Althea Matthews lost her New York City apartment to a fire in 2019, just weeks after she moved in. Unable to find affordable rent, Matthews spent the next three years in a shelter. She finally found a place in 2022, thanks to an Emergency Housing Voucher (EHV) from the federal government.
But now, Matthews—who has full custody of her 3-year-old great-grandson, can’t work, and is on Medicaid—might lose that voucher. And that would mean she’d lose her home, again. The EHV program allows Matthews to pay about 30 percent of her income toward a market-rate unit; the federal government covers the rest. For Matthews’s unit, market-rate rent is $2,500.
Federal rental assistance keeps millions of low-income Americans housed through billions in annual congressional appropriations spread across multiple programs administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). For fiscal year (FY) 2026, the White House is proposing to halve HUD’s budget, which was $89.1 billion in FY 2025. If the proposal goes through, line-item funding for EHVs and most other federal rental assistance programs will be zeroed out. What remains will be consolidated into a lump sum, cut by 43 percent, have time limits and work requirements added, and be handed over to the states to figure out how to distribute—a fundamental shift that HUD secretary Scott Turner said is meant to “be more effective.” Housing advocates, policymakers, analysts, and tenants argue it would spike homelessness and sow chaos across the affordable housing industry.
“That’s just next year, and that’s not too far from now,” Matthews says. She’s also scared of losing her health care benefits in the coming months if Congress passes the reconciliation bill, which slashes Medicaid and adds work requirements. “It’s cruel. It’s inhumane. They don’t care about people,” she says. “[Republicans] are making [a] decision, a life-and-death decision, on a person [they] don’t even know.”
Matthews is among millions of low-income renters, including the elderly and people with disabilities, who would lose their rental assistance and potentially become homeless if the Trump administration cuts HUD’s budget nearly in half as it wants to.
The White House’s proposal would combine the five main federal rental assistance programs—project-based rental assistance, Housing Choice Vouchers, public housing, supportive housing for the elderly, and supportive housing for people with disabilities—and pay states to administer them through a single block grant, funded 43 percent below the combined amount the previous programs received in FY 2025. Under the proposal, recipients would also be subject to a two-year cap on assistance. Proponents say block grants increase efficiency, but data show block-granted programs typically get less funding and recipients face more inequality.
“If you consolidate all of these [federal programs], cut them by 43 percent, and then block grant them to the state, you’re really just leaving the state holding the bag to try to figure out who gets cut and who doesn’t,” says Wendy Smith, deputy executive director of housing programs at Kentucky Housing Corporation (KHC), which Smith says administers 22,000 voucher-supported units across 109 Kentucky counties.
By cutting overall funding, adding time limits, and block-granting programs to states, some of which will not prioritize using their funds to support renters, the “skinny budget” proposal “essentially [ends] Section 8 and other housing voucher programs,” says NPR. So, what would ending rental assistance look like on the ground, to the folks who either receive or administer it every day?
A Block Grant Gamble
“It would be disastrous,” says Winston Miller, CEO and executive director at KHC. In Kentucky, “the most highly impacted [are] the 149,000 or so Kentuckians who currently receive some sort of assistance,” he says. “But where does that funding go? Much of it goes to private landlords who aren’t going to have those funds to make their tax payments or their other costs associated with the buildings. And then what happens? Do we have bankruptcies and foreclosures?”
Collectively, Kentucky’s public housing agencies (PHAs), of which KHC is one, get about $650 million per year in HUD funding, according to Smith. A 43 percent cut would leave the state short by hundreds of millions each year. Homelessness increased by 9.8 percent in 2024, even though it’s now illegal to be homeless in the state. More than 1 of every 5 kids in Kentucky live under the poverty line. A large swath of Kentuckians rely heavily on financial assistance that comes from a web of service providers, including PHAs.
Smith says the cuts would be “cataclysmic” to the entire state. “I just can’t even quite fathom what this is supposed to look like. I’m not sure what rural communities are expected to do. It’s not like there’s some special local efficiency magic that we have that can make up for a 43 percent cut.”
If PHAs did stop issuing rental vouchers to low-income tenants, and to supportive housing providers that rely on project-based rental assistance, Smith says, they’d be shorting entire communities—many of which are in rural areas with few to no other service providers. “The lion’s share of [HUD money], in the end, it goes to local communities,” she says. “It’s a key part of our housing sector and our housing economy in Kentucky, and to dismantle that without several years of planning, thinking about how we’re going to do this and how we’re going to structure it, it’s not just disruptive to the low-income tenants, but to all of those landlords and property owners.”
