Everything Wrong With the VFW
And How to Fix It
I want to be careful about how I open this, because the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) has done genuine good for a very long time. The GI Bill. The national cemetery system. Agent Orange compensation for Vietnam veterans who fought for decades just to be believed. Billions of dollars recovered annually from a VA bureaucracy that will happily underpay you if nobody pushes back. The VFW has legislative credibility, institutional infrastructure, and 125 years of accumulated relationships with Congress that most advocacy organizations spend entire lifetimes trying to build.
This is not a piece arguing the VFW should go away. The country needs it, or something like it, more than the country currently knows.
This is a piece arguing that the VFW is in serious and compounding trouble, that the trouble is largely self-inflicted, and that the people running it have known for decades exactly what the problems are and have mostly declined to fix them in any sustained way. They have read the obituaries. They have issued press releases acknowledging the crisis. They have formed committees. And then they have mostly continued doing what they were already doing.
That is a different kind of failure than ignorance. It is the failure of institutions that got comfortable with their own decline and found ways to describe it as something other than what it was.
What follows is a full accounting. The membership collapse, the financial fragility, the recurring theft, the political misfires, the history of exclusion that costs the organization members to this day, the generational failure to bring in post-9/11 and female veterans, the governance gaps that allow weak posts to disintegrate quietly until they’re gone. And then, at the end, what can actually be done about it, by real people with real authority who have real decisions to make.
The Numbers Are Not Good, and the Framing Is Sometimes Dishonest
Start with the most basic fact. The VFW peaked at roughly 2.1 million members between 1991 and 1993. By 2023, that number had dropped to 957,000. Under a million members. The organization that once could claim to represent the largest and most powerful cohort of combat veterans in the world now struggles to represent half its former self.
In 2024, the VFW changed how it counted members, combining auxiliary members into its total figures. In December 2025, the combined membership stood at 1.3 million across 5,556 posts worldwide. That number sounds healthier than 957,000 until you understand that it includes nearly 470,000 auxiliary members who are not themselves veterans — they are relatives of veterans who meet VFW eligibility requirements. The underlying veteran membership has not recovered. What changed was how the VFW chose to report it.
In 2019, the organization added nearly 25,000 members to snap what it called a 27-year membership decline, and issued a press release about it. The VFW described this as a significant development. The national commander credited social media and internet outreach. At 1.165 million members at the time, the VFW began its new membership year, quote, “a million less than its peak in 1992, yet significant nonetheless.” The framing here is worth pausing on. An organization that lost a million members in 27 years celebrated gaining 25,000 of them back in a single year. Adding 2.5% of what you lost is not a turnaround. It is a data point. The press release went out anyway.
In Illinois, a state with 260 VFW posts and over 35,000 members, yearly membership has increased only twice since 2015. Posts are merging when they can and closing when they can’t. In 2008, the North Riverside VFW, with around 600 members from absorbing several smaller posts, merged into Berwyn’s. “They’ve got a lot of members, but no one wanted to run for office or do the work required to keep the post open,” said the Illinois VFW’s District 4 commander. That pattern plays out across the country with enough consistency that it constitutes policy, not accident.
The VFW’s Interim Director of National Membership, Corey Hunt, made an observation in 2023 that was both accurate and telling. “We’re not your grandpa’s old VFW any longer,” he said, and explained that with two decades of war behind the country, there is currently the largest eligible pool of veterans for VFW membership in a long time. “So it’s a matter of us going out and getting them, marketing to the younger members.” What he did not fully address is why those eligible veterans are not joining, or why the posts those veterans would join often look exactly like their grandpa’s VFW, just with fewer members.
The Structural Problem Nobody Wants to Name
Before getting into each specific failure area, it helps to understand the basic structure that allows these failures to persist.
The VFW is a confederation. National headquarters in Kansas City sets policy, maintains the legislative office in Washington, accredits service officers, and provides organizational infrastructure. State departments operate between national and local posts. Posts are the actual membership units — the buildings, the bars, the meeting rooms, the officers who sign people up and file claims and run bingo nights and pay the electric bill.
The posts have substantial autonomy. This autonomy is not incidental to the VFW’s structure; it is fundamental to it, preserved in the bylaws and defended for generations as essential to local responsiveness. It is also the source of most of the organization’s worst recurring problems.
A post that does good work benefits from the VFW’s name, its legislative credibility, its service officer training, and its national programs. A post that does bad work, embezzles money, discriminates against eligible members, or simply degrades into a dysfunctional bar with a flagpole out front continues to operate under the same name, damaging the brand and failing the veterans in its community, until someone at the state level intervenes. State intervention is slow, complicated, and often insufficient. By the time a state department acts, the post has often already lost the members who might have turned it around.
