Today, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, released this fact sheet on the impact the Trump-Republican shutdown will have on the housing and homelessness crisis. The Trump-Republican shutdown will harm millions of hard-working American families in the United States who are simply trying to make ends meet, including renters and homeowners already struggling under the weight of Trump’s harmful economic policies and inflation-driving tariffs. At a time when more than 771,000 people are experiencing homelessness, this shutdown threatens to push even more families to the brink of homelessness as the affordable housing crisis worsens.
See below for specific details:
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which oversees our nation’s housing, community development, and long-term disaster relief programs. HUD has furloughed least 84% of its workers during this shutdown.
This has put renters receiving rental assistance through HUD at imminent risk of eviction as processing of their monthly subsidies may be delayed.
This will also put the safety of public housing residents in danger as maintenance of safety hazards on their properties could get delayed.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Rural Housing Service (RHS), which provides critical housing and development resources to meet the unique challenges in rural areas, will likely halt all program activity, including mortgage lending, rental assistance, community development, utility repair, and home repair activities.
Similar to HUD-assisted tenants, rural residents who rely on programs administered by the RHS are now vulnerable to eviction. While in past shutdowns, landlords have been given access to property reserve funds to cover rental assistance gaps, it is unclear if this Administration will seek to offer that authority and even how much funding is available.
Rural homebuyers or those looking to refinance their mortgages will now have their mortgage process halted, locking rural families out of affordable homeownership opportunities.
Additionally, it is possible that certain Personally Identifiable Information (PII) could be compromised or lost by RHS during a shutdown.
An extended shutdown could cause government employees across the country, as well as their families, to struggle to make their rent or mortgage payments, which typically make up the single largest share of household budgets. This could result in damage to individual credit scores and history, and in the longer term, could result in an uptick in evictions and foreclosures, diminish local property taxes, and undermine local economies.
The Trump Administration has even threatened mass layoffs beyond the typical furloughs during a shutdown, even at agencies independently funded outside of the annual appropriations process, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Such a step will leave consumers vulnerable to financial rip-offs, junk fees, and other abuses in the consumer financial marketplace.
