VA seeks $727M for suicide prevention programs reviews don't cover

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(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is seeking $727 million in fiscal 2027 for its suicide prevention programs, a 31% increase in two years. The independent review Congress ordered to identify which VA programs work best says there is no scientifically supported way to compare them.

The request is up from an estimated $714 million in fiscal 2026 and $556 million in fiscal 2025, according to VA’s budget submission. In a February news release, Secretary Doug Collins said VA was mounting, "for the first time in VA history, a serious effort to track the efficacy of the hundreds of millions the department spends per year in this area to ensure we have real solutions, not just rhetoric."

The Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act, adopted in 2015, directs VA to hire an independent third party to evaluate its mental health and suicide prevention programs every year, identify the most effective ones and determine the cost-effectiveness of each, according to the text of the law. The secretary must send the evaluations to the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs committees by Dec. 1 annually. VA has contracted the work since 2020 to Aptive HTG, a government consulting firm, according to the reports.

The most recent publicly available evaluation is the 2023 report, submitted that November. A Center Square search Tuesday of GovInfo, the Government Publishing Office's collection of congressionally mandated reports, turned up no later reports. The 2023 evaluation assessed eight VA mental health treatment programs, including general mental health, specialized post-traumatic stress disorder care and substance use disorder treatment. None of the suicide prevention programs the $727 million would fund were assessed.

The 2024 and 2025 evaluations were submitted to Congress on schedule, the Senate and House Veterans' Affairs committees confirmed, and both provided copies to The Center Square. Neither appears on GovInfo. The House committee said its standard practice is not to publish every congressionally mandated report it receives, and that the reports instead inform the committee's legislative and oversight work.

Neither evaluation examines the VA programs the $727 million would fund. Both assessed the same eight clinical treatment programs the 2023 report covered. The Veterans Crisis Line, the Staff Sergeant Parker Gordon Fox grant program and the department's suicide prevention coordinators were not among them.

The Veterans Crisis Line accounts for $312.8 million of the request, the Fox grant program $111.9 million, unchanged from VA's current fiscal 2026 estimate, and suicide prevention coordinators and teams $110.2 million, according to VA’s budget submission. The rest funds the department’s Suicide Prevention 2.0 initiative, its national strategy, centers of excellence and local outreach.

The 2025 evaluation says the comparison the law calls for cannot be made.

"There is no clinically appropriate and scientifically supported method to compare effectiveness between programs," the report states, because each serves a different population with different goals. Its recommendations ask VA to start collecting outcome data on suicide prevention programs that are not currently surveyed, so that future evaluations can cover them.

VA press secretary Quinn Slaven told The Center Square the department committed 100% of the allocated suicide prevention funds in fiscal 2026 with none lapsed or reprogrammed. Asked what outcome measure VA uses to judge whether the money is working, Slaven pointed to the annual report's findings: 62.2% of veterans who died by suicide in 2024 were not receiving VA health care that year or the year before, and while suicide rates for VHA enrollees fell 2.2% between 2001 and 2024, rates for unenrolled veterans rose 70.8%.

Slaven said he could not address a further question, about why those programs are not evaluated, on short notice before publication. VA leadership was attending Veterans Day events.

VA's annual report, released Sept. 30, counted 6,488 veteran suicides in 2024, an average of 17.7 a day. The suicide rate among veterans was more than double the rate for other adults, according to the annual report. The report states that it is not an evaluation of the impact of VA’s suicide prevention programs.

Veterans in crisis can reach the Veterans Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1, chatting at VeteransCrisisLine.net/Chat, or texting 838255.