The tension between local autonomy and organizational coherence is common to many membership organizations. The VFW has resolved that tension heavily in favor of local autonomy for 125 years, and the results are uneven to a degree that should concern anyone thinking about the organization’s future.
The Financial Model Is a Bar, and Bars Close
Here is something the VFW does not like to say plainly but which is plainly true: a large portion of local posts are financially dependent on selling alcohol. One post in Illinois makes 90% of its revenue from its canteen — its bar. That is not unusual. It is common. Many posts that survive do so because they have a liquor license, a fish fry, a bingo night, or some combination of gambling and cheap beer that generates enough cash flow to keep the building heated and the lights on.
This was a reasonable model in 1955. American social life revolved around the neighborhood tavern and the fraternal hall. The VFW post was a place where veterans could drink together, tell stories, play cards, and feel like themselves in a world that had moved on without them. The bar subsidized the mission and the mission gave the bar a reason to exist. The two things were more or less in balance.
That balance is gone. It has been gone for decades, and the people running these posts know it.
When the bar does well, the post survives. When it doesn’t, the post closes. In Appleton, Wisconsin, a VFW post shut down its bar and restaurant after years of declining traffic. “Years ago we would have a line out the door for our Friday fish fry, but over the years things changed and so we’re at the point where we can’t continue on,” said Post Commander Wayne Martin. In Waterloo, Iowa, VFW Post 1623 dissolved itself after financial struggles that left it in debt and unable to fill even its officer positions. The Iowa state adjutant, Russell Saffell, described the situation directly: “Nobody wanted to run for either of those positions because nobody wants a soup sandwich.”
When COVID hit in 2020, canteen revenue disappeared overnight. VFW Post 7109 in Pearland, Texas, turned to GoFundMe to raise $20,000 to keep the lights on after hall rentals and bar sales stopped entirely. Staff members faced weeks without pay. An organization with 120 years of history asking the internet for beer money is not a sign of institutional health.
A post in Gainesville, Georgia, that had to close its canteen was candid about the underlying problem. Their quartermaster said: “The only function of a bar in a VFW is to raise additional income, which it didn’t do.” He also noted that a significant source of the post’s struggle was a perception problem they couldn’t shake: “There’s a lot of misconceptions, especially in Hall County, that the VFW is just a place to go and drink and get drunk. But the reality is it’s there to help veterans of a foreign war.”
The perception problem and the financial model are related. The VFW raised generations of people on the idea that the post was the bar, and now it can’t get younger veterans through the door because they think the post is the bar. You cannot solve the first problem without solving the second, and you cannot solve the second without confronting the financial dependency that made it so.
The posts that have survived and grown are almost universally ones that diversified their revenue. Gaming licenses in states that permit them. Facility rentals to community organizations. Grants from state and federal sources. Partnerships with local employers and businesses. Aggressive pursuit of nonprofit funding. These are not revolutionary ideas. They are basic nonprofit financial management. The failure is not that these options don’t exist. The failure is that the VFW has not made their adoption a priority at the organizational level in any sustained way.
Board members and post commanders who watched the bar revenue erode over 20 years without building alternative income sources made a choice. That choice has consequences, and the consequences are not abstract. When posts close, veterans in those communities lose access to claims assistance, camaraderie, and a local organization that actually knows their name.
The Embezzlement Problem Is Real, Recurring, and Preventable
Small organizations with significant cash flow, limited oversight, volunteer-run finances, and strong norms against scrutiny of fellow members are not naturally resistant to theft. The VFW is all four of those things at the local level, and the result is a pattern of embezzlement that appears across states and years with enough regularity to constitute a structural failure rather than a series of isolated incidents.
In Lake Havasu City, Arizona, Dennis Dickey served as VFW quartermaster and chief financial officer for seven years before being arrested on felony charges related to the alleged embezzlement of more than $6,000 from the organization. Seven years. The oversight mechanism that was supposed to prevent this, mandatory quarterly trustee audits, clearly did not catch it, or did not catch it in time to prevent significant harm.
In Giles County, Virginia, former VFW Post Commander Dennis Whitlow was charged with felony embezzlement in 2024 after allegedly engineering the sale of the post building for $53,000 and directing those funds for personal use while promising members he would find a new home for the post. He had sold the building in October 2023 and continued telling members everything was fine until it wasn’t. The VFW Department of Virginia released a statement saying it could not comment on pending legal matters but took misappropriation of funds “very seriously.”
