The VA’s Anti-Suicide Grant Program That Needs Fixing

Last month, the VA released its long-anticipated three-year evaluation of the Fox Suicide Prevention Grant Program. This initiative funds community organizations that identify at-risk veterans not already in the VA system and provide support before they reach a breaking point. A VA news release in December declared that “together with Fox Program grantees, we are making a difference by reducing Veteran suicide in local communities.” A careful reading of the report tells a very different story. 

Since its launch in 2022, the Fox program has awarded $210 million to 111 organizations. Legislation to make it permanent—the HOPE for the Brave Act—is moving through Congress. But before the program is extended, its glaring deficiencies must be fixed. Otherwise, limited suicide prevention resources will be diverted away from VA programs that are manifestly working to community ones that are not. 

A True Bipartisan Idea 

In 2019, veteran suicide statistics painted a devastating picture. Despite a decade of sustained VA effort, the suicide rate wasn’t budging. An average of 17 veterans took their lives daily—12 of them with no connection to VA services. The unrelenting crisis demanded new thinking. 

That recognition produced rare bipartisanship. Senators John Boozman, an Arkansas Republican, and Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, joined forces, as did Representatives Jack Bergman, a Michigan Republican, and Chrissy Houlahan, a Pennsylvania Democrat. Together, they designed a grant program to fund community organizations already embedded in veterans’ lives—groups that could, they hoped, locate the hard-to-reach and intervene well before suicide intention emerged. The program is named for Staff Sergeant Parker Gordon Fox, a 25-year-old Army sniper instructor who died by suicide in 2020. 

The legislation’s promise wasn’t just relying on local partners, but the insistence that grant renewal be tied to demonstrated results. Grantees were required to assess veterans’ mental health and social stability at program entry and exit—data that would help the VA determine which organizations reduced risk and which did not. 

“We must have a common tool to measure the effectiveness of our programs,” Senator Boozman declared, “and better information sharing, data collection, and continual feedback to identify what services are having the most impact.” Senator Warner was equally blunt that counting veterans served wasn’t remotely sufficient: “To date, policymakers have assessed capacity and access to services as a measurement for effectiveness. There are no shared tools to measure the effectiveness of programming at improving mental resiliency and outlook”—the very indicators, he argued, that would signal reduced suicide risk. 

Fox program grantees were required to evaluate five factors—suicidal ideation, mood symptoms, mental well-being, socioeconomic stability, and social support—at both the beginning and end of each participant’s time in the program. The instruments were designed to be simple and easy to administer: three took roughly two minutes each; combined, they ran 20 to 25 minutes. As the VA itself acknowledged, “Having this screening occur at the beginning and again prior to services ending is important in evaluating the effectiveness of the services provided.” Formal grant renewal criteria explicitly required this practice. 

A Program Failing Its Promise 

The Fox program has achieved some genuine good, most notably by identifying veterans not in VA care and connecting them to services. But at $55 million a year, possibly rising to $85 million, its scope remains limited, and its measurable impact on the suicide risk factors it aims to tackle has been negligible. Three problems stand out. 

Too few veterans served, at a steep cost. Over three years, 8,373 individuals—approximately 92 veterans per grant recipient—had a Fox intake and any follow-up service or referral. Two-thirds of the organizations enrolled fewer than one new participant per week. For 80 percent of grant recipients, the average cost per participant exceeded $10,000, and for 25 percent, it exceeded $40,000. That’s an appalling return on investment. 

When questioned about the low number of veterans served and the high per-veteran cost, VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz insisted that the “VA is monitoring its performance to ensure the most effective use of resources.” 

Weak data. When asked about grantees’ evaluating the veterans they serve, Kasperowicz asserted, “Under the law, Staff Sergeant Parker Gordon Fox grantee sites are required to encourage Veterans to complete baseline mental health screening (BMHS), but Veterans are not required to complete this screening to receive services. The completion rate will continue to be monitored as a way to measure the effectiveness of the program.” 

But neither the law nor the VA’s implementing regulation merely “encourages” this data collection. Instead, grantees are required to conduct a baseline mental health screening for every individual at the start of services. Yet 21 percent of participants were never screened.  

Grant recipients must conduct exit screenings, too, though the addition of qualifying language—“when possible”—gave veterans leeway to opt out. Grantees exploited that loophole: For 80 percent of participants, there is no before-and-after data, and no way to determine whether they improved, declined, or remained unchanged. 

For the minority of participants with available data, the numbers indicate an improvement in outcomes, especially for depression. While this is worth noting, it only applies to a small portion of the group. The results for most participants remain completely unknown. 

No accountability. The program report indicated that outcome data could have been broken down by grantee, but chose not to present it that way. This is a serious failure. Grantee-level data is indispensable for sound funding decisions and for telling veterans, Congress, researchers, and taxpayers which programs are effective and which are not. Without it, organizations have their funding renewed with no evidence that they are producing meaningful change in veterans’ lives.  

Accountability Remains Under Threat 

Members of Congress have decried these shortcomings. In December 2023, House Veterans’ Affairs Committee member Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an Iowa Republican and a member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, called for “metrics and data…so that we can determine effectiveness.” Months later, ranking member Mark Takano, a California Democrat, raised similar concerns. At an April 2025 Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing, Senator Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Republican who is running for governor next year, warned that weakened accountability could enable “bad actors taking these grants away from people who need them.” 

Meanwhile, grant recipients have been working to shield themselves from accountability—and they may well succeed. 

The leading bill to make the Fox program permanent—the HOPE for the Brave Act—would renew awards without requiring organizations to demonstrate changes in risk factors. Grantees have welcomed that. Missy Meyer, Director of Community Integration at America’s Warrior Partnership, one of them, testified to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs in September 2024 that exit assessments should be optional. 

A Path Forward 

The Fox Grant Program was founded on a strong belief: Engage veterans early—before a crisis happens—and you can save lives. While this idea holds value, it is only useful if programs meet the high standards originally set by their creators. 

Congress has a clear opportunity to fix this problem. Two things matter most. 

Collect relevant data. Legislation permanently authorizing the Fox program must explicitly state that grant renewal depends on grantees administering assessment tools at both the beginning and end of veterans’ participation. Programs that do not meet this requirement should not receive future grants. Although streamlining data collection—such as removing one of the two well-being instruments—could save time without compromising rigor, the essential requirement must be ironclad. 

Tie renewals to performance outcomes. In addition to fulfilling the requirement of administering questionnaires, reauthorization should honor the original intent of the program’s founders: that renewal decisions be tied to measurable reductions in participants’ risk.  

The Fox program is worth supporting. What’s not worth backing is funding organizations that are under no obligation to show they are improving veterans’ lives. It’s long past time to get this right. 

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