Hud Pauses Changes To Homelessness Program Amid Lawsuits

Major revisions to a widely used federal homelessness program were walked back by the Trump administration Monday — pausing the policy shift just as a federal judge was preparing to weigh emergency requests to block it.

In a filing in Rhode Island federal court, government lawyers said the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had withdrawn recent changes to its $3 billion Continuum of Care (CoC) grant program so it could assess issues raised in the lawsuits, Reuters first reported.  

HUD told the court it intends to release a revised policy before January application deadlines.

The reversal landed roughly an hour before U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy convened a scheduled hearing on whether to freeze the new rules, which were unveiled last month. McElroy postponed a ruling and set a new hearing for Dec. 19, but sharply criticized the administration’s last-minute pivot.

“It feels like intentional chaos,” McElroy said. “You can change the policy all you want (but) there’s a mechanism for doing so.”

HUD had framed the overhaul to its CoC program as a shift away from the long-standing housing-first model toward transitional housing with work requirements and behavioral conditions.

The now-withdrawn overhaul also would have imposed a cap on funding for permanent housing, prohibited grants to organizations serving transgender communities and added new restrictions barring funding for diversity and inclusion efforts, elective abortions, gender ideology and any activity viewed as undermining federal immigration enforcement, Reuters added.

States, cities and nonprofit organizations filed multiple lawsuits arguing that the changes violated federal law, targeted LGBTQ people and other disfavored groups — and ran counter to the purpose of the program Congress created in 1987.

They also warned that changes could potentially put more than 170,000 people at risk of losing their housing.

For decades, the CoC program has supported a wide range of services for unhoused people, including childcare, job training, mental health counseling and transportation — with a mandate to prioritize veterans, families and people with disabilities.