In Grand Junction, Colorado, VFW Post 1247 was suspended by the Colorado VFW department in late 2024 after a state investigation found multiple problems serious enough to close the building. The investigating committee chairman declined to specify the causes publicly, saying he was still gathering information and the issues were “too many different reasons.” The post remained closed for months while the investigation continued.
These three cases appeared in news searches across a period of roughly 18 months. They are certainly not the full picture. Small-scale financial misconduct at voluntary organizations is chronically underreported, because the people who would report it are often members themselves, reluctant to harm an institution they believe in, uncertain whether what they’re seeing constitutes actual wrongdoing, or simply unable to navigate a reporting process they don’t understand.
The VFW’s own officer guidance acknowledges the risk directly. The Manual of Procedure states that quartermasters constitute a safeguard for post funds and are so considered by bonding companies in setting premiums. It notes that “laxity in enforcing and complying with the by-laws increases the hazard of loss.” It requires quarterly audits. It acknowledges that trustees conducting those audits are “not always qualified accountants, particularly where large amounts of cash are involved.” Its solution to that last problem is to suggest that posts hire a private accounting firm.
Many posts do not do this. The VFW knows this. Posts continue to be looted at a rate that should embarrass the organization into action. The fix is not complicated: mandatory external financial reviews for any post above a certain annual revenue threshold, standardized reporting requirements with real enforcement, and a clear, accessible process for members who suspect misconduct to report it to the state department without fear of retaliation. These are not expensive reforms. The cost of not implementing them, in stolen money, destroyed posts, and reputational damage, is higher.
The bonding requirement for quartermasters is real, but bonding only compensates for losses after the fact. The point is to prevent them. An organization that processes millions of dollars in aggregate revenue through hundreds of posts, each with its own volunteer treasurer and its own informal oversight culture, needs more than a paper requirement for quarterly audits that volunteer trustees with no accounting background are supposed to conduct.
The PAC Blew Up in 2010 and the Lesson Wasn’t Fully Learned
The VFW has described itself as nonpartisan for many years, and the description is largely accurate as a matter of policy. But in 2010, the VFW Political Action Committee demonstrated what happens when an affiliated body with loose accountability operates under the organization’s name.
Members were outraged over the PAC’s election endorsements, which included Barbara Boxer, Alan Grayson, and Sheila Jackson Lee, while simultaneously declining to endorse veterans running against those same incumbents, including Allen West, an Iraq War veteran running against Ron Klein in Florida, and Ilario Pantano, a former Marine running against Democrat Mike McIntyre in North Carolina. The PAC’s internal logic was straightforward: it had an established practice of endorsing incumbents who had supported veterans’ issues, and in a strong anti-incumbent election year, that practice translated almost entirely into Democratic endorsements. The membership was not interested in the internal logic.
VFW National Commander Richard Eubank acknowledged that “the recent endorsement decisions have, in fact, harmed the VFW’s reputation and future ability to fulfill our mission,” and called on the PAC to withdraw all endorsements. When the PAC publicly refused, Eubank took what he called an unprecedented step and recalled the entire PAC board en masse. He then moved to dissolve the PAC entirely, requiring a membership vote at the next convention.
The PAC was dissolved. The episode surfaced in organizational memory as an example of decisive action by national leadership. What it also demonstrated was that a quasi-independent body operating under the VFW’s brand, with no real-time accountability to the commander-in-chief or the membership, can make decisions that directly contradict the organization’s interests and cannot be overruled until after the damage is done.
The deeper issue is not the specific endorsements. It is the question of what the VFW’s political operation is for. The legislative service, which operates independently of any PAC structure, is genuinely effective. The VFW’s Washington Office testifies before Congress regularly, produces the Veterans Independent Budget in partnership with DAV, and maintains relationships with members of both parties that translate into real legislative wins. The Forever GI Bill. The Blue Water Navy Act. The PACT Act, which opened presumptive benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances. These are the VFW’s real political achievements, and they came through the legislative operation, not through a PAC endorsing incumbents.
When the VFW’s political activity drifts from legislative advocacy into electoral partisanship, it creates more risk than value. A PAC that can damage the brand in a wave election year is not an asset. It is a liability wrapped in paperwork. The organization learned part of that lesson in 2010 but has never fully reckoned with the underlying question: what does the VFW gain from electoral politics that it could not get by being the most credible veterans’ voice on Capitol Hill, accountable to all elected officials because it endorses none of them?
