WHEN THE NONDESCRIPT email landed in Maureen St. Cyr’s inbox, she didn’t know it would be taking of more than half her housing nonprofit’s funding with it.
Included was a simple letter attachment, immediately terminating $212,500 left in a congressionally-approved $425,000 federal grant that funded the Holyoke-based Massachusetts Fair Housing Center’s enforcement and outreach activities to address discriminatory housing practices. It also made it clear that the next year’s $425,000 grant was cut. Later in the day, a subcontracted education and outreach grant took another $19,000 off the table.
It was February 27, and the fair housing nonprofit world was suddenly in triage mode.
“The amount that we lost overnight was 52 percent of our annual budget,” said St. Cyr, executive director of the Holyoke nonprofit, focused but harried after almost a month of scrambling. “So we’ve had to take some pretty drastic immediate steps to ensure the continuation of service for our current clients, including closing our new intake so that new people who are reaching out to us for legal assistance or advice know we aren’t able to serve them at this time.”
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, directed its slash-and-burn approach toward the federal Department Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in February, terminating at least 78 grants across 66 institutions in 33 states, amounting to tens of millions of dollars according to court filings.
A termination notice sent to each program cut the grants off immediately and midstream, at the direction of the president and DOGE – the brainchild of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.
The groups targeted were nonprofit fair housing organizations, the “backbone” of anti-discrimination Fair Housing Law enforcement within their regions, according to a class action lawsuit brought by groups in Massachusetts, Ohio, Idaho, and Texas. These organizations offer services like eviction defense, housing search assistance, systemic investigations of housing discrimination, and education and outreach about fair housing rights and obligations.
Pulling grants out from under them, they say, will be devastating.
“These awards are necessary to keep employees paid and clients served,” the group wrote in its emergency motion. Often, they wrote, the awards “are needed to quite literally keep the lights on.”
The rationale for the cuts offered in each case? Only that the grant “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”
In a press release one week before the termination letters arrived, HUD Secretary Scott Turner said the agency was reviewing $260 million in contracts and has slashed $4 million in contracts promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. “DEI is dead at HUD,” wrote Turner, the president’s lone Black cabinet pick and executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council during the last Trump administration.
The Massachusetts Fair Housing Center, the Intermountain Fair Housing Council in Idaho, the San Antonio Fair Housing Council in Texas, and the Housing Research & Advocacy Center in Ohio, are all suing HUD and DOGE. They are seeking a temporary restraining order to stop the grant cuts.
A hearing is scheduled for the afternoon of March 25 in federal court in Massachusetts to hear arguments to certify the class of plaintiffs – the impacted fair housing groups – and the temporary restraining order. The government has until the close of business Friday to submit any opposition, according to the court calendar.
The Fair Housing Initiatives Program was initially a Reagan-era pilot that has since become a core funding source for the many nonprofits that make sure the 1968 Fair Housing Act’s purposes are fulfilled.
The program offers an array of funding options, including grants to investigate and enforce the Fair Housing Act, to carry out education and outreach activities, and to develop new fair housing enforcement organizations and develop or expand existing organizations. While the Massachusetts attorney general’s office and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination enforce state anti-discrimination law, which covers even more protected classes than the federal Fair Housing Act, it is the nonprofit system that bears the day-to-day weight of ensuring fair housing practices.
Writing in support of the group’s class action and temporary restraining order motion, Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance nonprofit, explained that the funding program, “like the Fair Housing Act itself, represents a congressional response to and remedy for the many years during which the federal government itself engaged in discriminatory practices that denied people fair housing opportunities and contributed to the residential segregation that remains prevalent today.”
HUD has awarded more than $30 million in Fair Housing Initiatives Program grants in each of the last two fiscal years, Rice wrote. The affected groups reported 37 education and outreach grants cut, all for $75,000 or $125,000 annually; seven organization expansion or formation grants cut, all for $260,000; and 34 of the investigation and enforcement grants cut, all for $425,000 annually except for the National Fair Housing Alliance award, which was $400,000.
If these abrupt terminations are not halted, Rice wrote, it will do “immediate, devastating, and irreparable harm to each and every one of the entities in question.”
Organizations in Massachusetts are either directly reeling from cuts or fearing future plug-pulling. The Fair Housing Alliance of Massachusetts includes Community Legal Aid, Suffolk University’s Housing Discrimination Testing Project, SouthCoast Fair Housing Center, and the Massachusetts Fair Housing Center.
The Massachusetts Fair Housing Center has been in its Holyoke building for over 30 years, St. Cyr said, but they will need to move to fully remote work without funding to cover the lease. They immediately reduced new programming, stopped their lead paint testing, and cut off an investigation into potentially discriminatory eviction screening policies in the region. Even after cutting off all expenses that are not “absolutely necessary,” the center will still face a $186,000 deficit, St. Cyr wrote in her filing, requiring half the staff to be slashed.
They will not be able to keep up with their current caseload of over 50 clients in direct advocacy, which includes taking about five new cases per week, let alone their usual work in community outreach. The Holyoke center’s grants have been pulled entirely, but the Suffolk University center is between grants with two grant applications stalled and their future sustainability in limbo.
“I think if we, as a state, lose two of the four agencies that provide this important work in the middle of a housing crisis, that will have an impact on our ability to address this housing crisis as a state,” St. Cyr said. She emphasized repeatedly that Massachusetts has been committed to fair housing goals and should step in to fill some of the funding gaps if at all feasible.
The recent state Affordable Homes Act, passed last year with the possibility of a second Trump administration looming but no specific sign that these cuts were on the table, featured anti-discrimination housing priorities including a new Office of Fair Housing.
Whitney Demetrius, previously the director of fair housing and municipal engagement at Citizens’ Housing & Planning Association, this month took on the role as head of the new state fair housing office.
“Our office is keenly aware of what’s happening in terms of the uncertainty, and really trying to think strategically and creatively around prioritizing funding needs, identifying what those key priorities are, and how we support organizations who are doing this great work on the ground,” Demetrius said.
The office will coordinate with regional fair housing organizations and state agencies to create policies to support fair housing law and combat housing discrimination. It will also oversee a fair housing trust fund, with money directed by the Legislature and other grants or private contributions, to support eliminating housing discrimination.
“We’re thinking about this as a holistic approach,” Demetrius said. “What do we stand to lose if these organizations can’t continue to do their work? Because residents are affected right now, especially where those organizations are turning folks away. They’re not taking on new intakes, they’re not doing additional trainings. That affects and hurts Massachusetts residents in a tangible way.”
Just two months into the new Trump administration, Massachusetts is working to chart a sustainable path through an environment now littered with federal funding threats. The fair housing organizations hope their work stays on the state’s priority list.
“At the end of the day, we can build all the affordable housing that we want to,” St. Cyr said. “We can give out all the housing vouchers that we want to. But if people can’t use that voucher because of discrimination, and if people can’t access an apartment because of discrimination, we haven’t solved the problem. And so we’re hoping that that the important piece that we fill in this puzzle of ensuring access to housing opportunity in Massachusetts does not fall to the wayside in this calculation.”
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