Details Matter
Federal housing assistance funding is paid to states in “categorical grants”—the dollars are earmarked for a singular, specific, auditable purpose. Switching to “block grants” means states get an undifferentiated chunk to spend how they want. The current administration says block-granting will increase efficiency, while others—including nonpartisan research institute Center on Budget and Policy Priorities—argue that block-granting federal programs removes equity requirements and reduces overall services. Either way, shifting from categorical to block grants is a complicated process that would take years to complete. “It’s one thing to say you want to do it; it’s another to actually do it,” says Denise Muha, chief operating officer and executive director of the National Leased Housing Association (NLHA), a nonprofit that advocates for nearly 500 member organizations, including affordable housing owners, managers, and developers; PHAs; state housing finance agencies; and other partners.
HUD has ongoing contracts with state housing providers, for example. Those binding agreements have to be followed or the federal government could face a wave of lawsuits claiming breach of contract. “And does that mean that the states have to create their own program and somehow enter into a separate contract? What happens in the intervening time?” Muha wonders.
KHC’s Miller says the process would be a bureaucratic nightmare. Each PHA in every state is locally governed by a board of directors. Those PHAs would have to figure out how to allocate the funds they get from HUD, then determine how to come up with the missing money—hundreds of millions of dollars.
And that’s assuming Section 8 rents stay where they’re at when budgets are set. Congress funds rental assistance at a service level, not a dollar amount—an option states don’t have. For example, Matthews’s rent on her New York City apartment recently jumped $300 per month, from $2,200 to $2,500. Since Matthews pays a portion of her income independent of the market-rate rent her landlord charges, HUD was on the hook for that rent increase. To appropriate federal funding for this, Congress partially funds HUD programs via continuing resolutions (CRs) throughout the fiscal year, as it does with much of government, adjusting the dollar amount to satisfy the service level. Because rents have increased so quickly in recent years, the actual dollar amount needed has so greatly outpaced the projected amount, that Congress sometimes has had to categorize the overage as “emergency funds,” Muha says, making them exempt from the annual spending cap.
“The [Office of Management and Budget] just apportioned more money when the [FY 2025] CR was coming up to make sure that everybody was covered and nobody would lose their housing,” she says.
Muha is hopeful that Congress will see the devastation that nearly halving HUD’s budget would create. “My experience in this arena is that White Houses propose budgets; Congress pretty much disposes of them,” she says. “They may consider cuts. I’m not saying the appropriators won’t, but they’ve been very supportive of rental housing programs, and they understand the scarcity of housing, too.”
Institutional Knowledge, Lost
HUD is complicated and cumbersome, but it works, Muha says—or at least it worked. “Is it perfect? Of course not. But it’s about as close as you’re going to get,” she says. “It’s an example, and a really good example, of public-private partnerships. That’s what we’ve promoted all these years—and, frankly, that’s what this administration says it’s interested in.”
But the administration’s stated goals and its actions so far don’t match. “On the one hand, they’re saying we need more affordable housing; we’re going to remove regulatory barriers, which is great,” she says. “And then they propose a cut that would decimate not only the people living there, but the structure of providing housing, developing housing, and financing housing.”
[RELATED ARTICLE: Section 8 Under Trump: How Policy Uncertainty is Affecting Affordable Housing]
Firings, retirements, and layoffs have left HUD lacking institutional knowledge that Muha says NLHA members expect will affect programming for years. HUD programs tend to involve complicated laws and rules that seasoned HUD staff regularly helped state agencies, developers, attorneys, and other affordable housing industry professionals to navigate. “A lot of the HUD people that took the ‘fork in the road’ are probably the most seasoned and effective staff that we deal with,” Muha says.
For many in the affordable housing industry, it’s painful and ironic that these cuts are being made now, just when affordable housing was getting public attention and support. “We’ve been waiting for this our whole careers—for the whole country to be concerned about affordable housing,” Muha says. “Finally we have the attention of people, and then the White House says, ‘Oh, well, we’re going to cut it.’”
First They Came For
While President Donald Trump in his first-term budget proposals reliably tried to slash HUD funding by what housing advocates at the time called “devastating” amounts, the funding proposals were generous compared to FY 2026’s. No one who spoke to Shelterforce for this story could describe how they’d provide services if HUD’s budget is cut nearly in half, because no one really knows.
What is clear is who would be hurt the quickest, the most deeply, and would struggle hardest to recover: elderly and disabled renters. Sue Popkin, codirector of the disability equity policy initiative at Urban Institute, a D.C.-based nonprofit policy research organization focused on economic and social equality, says she and her colleagues are surprised by the savagery.
When Trump got reelected, we thought, ‘OK, we’re gonna have trouble with talking about equity and maybe about race and gender. But disability? They’re not going to touch disability or Social Security or senior citizens,’ … We were wrong.”
“When Trump got reelected, we thought, ‘OK, we’re gonna have trouble with talking about equity and maybe about race and gender. But disability? They’re not going to touch disability or Social Security or senior citizens,’” she says. “We were wrong. They are. They’re not talking about preserving the housing for older adults. They’re not talking about increasing accessible housing. They’re talking about cutting it.”