The History of Exclusion Is Not Ancient History
The VFW sometimes treats its discriminatory history as a regrettable but fully resolved chapter. It is worth being careful about that framing, because the consequences of that history are still unfolding in the organization’s membership numbers and cultural reputation.
Despite their distinguished service record, many VFW posts and departments refused Japanese-American veterans entry after World War II. The national leadership condemned these actions at the time but, as Wikipedia’s well-sourced account notes, the bylaws “promoted autonomy in individual posts and were powerless to prevent the discrimination.” Leadership “could only offer them membership as members-at-large.” Nisei veterans in the Pacific Northwest were unable to find any sympathetic member in district leadership to approve a post charter and ultimately formed their own independent veterans organization. In California, those charters were eventually approved because one man, Alva Fleming, was willing to do what others weren’t. That is how the discrimination ended in California: not through organizational policy, but through one person’s individual decision. That is not a governance structure. That is luck.
Many VFW posts refused Vietnam War veterans membership entirely during the late 1960s and into the 1970s. The rationale offered by incumbent World War II and Korean War members was that Vietnam was a “police action” and therefore not a real war, despite the Korean War also having no formal declaration and also qualifying for VFW eligibility without controversy. Some posts blamed Vietnam veterans for losing the war. This was not universal. Some posts welcomed them. But the practice was widespread enough and consistent enough that the damage was generational. Many Vietnam veterans refused to join the VFW as a result, and decades later, many older posts found themselves struggling to survive as World War II and Korean veterans died, while the Vietnam veterans who might have stabilized the membership base were still staying away.
Joe Orr, a Black Vietnam veteran from North Texas, described what happened when he tried to join VFW posts in Colorado and Texas in the late 1960s. “I was rejected,” he said. “And why? Because of my color. They told me that.” He paid his VFW membership and was then told to leave the clubs. He shared the story publicly in 2019, decades after the fact, because it had never left him. The VFW spokesman who responded apologized on the organization’s behalf and said something gracious: “The loss of Orr not getting into the VFW back in the day was not really his loss. It was our loss for not getting to have a good leader.”
That is true, and the apology is genuine. But it should also be understood that the governance structure permitting that discrimination, the one granting posts near-total local autonomy and giving national leadership no real enforcement mechanism over conduct, was not a design flaw. It was a deliberate choice. And it allowed discrimination to flourish for decades under the VFW’s name with no real accountability until the individual membership of each post chose otherwise.
The organization has not fully reckoned with what that means structurally. The autonomy that allowed posts to refuse Black veterans in the 1960s is the same autonomy that allowed posts to refuse Vietnam veterans in the 1970s, and the same autonomy that allows posts today to treat women veterans with enough rudeness and indifference that those veterans never come back. The principle has not changed. Only the specific harm it produces has evolved.
The Organization Is Failing Women Veterans
Women now constitute the fastest-growing segment of the veteran population. More than two million women in the United States are veterans. Women account for over 30% of new patients at the VA in recent years. The military has been allowing women into an increasingly broad range of roles since the 1970s, and into combat roles since 2013. Women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in significant numbers for over two decades. They have been killed, injured, and left with the same range of physical and psychological consequences that male veterans carry.
The VFW is largely failing them, and the failure is not subtle.
Kate Hoit served eight years in the Army Reserves, including a tour in Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. When she tried to join her local VFW chapter, someone asked whether she needed an application for military spouses instead. She never went back. “I’m not going to go the VFW or the Legion and drink and smoke cigarettes,” she said. “I want to be out in my community.” Her experience was not unique. It was so common that it became a data point cited in multiple academic and policy discussions about why female veterans do not join traditional veterans service organizations.
A female veteran cited in a Center for a New American Security report described what it took to walk through a VFW door for the first time: “It took forever just to build up the courage to walk in. I walked in the door, and the guy behind the bar said, ‘Hey, no soliciting.’ He thought I was there to ask for money or put up a sign, so I left. That was the last time I ever set foot in a VFW.”
The PopSmoke Media analysis of the VFW’s governance noted that of the VFW’s 65 voting members on its governing body, only one was a woman. That figure may have shifted in recent years, but even if the ratio has improved modestly, the underlying leadership representation problem is real and documented. Organizations lead the way their governance says they should. When the governing body is almost entirely men, the programs, the culture, the physical spaces, and the unspoken norms of the organization reflect that.
