US Funding Plan for Homeless People Threatens Rights

Zazie Huml

On November 13, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a revised funding notice for the Continuum of Care program—the central federal mechanism for financing permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing, and the services that make them function. For thousands of communities across the country, the CoC program is the backbone of local systems that support people who are homeless. It is how leases are paid, caseworkers are employed, and outreach teams deliver the health and supportive services that help people regain stability. Cities plan their annual budgets around its predictability. Without it, shelter doors and subsidized housing organizations close.

The HUD notice attacked this system in three ways. First, it abruptly replaced a two-year funding cycle—around which organizations had planned their budgets, programs, and timelines—with a new competitive scheme that would delay awards until at least May 2026, despite the fact that many grants expire in January. Providers warn that they cannot survive this gap in funding. The result would be shuttered programs, layoffs, and people forced back into shelters or onto the street.

Second, it capped the portion of funding that communities could devote to permanent housing, the most consistently effective intervention for chronic homelessness. Permanent supportive housing and rapid rehousing have decades of evidence behind them; they reduce homelessness, reduce hospital use, and reduce mortality. National estimates suggest that more than 170,000 people’s housing would be jeopardized if permanent housing were defunded at the scale implied in the notice. Shrinking funding for permanent housing is a punitive move designed to punish people for their precarity by instating work or sobriety requirements and returning to high-barrier models of housing.

The notice also required providers to sign new declarations that would directly reshape whom they can serve and how. To get funding, they must attest that they:

1. Make no use of racial equity practices,
2. Recognize only a strict male–female definition of sex, and
3. Do not conduct or partner with harm-reduction efforts.

These criteria force programs to ignore the racial inequities that shape homelessness, to abandon evidence-based tools that prevent overdose and disease, and to exclude entire groups of people from care. This underscores that the proposed reforms are not designed to address homelessness, but rather an ideological boundary-setting exercise that limits organizations’ ability to serve their communities. Instead, they prevent homelessness organizations from doing their jobs.

Stakeholders have been fighting this mandate. On November 25, a coalition of states led by Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha filed suit in federal court, warning that the notice was unlawful and endangered hundreds of thousands of residents. On December 1, local governments and national homelessness organizations filed their own complaint, detailing the instability HUD had unleashed. Members of Congress followed with a formal letter urging HUD to withdraw the notice before irreparable harm occurred.

On the morning of December 8, 90 minutes before an emergency court hearing, HUD abruptly rescinded the notice. Judge Mary McElroy described the maneuver as “intentional chaos”—a last-minute withdrawal that offered no clarity or relief. The rescission did not restore the original funding cycle, repair the planning disruption, or remove the threat posed by the underlying policy. HUD has already said it will issue a revised version, meaning the fundamental uncertainty remains. The hearing is now scheduled for December 19.

Health related impacts

Homelessness is a health and human rights issue and the health consequences of these policy shifts are tragically predictable. UN experts on homelessness and health have warned that policies which push people into the streets, expose marginalized groups to violence, or predictably lead to unsafe behaviors are incompatible with the rights to housing and health because they lead to preventable illness, injury, and early death.

People experiencing homelessness already face mortality rates several times higher than the general population; they die younger, often by decades. Policies that restrict access to housing, suppress harm reduction, or force trans people into unsafe environments do not resolve underlying challenges—they heighten preventable morbidity and mortality. The empirical record makes this painfully clear:

(1)  Cutting off harm reduction is the most direct path to higher mortality. Harm reduction does not reduce drug use; it amplifies risk.

(2)  Transgender people already face violent-victimization rates nearly four times higher than cisgender people, sharply elevated rates of intimate-partner violence, and suicide attempts at eight times the national average for cis people. In shelter settings, 70% of trans users already report mistreatment and over 50% report harassment or assault. Nearly 41% of transgender adults seeking shelter were denied at least once, nearly 30% were denied specifically because of being transgender. Prohibiting organizations from recognizing gender as anything other than sex assigned at birth effectively eliminates the ability of shelters to house trans people according to their identified gender. As a result, trans people will either be placed in units that do not match who they are, turned away altogether, or pressured to hide their identity to avoid being moved or targeted.

(3)  The racial-equity restrictions are no less dangerous. Black Americans make up 13% of the population but 37% of all people experiencing homelessness and 50% of homeless families. When a federal program discourages or penalizes “racial preferences,” it effectively instructs providers not to track or correct these very disparities. It blinds the system to who is being harmed and ensures that the highest-risk populations remain the most exposed to hospitalization, infection, and early mortality.

Viewed through the lens of health and human rights, the implications of these restrictions are clear. They would increase overdose deaths, untreated infections, psychiatric crises, and preventable injuries—harms that will be most visible in emergency departments, shelters, and encampments, and borne by those already at the margins.

On 19 December, the court will determine whether US homelessness policy will be governed by law and evidence or by an ideological program that mistakes vulnerability for vice. A society willing to jeopardize stable housing for hundreds of thousands in the service of political theatre abdicates its duty of public care. The health consequences of destabilizing housing at this scale are foreseeable and severe.

Zazie Huml, AB, is a research assistant at the Planetary Health Lab, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States.