This HUD Funding Stream Was Cut. It Means Less Money for Technical Assistance.

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This story was co-published in collaboration with Shelterforce, the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of affordable housing, community development and housing justice.

The Trump administration and DOGE have slashed or delayed many types of Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grants, including those for fair housing and homelessness. But there’s one type of grant that has suffered huge cuts and received less attention than others, despite being no less crucial for addressing the housing crisis: technical assistance for nonprofits, tribes and housing authorities.

Technical assistance grants fund consultants to help smaller organizations or governments build affordable housing, prevent homelessness or efficiently implement federally funded programs. TA can include help with data gathering, legal expertise, accounting, permitting and perhaps most importantly, expertise in navigating federal bureaucracy. It is crucial for enabling smaller organizations, as well as tribal and rural organizations, which can find themselves shut out of the system of competitive federal grants to provide needed services in their areas.

Two major TA programs — Community Compass and Section 4 technical assistance and capacity building grants — were affected. Section 4, which helps with the construction and preservation of affordable housing, was cut for two of the three organizations that distribute the funds. Both organizations, Enterprise Community Partners and Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), are large national affordable housing nonprofits and are explicitly named as intermediaries in the 1994 statute that established Section 4.

Community Compass grants provide technical assistance to grantees, public housing authorities, and tribes for their work in areas including disaster recovery, affordable housing development, rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing and housing voucher programs. They also help organizations implement Continuum of Care grants, the $3.6 billion in federal homelessness dollars that HUD has been slow in disbursing this year. Eight contractors out of 34 (as of FY 20) that provide technical assistance under Community Compass saw their awards cut: Enterprise Community Partners, LISC, Cloudburst Consulting, Corporation for Supportive Housing, BCT Partners, and Homebase Center for Common Concerns, Collaborative Solutions and Technical Assistance Collaborative. These firms, which include both housing nonprofits and private consultancies, provide technical assistance to hundreds of nonprofits across the country.

“The bottom line is that HUD staff don’t have the capacity to do this work, so [technical assistance] providers fill a gap,” says Mary Frances Kenion, vice president of training and technical assistance at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “It’s work that happens behind the scenes, but it really does serve as an anchor for many communities and their grantees, and ultimately people experiencing homelessness.”

Shelterforce first reported threats to the Community Compass program; they came in a Jan. 24 email telling contractors to pause their work while their involvement in diversity, equity, and inclusion measures was assessed. Talking Points Memo was the first to report the emails from DOGE notifying firms of actual cuts on Feb. 26. Unlike contract cancellation emails for fair housing and Continuum of Care grants, which used more careful and bureaucratic language, the email said the technical assistance grants were being canceled after a “DOGE review of their websites and LinkedIn profiles,” according to TPM.

At least one of the organizations, the New Jersey-based consultancy BCT Partners, has updated its website to state that it is changing its language to comply with Trump’s executive orders rescinding funding for DEI-related activity. BCT’s website now has the disclaimer, “Content on this website is being reviewed and updated as necessary to comply with executive orders” across the site. The company did not return a request for comment.

In a Feb. 26 press release, Enterprise CEO and former HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan said of the grant cuts, “Make no mistake: Today’s decision will raise costs for families, hobble the creation of affordable homes, sacrifice local jobs, and sap opportunity from thousands of communities in all 50 states.” In a separate press release, Donovan reinforced that Enterprise would “defend vital programs,” but also indicated his willingness to work with Republicans and the current administration. The organization says it has deployed Section 4 funds to over 700 organizations across the country to build or preserve 45,000 homes.

Alex — not their real name — is a consultant working at a firm that contracts with HUD to provide technical assistance to nonprofits. They did not want their name published because they are not authorized to speak on the record. Alex told Next City/Shelterforce that the cuts were nothing like what they had experienced before, even during the last Trump transition.

They said that the technical assistance funding is crucial for implementing HUD’s homelessness grants, which have also been experiencing pauses and delays.

HUD has a central office in D.C. and 10 regional field offices. But the staff at those offices is not sufficient to help walk smaller agencies through the process of qualifying for grants or implementing grant funds while meeting all of HUD’s requirements. Even HUD staff within field offices seemed to be taken aback by the grant cuts, particularly with the lack of planning involved, according to the consultant who spoke with Next City/Shelterforce.

“Representatives that we tried to scramble to reach out to at HUD literally said, ‘We don’t even know what to do with this. We don’t even know how we recover from this,” Alex tells Next City/Shelterforce. “It was just a chaotic, ‘You’re done. Get out of the community. Your award is over.’ No one knows how do they bill for this? Can employees even work to the end of the week?”