The cost of this failure is not abstract. Women veterans who don’t join the VFW or organizations like it are not just choosing a different social preference. They are walking away from a network of VA-accredited service officers who know how to file and fight claims, from legislative advocates who understand the disability rating system, from people who know what it’s like to have served and come back and find that the world moved on. The VFW’s service officer network recovered more than $13 billion in VA compensation and pension benefits for veterans in fiscal year 2022. Women who feel unwelcome at VFW posts are not participating in that benefit at the rates they should be.
This is correctable. The VFW does not need to become something it isn’t. It needs to stop being a place where a female Iraq War veteran is assumed to be the spouse before the veteran. That is not a values statement. It is a minimum standard of organizational competence.
Younger Veterans Are Choosing Something Else, and the VFW Still Doesn’t Fully Understand Why
The VFW’s failure to recruit post-9/11 veterans is one of the most discussed problems in veteran service organization circles, and it has been discussed, at length, for over 20 years. The discussion has not produced proportionate results.
Part of the challenge is structural and cannot be solved by better marketing. With an all-volunteer force where less than 1% of the American population serves, the country is producing fewer veterans than it did in the draft era. The VFW was built on a model that assumed roughly every generation would produce a large cohort of combat veterans who would eventually age into the post structure. That model’s assumptions no longer hold. The eligible pool has shrunk, and the VFW cannot recruit people who don’t exist.
But a substantial part of the problem is cultural and organizational, and that part is the VFW’s responsibility.
Post-9/11 veterans described typical experiences at local posts with enough consistency that a pattern emerges. Army veteran Sgt. Matt Pelak, who spent three years in Iraq, said: “It’s just the most depressing place. I can’t imagine a place that is further removed from my generation of veterans.” The posts he visited were dimly lit, populated by veterans 30 years older, and offered an environment that seemed designed for someone else’s era and someone else’s war.
Lieutenant Commander Sean Foertsch, a Navy reservist who served in Afghanistan, described traditional veterans groups as “more interested in being a political player than actually addressing the needs of vets.” He and other younger veterans were gravitating toward organizations like Team Red, White & Blue and The Mission Continues, which focused on community reintegration and physical activity rather than legislative advocacy. “That is where the models of Team RWB and Rubicon seem to gain more traction with younger vets,” Foertsch said. “They are focused on the ‘who’ the veteran is as opposed to the ‘what’ they get from” veterans organizations.
Bryan Allyn, a former Navy petty officer who served in Afghanistan, did not renew his Legion membership after two years because he said the VA has advocates to help him navigate the benefits process and he would rather work with them directly. This is a significant shift from the VFW’s traditional value proposition. The organization built its claim to relevance partly on being the intermediary between veterans and a hostile bureaucracy. As that bureaucracy has become somewhat less hostile, and as other advocacy resources have proliferated, the VFW’s claims assistance advantage has narrowed.
What the newer organizations cannot replicate, and this matters enormously, is the VFW’s nationwide network of VA-accredited service officers, its relationship with Congress, and its ability to recover benefits at scale. In fiscal year 2022, VFW service officers helped recoup more than $13 billion in compensation and pension benefits. In 2018, they helped 526,000 veterans and transitioning service members recover $8.3 billion. Those numbers represent real money for real people who would otherwise have received less than they were owed.
The problem is that the VFW is not leading with this. The story it tells about itself, the one that shows up when a potential young veteran member walks into a local post for the first time, is often a bar story, not a claims story. The framing the VFW uses internally, the canteen model, the fish fry, the corner barstool, is exactly what post-9/11 veterans say they don’t want. The framing the VFW should be using, you served your country, the government owes you money, and we know how to get it, is exactly what those same veterans would find useful.
There is some evidence the organization is beginning to understand this. PBS NewsHour reported in November 2024 that some posts have started gaming communities for younger members, weekly tailgates, and increased community service opportunities, with modest success in membership growth. VFW posts around Columbus, Ohio, were running potluck events and veteran-family social gatherings that bore no resemblance to the traditional post image. Some posts have grown meaningfully by doing exactly what the data says works: building the organization around family and community and service rather than around alcohol and nostalgia.
These are individual success stories. They are not yet organizational policy.
The Governance Problem at the Local Level Is Both Deep and Specific
The VFW is not a hierarchy. It is a confederation with a common brand, a common set of bylaws, and very limited enforcement authority. National headquarters can set standards. It cannot reliably enforce them in the 5,556 posts spread across all 50 states, four territories, and eleven foreign countries. This creates a governance gap that individual posts fall into regularly, and that no one closes until the situation is already bad.
