A federal judge in Rhode Island expressed frustration as, shortly before a hearing, the administration withdrew a document that was at the center of a Democrat-led lawsuit, joined by Gov. Andy Beshear and 20 other state officials in November.
The Notice of Funding Opportunity, or NOFO, made major changes from previous years to the funding process for local efforts to reduce or end homelessness. It put a restrictive 30% cap on how much can go toward permanent supportive housing in funding requests from Continuums of Care, the community-wide networks of nonprofits working to end homelessness.
U.S. District Court Judge Mary S. McElroy said she was frustrated by the way the Trump administration had conducted itself — both in this case and others making their way through the courts. The Monday hearing was over whether to grant a temporary restraining order halting the new NOFO.
Elroy said the issue isn’t with the administration making policy changes, it’s the failure to follow the prescribed process, which she said creates chaos for states.
“There's a process for amending that, but it's not by tweets, and it's not by last minute orders or last minute withdrawals,” Elroy said. “These cases tend to be incredibly labor intensive and incredibly wasteful, financially for the government, for the courts, for the agencies and states … Are we going to see another 2025 NOFO without the proper procedure in place tomorrow?”
In the meantime, organizations that serve homeless Kentuckians are left in limbo as they wait for a new NOFO and wonder how much funding they can expect for their existing program.
Pardis Gheibi, the lawyer representing the administration, argued the withdrawal makes the temporary restraining order sought by Beshear and other Democratic officials unnecessary.
“To the extent that plaintiffs were entitled to any relief on this emergency posture, which would have been the stay of the 2025 NOFO, they effectively already have that,” Gheibi said.
In the notice withdrawing the NOFO, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said they would be sending out a new one before long. HUD originally set the deadline for turning in an application at January 14; it’s unclear what the new timeline will be.
Gheibi confirmed that the withdrawn NOFO does not mean that previously allocated funds would be going out. A HUD spokesperson has said that the NOFO will be reissued with “technical corrections.”
Lawyers representing the coalition of states and the National Alliance to End Homelessness said it was only a matter of time before HUD released another document, which they expected would have similar restrictions, and in the meantime, organizations would remain in limbo.
Kentucky organizations are left to continue waiting to see if they’ll have the funds to run their existing programs in the coming year. The administration didn’t give an indication of when they would release the new NOFO — just that it would be before the “deadline for obligation of available Fiscal Year 2025 funds.”
Catherine McGeeney with the Coalition for the Homeless in Louisville said they’ve already had to make “difficult decisions” in anticipation of the funding cuts to Louisville’s Continuum of Care. Particularly, they’ve halted admissions to permanent supportive housing due to the 30% cap — she said that such housing programs have previously made up 85% of the continuum of care’s federal HUD grants.
“Not only has the timeline shifted later, but the implications of that are more dire, because there is far less funding that has been guaranteed, either for permanent housing or for previously successful programs,” McGeeney said.
The timeline for submitting a NOFO has skewed significantly later than usual. Normally, they would receive the application for federal funding around late summer and spend months preparing the labor-intensive application. In previous years, they have received applications later in the year, but usually large portions of previously successful programs have guaranteed funding — not so under the original NOFO.
“We don't know if that means they're going to repost it in two days or in a month. We don't know if the deadline will be updated when that is changed,” McGeeney said. “The application is hundreds of pages, and it requires a ton of work to create the very detailed information that's necessary in order to put forth the application.”