Enterprise Community Partners lost funding for both Section 4 and its Community Compass grant. Section 4 grants operate by reimbursing spending by grantees, and Enterprise is one of the designated organizations meant to disburse that money. An Enterprise spokesperson said organizations that had already spent money on office equipment or labor approved under those grants have approached them with receipts, which HUD will no longer reimburse.

How Tribal and Rural Communities Are Impacted

Technical assistance grants play a huge role in helping smaller organizations navigate significant allocations of federal funding. Third-party consultants act as extra capacity for HUD, guiding nonprofit organizations to project completion and helping them to understand legal requirements so they don’t run afoul of federal law.

Experts on HUD’s technical consulting say smaller organizations as well as rural and tribal communities would be particularly impacted by the grant cuts.

Prestene Garnenez is the executive director of Navajo Townsite, a community development corporation in New Mexico. For the past three and a half years, the organization was receiving Section 4 capacity-building support from Enterprise to help with pre-development on the construction of up to 40 single-family homes that would eventually be sold affordably to residents of the Navajo Nation.

A study by the Navajo Housing Authority 15 years ago found a shortage of 35,000 homes for Navajo people, and another 34,000 homes in serious disrepair. Navajos remain on the Navajo Townsite’s waiting list for rental housing for two years, Garnenez says. The organization is no longer adding names to its waitlist for affordable homeownership because of a lack of units. The wait is even longer for the Navajo Housing Authority, the Navajo Nation’s tribally designated housing entity that works with HUD.

Enterprise was using Section 4 funds to help Navajo Townsite upgrade its financial and housing data systems and do an audit. It’s now easier for Navajo Townsite to process service orders for things like water heaters that need to be replaced in homes that it manages.

But now that HUD has canceled its grants, Navajo Townsite will not be reimbursed for months of work it has already performed, says Garnenez. Because the grant’s life cycle was reaching its end, the amount the organization is still owed only comes out to around $4,000, but she says for a small organization, that is still a big loss.

“Living on the reservation, it’s already really difficult,” Garnenez says. “There’s so many things we have to grapple with in these funding cuts, and what’s happening is not helpful.”

Technical assistance for Native communities requires a level of cultural competence and knowledge of tribal sovereignty and federal law that not all providers have, so the loss of long-term relationships is also huge to those receiving support.

“I never know what someone else knows about Native culture or federal Indian policy,” said Demarus Tavuk, development manager of Seattle Indian Services Commission, a group that is working on developing housing and has received technical assistance from private firms.

Alex, the consultant, agrees. “I’ve worked in a lot of tribal communities where the trust with the government is already low or non-existent,” they say. “Oftentimes, the wrong people are going into those communities. And if I’m being frank, oftentimes white people are going into tribal communities trying to tell them what they think that they need.”

They said canceling technical assistance for these communities would be wasteful as well as harmful.

“It’s literally wasting taxpayer dollars… you are taking [technical assistance] providers out of communities that they have spent months, years, sometimes decades, building relationships with.”

Continuum of Care Cuts Slow Homelessness Response

The contract cuts will also jeopardize the work that agencies do with federal homeless funding through the government’s Continuum of Care program.

In a March 12 letter to HUD Secretary Turner, 10 United States senators including Ed Markey, Tina Smith and Adam Schiff called out the cuts to technical assistance funding. The letter said that 240 of the nation’s 400 Continuums of Care no longer had any technical assistance providers, including the entire states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas. “There will inevitably be delays, reduced services, and ultimately, more individuals, families and children who end up on the streets,” the senators wrote.

That means for some organizations that get homeless funding — which HUD has begun awarding and negotiating contracts for after delays caused alarm among providers — they may not be able to implement the programs without the additional support.

“There’s not nearly enough staff to go across CoCs in this country and help them with all of the grant funds that they’re getting across their projects, whether it’s youth funding, whether it’s funding for minors, veterans,” Alex told Next City/Shelterforce.

For now, firms that were meant to receive grants are weighing their legal options. Enterprise and LISC have current Section 4 contracts, and a spokesperson for Enterprise said that the federal government’s cancellation, which came with a 60-day window to file an appeal via email, may have violated that contract. The organization has filed an appeal with HUD but has not stated whether it will take legal action.

Kenion, with the National Alliance to End Homelessness, says organizations that were receiving technical assistance for their Continuum of Care grants will still be able to process federal funding, but will be stretched thin.

“Our homeless response field has been conditioned over time to do more with less, but we shouldn’t have to,” Kenion says. “No community should have to do more with less, especially given the status of homelessness right now.”