The Waterloo, Iowa, case is instructive. VFW Post 1623 had been struggling financially for an extended period. The Iowa state department sent in a team to help, more than once. “We’ve tried to help them multiple times,” said state adjutant Russell Saffell. “The issues, there’s just too many issues with the post to keep it open.” When both the commander and quartermaster were asked to resign so new officers could stabilize the post, no one would take the positions. The post administratively dissolved itself. “Nobody wanted to run for either of those positions because nobody wants a soup sandwich,” Saffell said.
This is not a story about a bad post or bad members. It is a story about an organizational model that does not provide adequate support to posts before they reach the point of no return. By the time a state team arrives, the post’s reputation in the community has often already deteriorated, the most engaged members have already drifted away, and the financial hole is deep enough that climbing out requires more energy than the remaining membership can generate.
The VFW’s officer guidance is thorough on paper. It requires bonded quartermasters. It mandates quarterly audits. It lays out specific duties for commanders, adjutants, trustees, and service officers. What it does not do is create systematic early-warning mechanisms that bring state-level expertise and support in before a post reaches crisis. The gap between “post is struggling” and “state department intervenes” is too wide, and too many posts fall into it permanently.
An 83-year-old Army Korean War veteran named Robert Skinner, serving as commander of VFW Post 5857 in rural Onaway, Michigan, had only five active members and needed to fill eight board seats. If he couldn’t fill them, the post would have to relinquish control to district leadership, effectively closing. He was alone in a 50-year-old building trying to keep something alive that the organization had not given him the tools to sustain. “About eight years ago, it started to decline, and since then it’s been constant,” he said.
The failure here is not Skinner’s. He is an 83-year-old man doing what he said he would do. The failure is that no one in the VFW’s leadership structure had a plan for helping him recruit the people he needed before the situation became critical.
The DOGE Moment Is the Test the VFW Must Not Fail
This section requires context. In early 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency began executing sweeping cuts across the federal government, including at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA canceled hundreds of contracts and initiated mass layoffs of probationary employees. An internal memo proposed cutting roughly 70,000 to 80,000 VA positions, which would have reduced staffing to pre-2019 levels, before the PACT Act expanded presumptive claims for burn pit exposure and other toxic substances.
The VFW acted. VFW National Commander Al Lipphardt publicly called on the administration to stop what he described as indiscriminate mass firings of veterans and VA employees. He testified before a joint session of the congressional veterans’ affairs committees. He called on VFW members to march forth to Capitol Hill. Wisconsin’s VFW adjutant Adam Wallace set up an email hotline for affected VA employees and veterans to document the real effects of the cuts so the VFW could show elected officials what was happening. Wyoming VFW State Commander Justin Tripp, speaking to NBC News about a VA office manager who had been fired despite strong performance reviews, said directly: “I would be concerned with positions that are front-line positions that touch veterans every day. I’d want to make sure that somebody’s at the front door so if a veteran walked in in a crisis, they would be there to help.”
More recently, the VFW has pushed back against legislative proposals that would cut disability compensation for tinnitus and sleep apnea to fund other veterans benefits, warning that such changes could reduce payments by approximately $57 billion over 10 years and affect up to 1.5 million veterans. The VFW’s statement was unambiguous: “Veterans’ benefits are not charity. They are an earned obligation of the nation and part of the promise made through military service. Congress should Honor the Contract.”
This is the VFW doing what it does best: using institutional credibility, relationships on both sides of the aisle, and a large national membership to push back against policy decisions that harm veterans. The legislative operation earned that credibility over more than a century of sustained advocacy. The PACT Act that expanded burn pit benefits exists partly because the VFW spent years advocating for it. The PACT Act’s implementation is now under threat. The VFW is one of the few organizations positioned to defend it effectively.
But the VFW can only do this with members. The legislative operation’s credibility rests on the claim that it represents a significant number of veterans. As membership declines, that claim weakens. A national commander who speaks for 957,000 veterans has less political weight than one who speaks for 2 million. The declining membership is not just an organizational problem. It is an advocacy problem with direct consequences for every veteran in the country, member or not.
This is the argument for fixing the VFW that neither the organization’s critics nor its defenders make clearly enough: the alternative to a functional VFW is not a vacuum. It is a collection of organizations, each legitimate, none with the legislative access and institutional weight that the VFW has built, all trying to advocate for veterans without a common voice. Team RWB runs great events. It does not testify before the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America does excellent advocacy work for a specific generation. It does not have 125 years of congressional relationships. Wounded Warrior Project provides important services. It does not produce an annual Veterans Independent Budget that Congress references when setting VA funding levels.
The VFW’s problems are real and serious. They are also fixable by people who already have the authority to fix them, if those people choose to use it.
