Federal cuts could still evict vulnerable Pierce County residents | Opinion
There’s plenty of disagreement about the best way to address homelessness in Pierce County. But there’s one policy most advocates here would likely agree is a bad idea: Taking housing away from the people who struggle the most to get out of homelessness.
That’s what the federal government has tried to do with an effort to shrink funding for a form of aid called permanent supportive housing. As local housing advocate Cynthia Stewart told me, these grants pay for housing and services for people with significant disabilities or mental health problems.
Distributed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the grants help fund a system that includes roughly 700 units in Pierce County, Stewart said. She chairs a body called the Greater Pierce County Continuum of Care, which oversees the application process for the region’s housing and service providers. Pierce County said the proposed cuts would have affected about 300 permanent supportive housing units in this county.
The federal government put the changes on hold in late December after a legal challenge. Advocates expect the Trump administration to try again.
That’s extremely worrying because permanent supportive housing units shelter hundreds of people who come from what the advocacy world typically calls “our most vulnerable populations.” That translates to people who face challenges so severe that we can’t expect them to provide their own housing, period.
HUD’s new approach came to light in mid-November when the agency announced a shift to primarily funding transitional housing, cutting permanent supportive housing grants by more than half.
The announcement’s inflammatory language called the previous grants a “Biden-era slush fund.” That disregards the fact that the first Trump administration also distributed grants for permanent supportive housing through the same process it’s now lambasting. So did multiple previous administrations.
In its announcement, HUD said the new policy “restores accountability to homelessness programs and promotes self-sufficiency among vulnerable Americans. It redirects funding to transitional housing and supportive services, ending the status quo that perpetuated homelessness.”
That simplistic view assumes there are no people who need continuous housing aid when it’s a plain fact that there are. It also wildly misstates the immediate consequences of the proposed change: Instead of reducing homelessness, it would have put people on the street. The same people who struggle the most to make use of transitional housing to get back on their feet.
The announcement also implies some kind of malicious laziness inspired previous federal spending on these grants. Again, this doesn’t make much sense when you consider that the grants have existed for multiple decades. The first Trump administration’s HUD paid out nearly $14.5 million in grants to Pierce County agencies.
An ongoing effort to dictate a community’s response to homelessness.
The irony here is that HUD is attacking its own system for letting communities decide how best to address homelessness. The federal agency established the Continuum of Care system in the 1990s, which essentially let counties direct the flow of federal money to its various housing and service providers.
Since 2005, Pierce County’s Continuum of Care has sent in one HUD grant application for all its local agencies and then distributed awards.
HUD’s attempt to control local policies didn’t stop at cutting funds for permanent supporting housing. It also targeted local agencies over the Trump administration’s ideological bugaboos. Organizations that currently, or had even in the past, served people based on “racial preferences” or offered safe injection sites, wouldn’t be eligible for funds. That lines up with the administration’s interpretation of diversity efforts as discriminatory, and harm reduction as unacceptable.
This attempt to hijack local homelessness services for a federal ideology is on pause. Localities fought back in court with a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s new restrictions. On Dec. 8, HUD withdrew its new notice of funding availability. On Dec. 22, Stewart said, it issued a new notice that reverted to the same approach used in 2024 – in other words, the same grant offerings found in that “Biden-era slush fund.”
Robin Thurston, an attorney with Democracy Forward who has worked on the lawsuit, said HUD’s attempt to steer homelessness policy on a local level was inappropriate.
“The federal government’s attempt to exert this level of control undermines how local communities and organizations respond to homelessness and puts people’s safety and housing at risk,” she said in an email.
Pierce County’s homelessness response system dodged this bullet for now. But HUD isn’t required to approve any given grant application, so the true impact of the attempted change in policy won’t be clear for months.
“In the chance that funding is eliminated from HUD that we rely on for [permanent supportive housing], the County will prioritize keeping people in their homes,” the county said in a statement. That would mean finding funding elsewhere.
There are three more years of this administration. I asked Stewart if she worried HUD would try to implement the same changes during next year’s funding process, and her answer was immediate.
“I do,” she said.
This story was originally published January 9, 2026 at 10:43 AM.
