Carol Whitmore biggest priorities as the VFW National Commander are advocating for veterans, fighting claims sharks, repatriating the remains of POW/MIA, and highlighting the service of women. But she took command of the VFW at a turbulent time for veterans: a VA secretary accused of moving against veterans’ hard-won benefits, thousands of veterans facing foreclosure, and a membership base in slow decline.
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It’s a historic time, but she’s accustomed to that. In August 2025, she was elected National Commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States. She is the first woman and first Iowan to lead the 126-year-old organization in its history.
But Whitmore has been making history for nearly 50 years. She enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps in 1977, one of the final cohorts of the all-female military branch that would be disbanded the following year. She served 36 years in the Army, deployed to Iraq, and received the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star before retiring in 2013.
The VFW is a congressionally chartered veterans service organization representing approximately 1.3 million members across more than 5,500 posts worldwide—and Whitmore has the opportunity to make history once again by leading it through an uncertain era for veterans.
It wasn’t long after her election to the VFW’s top post before there was a flashpoint for her constituency.
An interim final rule published by the VA on Feb 17, 2026, would have required medical examiners to factor in the effectiveness of medications or treatments when determining a veteran’s disability rating—a change veterans’ advocates warned would slash compensation for hundreds of thousands of people who rely on medication to manage their conditions.
The VFW mobilized immediately.
“We sent out over 20,000 emails to the secretary,” Whitmore said, “and he came to our conference personally and apologized for that and said, ‘I will rescind this immediately.'”
VA Secretary Doug Collins formally rescinded the rule just 10 days after its publication.
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“When you send out 20,000 emails to the VA Secretary, he sits up and takes notice,” she said. “He told us his top three advisors were fired for advising him to do this.”
But would the VFW have filed a lawsuit over the illegal interim final rule had it not been rescinded, as other organizations did.
“We have always talked about being the tip of the spear for service organizations,” she said. “I would like to think if it needed to go further, that we would.”
“When you send out 20,000 emails to the VA Secretary, he sits up and takes notice… He told us his top three advisors were fired for advising him to do this.””
A second, unresolved crisis still looms. This one hangs over VA-backed housing. The Veterans Affairs Servicing Purchase (VASP) program, a last-resort mortgage assistance option for veterans in default, was shut down by the Trump administration on May 1, 2025.
According to NPR, more than 10,000 veterans have lost their homes to foreclosure since the program ended, at the highest pace in a decade, and another 90,000 are at risk of losing their homes.
The issue Whitmore describes as her personal passion this year is the Major Richard Star Act. The legislation would end a longstanding offset that forces medically retired veterans (those discharged before 20 years due to combat-related injuries) to choose between their military retirement pay and their VA disability compensation rather than receiving both in full.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also expressed support for the bill in a May 2026 congressional hearing, estimating it would benefit roughly 54,000 veterans. It has since become a cause célèbre for the veteran community.
“They’re two different benefits, earned benefits for veterans,” the VFW National Commander said. “Yet if you’re not 100% disabled, that money is offset, and you can only choose one. And that is completely unfair to a veteran.”
Then there’s a structural challenge facing the VFW, one that is not lost on Whitmore. The organization’s image as what Whitmore wryly called “Grandpa’s Smokey Old Bar” has proven difficult to shake, even as posts run scholarship programs, partner with Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and anchor community life in small towns across the country.
Total membership stands at roughly 1.5 million—approximately half the organization’s peak membership from 30 years ago—as older members die and younger veterans do not join at the same rate.
“Some of them have bars, we call them canteens, and some do not,” she said. “It’s being dictatorial if we tell them, ‘You have to modernize,’ because it’s what works in their community that makes them important. What works in Massachusetts is not necessarily going to work in Texas.”
VFW Day of Service 2023
She points to VFW Post 1020 in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, as a model, a post she described as fully embedded in its community, supporting both a thriving restaurant and meaningful veterans’ programming.
“They’re like peas and carrots there.”
But she stops well short of mandating change from above.
“We have to give them a lot of leeway on what to do for modernization, she adds. “My hope is that the perception of what a veteran is helps change that, but the public has to make that change. They have to want to make that change themselves.”
She would know, because as the VFW National Commander, she’s constantly on the road visiting VFW posts. With more than 5,500 posts across the United States and overseas in places like American Samoa, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.
“I am so proud of them because they make it work. They’re overseas, and they use every resource available to them to make it work.”
Whitmore says, probably one of the biggest responses the VFW gets when they ask a prospective member to join is “what’s in it for me?”
“The Forever GI Bill, the PACT Act, and now going for the Major Richard Star Act,” she mentioned. “Advocacy is by far the most unseen thing the public knows about what we do, and that’s what we do. We advocate for every veteran, for every aspect of what a veteran deserves and needs.”
“We were founded on the earned benefits that Washington did not follow through with after the Spanish-American War in 1899,” she added. “We’re not going to take that. Our service officers are second to none.”
For all the legislative and institutional battles, Whitmore’s identity remains rooted in something simpler.
“I told everybody I’m a veteran first. I just happened to be female.”
When Whitmore enlisted in 1977, the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) was still a separate branch of the military. Women wore distinct uniforms, performed modified physical fitness tests, and operated in an institutional structure designed to keep them apart from male soldiers.
The cycle of recruits just ahead of her famously did PT in skirts. But when the WAC was fully integrated into the regular Army in October 1978, the women were expected to meet the male standard almost overnight.
“It was very, very different for women back in the day,” Whitmore told We Are The Mighty. “I was expected to do all the male standards regardless of the training, but that’s how it goes sometimes. And you fit in however best you can.”
She carries that history deliberately. And literally. The symbol of the WAC was Pallas Athena— goddess of warriors and wisdom—and Whitmore has it engraved on the back of her challenge coin.
“I have that on my challenge coin just to remind myself where I came from, to let people know where we have come from, and how long it’s taken for us to be all part of one unit, one army, one military.”
Her road to the VFW’s top post was similarly unexpected. She saw an opportunity while serving as junior vice commander just three years ago.
“I saw there was a gap and I said, ‘I’m going to put my name in there.’ Whether or not I get chosen, I thought people deserved other options.”
She ran against three men in the Big 10 Conference (the VFW’s Midwestern bloc of 10 states) and won their overwhelming support before being elected National Commander at the 126th National Convention in Columbus, Ohio.
2025 VFW National Commander Carol Whitmore's Acceptance Speech
“Everywhere I have gone, people embrace me because of me,” she said. “You cannot expect people to respect you just because of a title. You earn it.”
The VFW National Commander knows that the public, rather than fellow veterans, has been slower to update its assumptions about who a veteran is.
“They will always thank my husband for his service because he always wears a military cap. My husband always points out and says, ‘She served too, even longer than I did.’ You just have to accept it and make those corrections when it’s appropriate.”
She is planning to mark the 82nd anniversary of D-Day by parachuting into Normandy with an all-female team called Fox Force. She had never jumped out of a plane before being invited. She said yes anyway.
“If it brings some awareness to what female veterans have done for this country and jumped into World War II—most people don’t know that women jumped into Normandy during that time—I am very honored.”
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