US judge blocks Trump administration from altering homelessness funding conditions

By Nate Raymond

Dec 19 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from imposing new restrictions on more than $3 billion in grant funding used to provide permanent housing and other services to homeless people.

U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy in Providence, Rhode Island, at the close of a court hearing, issued a preliminary injunction barring the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from rescinding an earlier policy governing how funding from the Continuum of Care program would be provided to grant recipients.

She did so at the behest of officials from 20 mostly Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C., and a coalition of local governments and nonprofit organizations that said HUD was seeking to adopt changes that would put an estimated 170,000 people at risk of losing their housing.

“And that means that individuals, families with children, veterans, and victims of domestic violence are going to lose their housing in the middle of winter,” Kristin Bateman, a lawyer for the nonprofits and cities at the liberal legal group Democracy Forward, said during the hearing on Friday.

McElroy said HUD’s efforts to change the grant funding conditions conflicted with the statutory mandates of the McKinney-Vento Act, including the prioritization by Congress of providing funding for stable and permanent housing, and would guarantee funding gaps.

“Ensuring lawful agency action, continuity of housing, and stability for vulnerable populations is clearly in the public interest,” said McElroy, who was appointed by Trump during his first term in office after Democratic President Barack Obama initially nominated her.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION CRITICAL OF ‘HOUSING-FIRST’ APPROACH

Before McElroy issued her ruling, a Justice Department attorney said HUD had planned later on Friday to issue a revised set of grant funding conditions. HUD withdrew an earlier set an hour before a previous hearing in the case, which the judge said appeared to be a strategic attempt to disrupt the case.

Following the ruling, a HUD spokesperson said the agency “remains committed to program reforms intended to assist our nation’s most vulnerable citizens and will continue to do so in accordance with the law.”

Congress created the Continuum of Care program in 1987 to provide resources for states, local governments and nonprofits to deliver support services to homeless people, with a focus on veterans, families, and people with disabilities.

The program has long been based on the “housing-first” approach to combating homelessness, which prioritizes placing people into permanent housing without preconditions such as sobriety and employment. Along with housing, the grants fund childcare, job training, mental health counseling and transportation services.

The Trump administration has criticized the housing-first approach, and HUD in November said it was overhauling the grant program to focus on transitional housing initiatives with work requirements and other conditions.

HUD also barred grant recipients from using the funding for activities that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, elective abortions, or “gender ideology,” or interfere with the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond; Editing by David Gregorio, Alexia Garamfalvi and Paul Simao)