HUD choked funding to enforce fair-housing laws. Legal aid groups may not survive

A few weeks ago, Brooke Kirkpatrick was panicked about being forced to leave her family’s apartment in Willoughby, Ohio. Her younger child, who’s 3, has nonverbal autism, and neighbors had repeatedly complained about him making noises — a common behavior known as vocal stimming that people with autism use to calm themselves.

Kirkpatrick said she’d told the landlord about her son’s disability before they moved in, and explained the situation to some neighbors. But the 30-day notice came anyway, just days after her husband lost his job as a machine operator.

“I was actually looking up homeless shelters in the area for my family,” she said.

That’s when she found a local group that helps people facing housing discrimination. Kirkpatrick said she didn’t even know she had a legal right to challenge the landlord. She met with a lawyer and “within 24 hours, it was resolved,” she said.

But the group that helped Kirkpatrick is now at risk of shutting down. Late last month, the Trump administration cut off the flow of federal funding to that organization and dozens of other fair-housing nonprofits across the country that are key enforcers of anti-discrimination laws. It’s part of a larger effort to dramatically shrink HUD.

“I’ve been doing this job for 25 years. Never have I ever seen anything like this before, and it was absolutely a punch in the gut,” said Patricia Kidd, executive director of the Fair Housing Resource Center in Painesville, Ohio.

Kidd doesn’t know if this cut is temporary or permanent. But the HUD grants make up 85% of her budget. She’s laid off most of her staff and is talking with a realtor about selling the organization’s office building.

“We’re in a position now where we’re trying to hang on to the cash that we have, and we have probably about six months until we close down,” she said.

The Fair Housing Act was one of the hardest fought anti-discrimination statutes of the 1960s

For decades, federal policies contributed to making housing discrimination an entrenched problem. The practice of redlining effectively barred Black people, Jewish people and other people of color from certain neighborhoods and made it harder for them to get a mortgage.

President Lyndon Johnson pushed Congress for years to address residential segregation, but it was considered too controversial. He was finally able to sign the Fair Housing Act in 1968, a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. sparked riots around the country.

“Of all the civil rights statutes that were passed in the ’60s, the Fair Housing Act has some of the strongest language in terms of anti-discrimination,” said Yiyang Wu, an attorney with the civil rights law firm Relman Colfax.

The law hasn’t achieved its original goal of ending racial segregation. But over the years, it’s been expanded and now bans discrimination on the basis of race or color, religion, national origin, sex, disability or family status. And people are making use of it. Last year there were more than 34,000 fair-housing complaints of all kinds, a record high for the third year in a row.

Congress has formally recognized the key role of private nonprofits to enforce the law. They take on the vast majority of such cases, with funding through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

A lawsuit alleges the Trump cuts are unlawful, and that DOGE exceeded its authority

But last month, about two-thirds of those nonprofits — 66 — received letters from HUD terminating about half of the agency’s fair-housing grants, some $30 million in all. The letters all said it was being done at the direction of the Elon Musk-led unit known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) because the funding “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”

“HUD provided no explanation as to how that could be possible,” said Lila Miller, another Relman Colfax attorney. “The plaintiffs are just doing that bread and butter work that is consistent with the congressional mandate.”

Relman Colfax and four fair-housing groups have filed suit against HUD and DOGE alleging the cuts are unlawful. The lawsuit accuses HUD of acting arbitrarily and capriciously, and asserts that the DOGE cost-cutting entity exceeded its authority.

In a statement to NPR, a HUD spokesperson said, “The Department is responsible for ensuring our grantees and contractors are in compliance with the President’s Executive Orders. If we determine they are not in compliance, then we are required to take action. The Department will continue to serve the American people, including those facing housing discrimination or eviction.”

The agency did not explain why it cut funding to some fair-housing groups but not others.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner has said he is taking inventory of every program and process to become more efficient and will “cut and consolidate as necessary.”

Fair-housing groups say their work is needed now more than ever

Amy Nelson, who heads the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana, said she’s worked through multiple administrations and that changing priorities is nothing new. But “this is the very first time we’ve ever had a grant terminated without any sort of discussion,” she said. “And it was a grant that we had high performance evaluations on.”

Several advocates also said the move does not make sense if cost-cutting is the goal.

“We help people avoid homelessness,” said Maureen St. Cyr, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and head of Massachusetts Fair Housing Center in Holyoke, Mass. “This work saves taxpayers money.”

She and others say they educate their communities about fair-housing law, investigate complaints and work hard to keep people from losing housing.

“I would say 98% of the time we mediate and resolve an issue before it ever gets filed in court,” said Kidd of the Ohio nonprofit.

That can mean pushing a landlord to install a ramp or shower grab-bars for an aging tenant. In Indiana, Nelson put out a recent report on an uptick in foreclosures, noting that rising insurance rates may be a possible factor. In Massachusetts, St. Cyr started a program to help people with housing vouchers find a place to rent, since many landlords refuse to accept vouchers even in states where that’s banned.

These local advocates can also act as a kind of emergency rescue. Like a call one Friday night to Zoe Ann Olson, executive director of the Intermountain Fair Housing Council in Boise, Idaho. An older disabled woman had been evicted, “and it was illegal under both state and federal law,” she said. Olson found her a shelter that night and then got the woman back into housing.

Olson’s group is the only fair-housing legal aid provider in Idaho. She and others worry what will happen if federal funding isn’t restored and they’re forced to shut down.

HUD likely won’t be able to pick up the slack. It currently handles only about 5% of housing discrimination cases, and the Trump administration aims to slash three-quarters of the staff in its fair-housing office, according to an internal document seen by NPR.

Meanwhile, rent and housing prices are out of reach for many people across the country, and homelessness is at a record high.

“The shelters are overwhelmed. There’s not enough affordable housing,” Olson said. “We’re just seeing an extraordinary amount of evictions, like so many that we’re getting on a daily basis. It’s so disheartening to lose this money.”