Veterans die by suicide at a rate 50 percent higher than nonveterans—and nearly two-thirds of those deaths occur among men and women receiving all their health care from private providers in the communities where they live. That is where they are dying, and that, apparently, is where accountability vanishes.

VA Secretary Doug Collins and Republican congressional leaders profess to care deeply about veterans experiencing mental health crises while under the care of these private providers. But another pattern is also obvious: Every time Department of Veterans Affairs officials or Republicans in Congress have had the chance to hold private providers to the VA’s own quality standards for treating at-risk veterans, they’ve chosen not to.

In February, Collins declared: “Under President Trump, we are totally revamping the department’s approach to suicide prevention, with new leadership, a fresh focus on reaching those who need our help.” But the department’s actions tell a totally different story.

This week, a House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee took up the Fostering TRUST Act of 2026, a bill that would require providers in both the VA and in the private sector under the VA’s Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP) to report suicide attempts and deaths at their respective facilities. Scrupulous monitoring isn’t currently mandated for the VCCP, an inconvenient truth freely admitted by a VA official who testified before the committee. Yet when this bill proposed to create exactly such a system, the VA refused to support it.