She worries these cuts would force older renters and people with disabilities to move out of their preferred communities. A significant chunk of public and assisted housing households are headed by older adults and disabled folks, Popkin says. They often live on fixed, usually low, incomes, and often need additional supportive services. “They are now at risk of homelessness or institutionalization,” Popkin says. “There will be fewer home and community-based services, and there’ll be no staff in these institutions that are supposed to house people.”
Baby boomers increasingly need help at home, and more are retiring without a nest egg for adequate housing. That’s increasing the need for housing vouchers and the other low-income rental assistance programs the administration would like to block-grant away. Rates of both COVID-related disabilities and other disabilities have also increased since the start of the pandemic, Popkin says. She worries that the increase in need coupled with the decrease in funding will force people to accept undesirable housing choices—or have no choices at all.
“What worries me now is that the care just won’t be available. People will be left with no choices . . . because there aren’t enough nursing home beds in a lot of communities,” she says. “I can’t see any situation in which we don’t have more older disabled people homeless.”
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13 thoughts on “What Happens if Trump Kills Section 8?”
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Can you please tell me if the cuts to housing, Section 8 were left in the budget bill? I can’t find a straight answer anywhere, although I’m assuming if the gutted SNAP and Medicaid, they gutted funding for housing as well.
Thank you for this article. It helped me understand what might happen a lot better.
There is nothing specifically related to Section 8 in the BBB – everything is the same as the prior day
To whom this may concern
Single parent abused mom also need help ,this program help out to the youth with babies living & probity and willing to transition to live better with the job that’s barely bring ends meat, we are loving pay check to pay check , this would bring millions of our children living on the streets homeless the rich people aren’t worried the poor people are
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-people-live-in-subsidized-housing/country/united-states/ for some stats from 2023 re the over 9 million needing housing assistance and more info also states in 2024 41mil ppl receive some amount of food/SNAP
I’m a single mom of three on sec 8 and this is a blessing for my kids and I please trump I voted for you don’t leave us struggling under poverty people children and disabled without help. I don’t have family that has money . We grew up poor . Please help the poor or unhealthy too.
The EHV program is already dead. Housing Authorities have been told the funding will run out in March 2026, four years earlier than expected. This money is gone. Housing authorities have been told to move people onto other funding streams, which do not exist now, let alone in FY 26.
“‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
Republicans’ goal has always been to gut social programs that poor working class Americans rely on. Trump has expedited that process by violating the US Constitution at every turn and levying political power and the threat of lawsuits and primaries to do so. I sympathize with you for being fooled into believing that the billionaires would work with your best interests in mind, but unfortunately for everyone, they only care about themselves. My advice to you: vote for progressive democrats (not the ones owned by super PACs) and independents who actually have your best interests in mind.
I’m so afraid. I have HIV and cancer I just got into a hcv apartment now I’m likely gonna be on the streets and I’m at best got 2 years to get enough together to move to my own place. I can’t even walk some days. I’m terrified.
Unfortunately the people that voted for Republicans didn’t pay attention to Trump’s “Project 2025” which outlined mostly everything he is doing. The most vulnerable are the ones that were duped into thinking that a Felon, draft doger and someone that bankrupted his companies several times over would be a great choice for President. So as they say “lessons learned the hard way” has become their reality.
I have absolutely no family severe PTSD along with multiple vertebral fractures
No family no car even no friends
I already have my suicide note ready and my bottle of pills for when Trump takes my section eight
I am way too mentally ill to survive homeless
My brain does not work the same way as all you idiots who voted for Trump cuz you could not bring yourself to vote for a vagina
I cannot wait to exit this horrible planet anyhow
Wish I had jumped out that window when I first thought of it in third grade
(Trying to escape a beating from my so called father)
I resent everyone who voted for this egotistical cruel brainless moron
As someone who has had severe PTSD my entire life due to narcissistic tyrant father
(I still have inability to sleep like a normal person due to nightmares)
I am astounded at all the people who voted for someone with his evil presentation
But are now somehow astounded that he is treating disabled people with this type of evilness
My brain cannot understand nor accept the lack of compassion
Thanks for giving me the final reason I need to exit this planet
All you idiots who could not bring yourself to vote for a vagina
I can’t wait for this to pass; I’m so tired of people in my neighborhood, where rent is over $3000 a month, being surrounded by people who pay no rent and only utilities. These are able bodied people who are too lazy to work. Me and my wife did it all on our own with 4 kids and had 5 jobs between us at one point. Its fine to help people get back on there feet, but you have people living on it there whole lives and guess what they teach there kids how to milk the system in the same way.
This may greatly affect poor families, but families who live comfortably are not affected. I have been in section 8 since 2019 and I am a low-income family with five children to support. The question is, what will my situation be after these decisions? Will I be on the street? Or are these decisions under review? This program should be directed to families with a strong income, or to weak families with exceptions? Otherwise, what should we do?