What the Successful Posts Have in Common
Before prescribing fixes, it is worth looking at what is actually working, because the VFW is not uniformly declining. Some posts have grown meaningfully, recruited younger veterans, attracted women, and built financial models that don’t depend on bar receipts. The patterns are worth examining.
Posts that grow tend to share a few characteristics. They are built around service and community activity rather than around social drinking. They have commanders who understand that recruiting a younger veteran requires demonstrating value before asking for dues. They organize around families, not just individuals. They do visible community work that connects them to people who are not veterans but who respect the mission. They are honest about the claims and benefits assistance the VFW can provide, and they lead with that, not with the bar.
Rich Williams, an Air Force Desert Storm veteran, took over VFW Post 2149 in Wood Dale, Illinois, in 2021 after the previous commander stepped down and nobody else would take the job. He inherited seven to ten active members. His explicit goal was to change the culture. Posts that attract younger veterans, he said, do it by building programs around families, not by assuming that veterans want to sit around and drink. This is consistent with what every analysis of VFW membership decline has found, and it is consistent with what younger veterans themselves say when asked.
The Whitehall VFW Post near Columbus, Ohio, draws veterans for weekly tailgates during football season and has built an active community service program. Some posts have created gaming communities for veterans who don’t find value in traditional social formats. A VFW post in Tualatin, Oregon, invested in a new facility with proper equipment and a modern kitchen, named it after a young Marine killed in Afghanistan, and built a community around honoring recent service rather than mourning it.
These posts have not solved the financial model problem permanently. They are still dealing with aging facilities, leadership recruitment challenges, and the basic math of a shrinking eligible pool. But they have demonstrated that the brand is not dead, and that veterans who have options will choose the VFW when the VFW gives them a reason to.
How to Fix It
None of what follows is radical. Most of it has been discussed inside veteran service organizations for years. The failure is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of sustained organizational will to implement them over the resistance of members and post leaders who prefer the current arrangement, however dysfunctional it may be.
Diversify the revenue model and make that diversification a requirement. The VFW should establish minimum standards for post financial planning that include diversified revenue sources. Any post above a basic threshold should be required to demonstrate that bar and gaming revenue does not exceed a certain percentage of total operating income. This will be resisted. Do it anyway. Posts that have built multiple revenue streams are more stable, more likely to survive disruption, and more likely to look like something other than a bar, which matters for recruitment.
The national organization should develop and distribute a grants toolkit specifically for local posts, identifying federal, state, and private sources available to veteran service organizations, providing template applications, and offering technical assistance to posts that want to pursue them. Most posts do not have anyone on their officer roster who knows how to write a grant application. That is a solvable problem.
Mandate independent financial oversight for posts above a revenue threshold. Any post handling more than a defined annual revenue level should be required to have an external accounting review, not a trustee committee of three volunteers running totals on a printed form. The threshold can be calibrated to the organization’s capacity. Start with the larger posts. Expand over time. The recurring embezzlement pattern in the news demonstrates that the current model is not working. Quarterly trustee audits conducted by people who are not accountants and have no accountability to anyone outside the post are not a control. They are paperwork.
This costs money. The VFW should explore whether state departments can provide accounting support to smaller posts, whether a national fund can subsidize external reviews for posts below the cost threshold, and whether the requirement can be phased in over three years to allow posts to prepare. The cost of not doing this is higher than the cost of doing it.
Create systematic early-warning mechanisms and real support before posts reach crisis. The current model is reactive. States send teams when posts are already in trouble, often too late to reverse the decline. The VFW should establish a proactive outreach system in which state departments conduct regular health assessments of posts, not just respond to crises. Posts below certain membership and financial thresholds should trigger automatic support from the state level, including leadership training, recruitment assistance, and financial planning help, before the situation becomes irreversible.
The national organization should invest more heavily in leadership development. The quartermaster position is the single most critical officer role in post financial integrity, and it is chronically difficult to fill. The VFW should develop specific training and support for this role, identify promising members early, and make it clear that serving in this capacity is valuable and recognized, not a burden to be avoided.
Give national and state leadership real enforcement authority over post conduct. Local autonomy has value. It does not have unlimited value. The VFW needs clear, consistent, and fast-acting authority to intervene when posts discriminate against eligible members, mismanage funds, or fail to meet basic standards of conduct. The current model allows problems to persist too long before intervention, because the authority structure is too diffuse and the intervention process is too slow.
