The Trump administration’s housing agency on Monday abruptly withdrew a funding notice likely to cut millions of dollars in federal grants for local programs helping homeless families and individuals obtain and remain in housing. The change happened less than two hours before a court hearing on a lawsuit filed Dec. 1 by Cambridge, Boston and other cities and several counties and national organizations. Massachusetts and 19 other states filed a separate lawsuit.
“This sudden withdrawal of the program guidelines, while keeping the threat of new funding conditions open, doubles down on the chaos and disruption the Trump administration has caused to this critical improvement program that has helped people out of hope with homelessness,” city manager Yi-An Huang told the city council Monday.
Huang said the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had withdrawn the notice of funding opportunity, or NOFO, for the Continuum of Care program less than 90 minutes before a court hearing on both suits before District Court judge Mary S. McElroy in Rhode Island Monday. Cambridge city solicitor Megan Bayer told councillors that the judge “was very displeased with this last-minute change from the federal government, and specifically commented on how she worked all weekend to prepare for this hearing, and knows that plaintiff’s attorneys worked many hours, and she does not appreciate these shenanigans from the federal government.”
Federal officials said they would reissue the notice of available funding with changes “to account for new priorities.” Housing advocates said updates could repeat the same problematic rules.
A HUD spokesperson said in an email message: “HUD fully stands by the fundamental reforms to the FY25 Continuum of Care (CoC) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) and will reissue the NOFO as quickly as possible with technical corrections.” The spokesperson said the agency “remains fully committed to making long overdue reforms to its homelessness assistance programs.”
Huang said Cambridge “will continue to stand with our fellow local, regional and national partners” who have sued the federal government over the changes “to ensure that the compassionate evidence and common sense based practices continue to guide our housing policies.”
The next hearing in the suits is Dec. 19. Before then, both sides are to file arguments on the plaintiffs’ request for preliminary injunctions ordering the government to set aside the new NOFO and use the existing guidelines to award grants.
Huang said Nov. 17 that Cambridge could lose $4.6 million in federal funds for the program under the new guidelines. The new rules say HUD will renew only 30 percent of a grant for the purpose of permanent supportive housing, instead of 90 percent. Currently, 224 households in Cambridge are housed with money from the city’s Continuum of Care grant of $6.4 million.
Emergency rent vouchers also affected
Another program that supports housing for formerly homeless individuals and families, emergency rent vouchers, will probably lose all its federal funding – $3.8 million – Huang said. That program houses 129 Cambridge families. Huang said he expected the cuts to both programs to probably occur next August to September.
After HUD issued the new NOFO for the Continuum of Care program, a tight timeframe for applying for the grants meant the city had to solicit bids from the organizations that provide services for the program at short notice, assuming that the new rules would be in place, Huang said Monday. The city “has held meetings with everyone we fund,” he said. He added that “I think at this point, with the program guidelines withdrawn, we haven’t yet determined what the path forward would be on that bidding process.”
“This has been an incredibly stressful time for our housing and homelessness team, our nonprofit partners, for community members that are being housed,” Huang said. “I can’t say enough about how dedicated and hard working our teams have been to both coordinate through all of this uncertainty, to read all the guidelines and to manage to find a path for us to navigate through over these last three weeks.”
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