The Trump administration’s budget proposal will create more hardships and homelessness for families across the country, according to leading housing advocates.
The administration’s fiscal 2026 request calls for a massive 44% cut to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) budget.
It also proposes consolidating five of largest rental assistance programs into a single state-run block grant while imposing a two-year limit on assistance, according to housing leaders who are closely watching the budget proposal that was released May 30.
Rather than promoting self-sufficiency, proposals like time limits and work requirements impose unnecessary bureaucratic barriers to obtaining and maintaining housing assistance, said Renee Willis, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Her organization reports a shortage of 7.1 million affordable and available homes nationwide. In addition, only 1 in 4 households who qualify for HUD assistance receive it, leaving 75% of households struggling to afford rent.
“Most people who receive assistance are working but are not paid enough to afford rent,” Willis added.
Cuts to federal housing programs will only make the situation worse, warn advocates.
“Despite the Trump administration’s stated commitment to increasing the nation’s supply of affordable housing, the budget request proposes no additional funding to support the expansion of affordable housing stock,” said Willis.
If adopted by Congress, the request would lead to communities across the country losing the federal funding they need to build more deeply affordable, accessible homes, according to Willis.
The Trump administration is proposing severe cuts to nearly every HUD program, added Will Fischer, senior fellow and director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The most devastating include the reduction of $27 billion, or 43%, in funding for rental assistance through the Housing Choice Voucher, project-based rental assistance, public housing, Section 202 for seniors, and Section 811 for people with disabilities programs, he said.
The budget request would also deliver a massive blow to programs aimed at reducing homelessness.
Changes to homeless assistance grants would end assistance for hundreds of thousands of people, putting them at risk of losing their housing, said Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
The administration proposes a consolidation of the Continuum of Care (CoC) and the Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS (HOPWA) programs into the Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG) program that would cap assistance at two years.
Overall, about $532 million is proposed to be cut from special-needs programs, which includes HOPWA, CoC, and ESG, according to Oliva, who noted that amount is enough to provide rental subsidies to almost 63,000 households, she said.
“I don’t use the word catastrophic very often, but this shift and the related cut would indeed be catastrophic,” she said.
According to Oliva, if the budget proposal is passed, it would mean:
- The loss of 167,000 beds for people with disabling conditions who are living in CoC permanent supportive housing;
- The elimination of the Youth Homeless Demonstration program. HUD has awarded eight rounds of funding to more than 120 communities to help them end youth homelessness;
- The loss of funding for HOPWA, and 46,000 households would lose their housing and support;
- The elimination of funding for the project that produces the annual homeless report to Congress. This would mean the loss of the premier dataset for understanding homelessness across the country; and
- The loss of technical assistance for about 150 communities and the “crisis response backbone” that is funded by the CoC program.
Oliva also pointed out that some states would be hit harder by the changes, including Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. “Rural and suburban areas that rely more heavily on federal investment for their homelessness system functions would also be very hard hit if this budget were to be passed as is,” she said.
The first Trump administration also proposed significant cuts to HUD programs, but they were largely thwarted by Congress. Housing advocates are calling on Congress to reject the administration’s latest moves as well as it begins its budget appropriations process.
“We don’t know what the fate of these proposals is going to be,” Fischer said, noting that the housing programs need additional funding just to stay even. “… It’s going to be a really critical appropriations debate, where you’ve got these sort of extreme proposals for cuts, but even anything that reduces these programs below what’s needed to maintain assistance for folks who need it would have devastating impacts around the country.”
