VA mortgage program — an earned benefit for active-duty and veteran families — the existing guaranty fee is already well above the amount actuarially needed to keep the program safe.
“In other words, today active-duty and veteran families are already paying twice for this earned benefit,” the letter continued. “Once when they enter the Armed Forces to defend our nation, but then again when they pay elevated and diverted fees to access what they have already earned. This is not fair to those who serve.”
CHLA warned that not only might the committee renew the fees, but it could go a step further and add additional costs.
“Such action would make some active-duty and veterans’ mortgages the single-most expensive federal government homeownership in the land, a great irony given that other federal mortgage programs do not require the recipient families to literally put their lives on the line — and forfeit them potentially — for our great nation,” the community lender group cautioned.
Requests for comments by Scotsman Guide did not receive responses from the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans and Disabled Veterans National Foundation.