This is a bylaw change. It requires a vote. The membership should be asked to make it, and the case for it should be made explicitly: the autonomy that allowed posts to refuse Black veterans in the 1960s and Vietnam veterans in the 1970s is the same autonomy that allows posts today to turn away female veterans before they can even explain why they’re there. At some point, protecting the brand and protecting the members in each community requires the ability to enforce standards, not just encourage them.
Treat women veterans as the growth constituency they are, not as an afterthought. This means more than updating charter language. The VFW should set measurable goals for female representation in post leadership, in state department leadership, and in the national governing body. It should audit the experience of female veterans at local posts systematically, not just respond to complaints when they surface. It should invest in recruiting female veterans the same way it invested in recruiting post-9/11 veterans generally, with dedicated outreach, specific programs, and visible evidence that the organization takes their service seriously.
The claims and benefits assistance the VFW provides is just as valuable to a female veteran as to a male one. The suicide rate for female veterans is 250% higher than for the civilian population. Women who leave the VFW before they find its service officer network are not just choosing a different social club. They are losing access to resources that can matter to their survival.
Build a real pipeline from active duty service to post membership. The VFW’s Pre-Discharge program already places representatives on or near major military installations to help transitioning service members begin their VA claims process before they leave active duty. This is an excellent model. It should be expanded, better funded, and better connected to local post recruitment. A veteran who meets a VFW service officer at their final installation is a veteran who has a reason to look up their local post when they get home.
The VFW should be showing up at Transition Assistance Program sessions systematically, not opportunistically. It should be in the rooms where separating service members are being told, sometimes for the first time, that they are eligible for disability compensation. It should be the first organization those service members encounter, not the third or fourth. This is a resource allocation question. The VFW has the infrastructure to do this. The question is whether it allocates the money to do it at scale.
Reform the PAC governance permanently or exit electoral politics. The VFW’s most effective political work happens in the legislative office, not through electoral endorsements. If the organization chooses to maintain any form of electoral activity, it should do so with ironclad accountability to the membership, clear and enforceable standards that cannot produce endorsements of candidates widely seen as hostile to veterans, and leadership authority to override decisions before they become public embarrassments rather than after. If those conditions cannot be met reliably, the organization should direct its political capital entirely through the legislative operation, where it has a genuine track record of success.
Invest in the claims and benefits function as the core product. The VFW’s service officer network is its most defensible competitive advantage. It is the thing that newer, hipper organizations cannot replicate because it requires accreditation, training, and sustained institutional relationships with the VA that take years to build. The VFW should talk about this constantly and loudly, particularly to the post-9/11 veterans who are skeptical of the traditional post model. The fish fry is optional. The claims assistance is the mission.
In fiscal year 2022, VFW service officers helped recover more than $13 billion in compensation and pension benefits. That is $13 billion that went to veterans and their families who would otherwise have received less. That number deserves to be on every piece of VFW recruitment material that exists. It deserves to be the first thing a potential member hears when they ask what the VFW does. Instead, the first thing many potential members encounter is a dimly lit bar with a flag over the door.
The Honest Assessment
The VFW is not going to disappear. It has a congressional charter, a Washington office with genuine relationships on both sides of the aisle, a history that connects to nearly every major veterans policy achievement of the last century, and enough posts in enough places that it will persist in some form for a long time. The inertia alone will sustain it for years.
But inertia is not a strategy. An organization that holds its shape while its substance declines is not stable. It is hollow, and hollow things break.
The people who should fix the VFW are the ones currently running it: national commanders, state department leadership, district officers, and post commanders who know exactly what their posts look like and have chosen, year after year, not to force the hard changes. They know the bar model is failing. They know the post culture repels younger veterans. They know women veterans are walking away. They know the embezzlement problem is structural. They know the officer pipeline is drying up. This information is not new. The VFW has been reading its own declinist analyses for 50 years.
The VFW also knows what it’s up against in the current moment. The VA faces pressure that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago. Thousands of VA employees who helped veterans navigate the claims process have been fired or threatened with firing. Contract cuts have touched programs that support veterans in crisis. Disability rating criteria face proposed changes that could affect over a million veterans. The legislative advocacy function of the VFW has rarely mattered more than it does right now.
An organization at full strength, with broad membership across generations, with financial stability at the post level, with women veterans as active participants and leaders, with post-9/11 veterans who know and trust the service officer network, would be positioned to fight these battles effectively. The VFW that exists today is fighting them with a diminished roster, an aging core, a financial model that depends on beer sales, and a governance structure that cannot enforce its own standards.
At some point, an organization that keeps identifying its problems and declining to solve them has made a choice. The VFW still has time to make a different one. The country would be better off if it did.