FY26 Appropriations: Update on Homelessness and Housing Funds

Congress’s process for passing a spending bill for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for Fiscal Year 2026 is moving forward, most recently with a preliminary bill from the House Appropriations Committee following up on the Administration’s budget request. We expect that the Senate Appropriations Committee will soon release their own version of the bill. Neither the Administration nor Congress has yet made any serious attempt to match resources to the scope of the problem, so our advocacy work continues. 

What’s Needed: the Alliance’s Analysis 

The Alliance has been clear that HUD’s homelessness programs need substantially more funding. In light of the increasing number of people entering homelessness, we need more funding to ensure that existing programs are able to handle rising costs and serve more people. The Alliance calls for $4.922 billion for HUD’s Homeless Assistance Grants account. 

The White House released a budget request that would block grant and cut funding – a disaster for HUD’s programs and the people they serve. The Alliance’s discussions with Congress indicate that these changes are unlikely to be enacted, at least this year.   

However, just because the House did not take up the disastrous proposals put forward by the Administration does not mean we should breathe a sigh of relief. The biggest danger of the Administration’s budget now is that it will distract from inadequate funding that Congress might enact. 

Please don’t be distracted. Here’s what the House Committee bill would do to HUD’s Homeless Assistance Grants and rental assistance programs.  

What the House Appropriations Committee Is Proposing 

Homeless Assistance Grants 

The House Appropriations Committee’s version of the bill would provide $4.158 billion for the Homeless Assistance Grants account, an increase of $107 million from FY25. While substantially better than the Administration’s proposal, this is not nearly enough to sustain current local homelessness response efforts, which rely heavily on federal funding.   

• Renewal funding: For many years, appropriators have committed to provide funding to maintain existing program capacity. This bill would fail to do that. The amount provided for renewal in the House’s bill would likely be short $200-400 million, much of it for rent for people who used to be homeless but are now housed.  
• New funding: There is nothing in the bill for anything new outside of “reallocation,” the process allowing communities to use existing funding for a different purpose. 
• Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG) funding: Funding for the Emergency Solutions Grants would remain flat at $290 million.   
• Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS): The bill includes $10 million for data analysis, as in past years. 
• Recaptured funds: The bill would allow HUD to use recaptured funds from previous years for some new projects. However, because last year’s Homeless Assistance Grants were flat-funded despite rising costs, most or all unobligated funds from the recapturing process will have already been spent to address shortfalls from FY2025. 
• Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project (YHDP) funding: In the House Committee’s bill, all unobligated grants for YHDP for FY 2025 are immediately rescinded. That will not take effect until the bill is enacted, but there is no indication that HUD is anywhere near issuing a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for YHDP for FY 2025, so this funding from last year would likely disappear. 
• Domestic violence funding: The bill does not include new funding for survivors of domestic violence as it has the last several years. It does include language instructing the HUD Secretary to provide “incentives” to renew programs for domestic violence survivors.  

Tenant-Based Rental Assistance

• HUD’s largest rental assistance account, which funds the Housing Choice Voucher Program, would remain intact, instead of being block granted as the Administration proposed. The House bill proposes an increase of just over $2 billion for the Housing Choice Voucher program overall, well short of what’s needed to fund existing vouchers in light of rent increases. 
• Renewal funding: The amount provided will be billions of dollars short of what’s needed to renew existing vouchers. Even fewer households would have access to this much needed assistance.  
• Tenant Protection and Emergency Housing Vouchers: The House bill includes $375 million for Tenant Protection that could be used to protect existing voucher holders. This includes those being assisted with Emergency Housing Vouchers, which received temporary funding through COVID-era programs and are in danger of expiring. The amount provided for Tenant Protection is inadequate to fund all the different vouchers that could be protected.  
• HUD-VASH funding: No additional funding is provided for the HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (VASH) Program. The House Appropriations Committee, in a different bill, proposed funding rental assistance through a new account at the Department of Veterans Affairs, but that would require new authorizing legislation which has not been enacted.  
• Allowing Housing Authorities to adopt problematic policies: The House Committee bill would provide HUD with broad flexibility to allow Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) to waive or create alternatives to key statutory requirements. This could open up the door to allowing PHAs to limit people’s access to housing and services, through harmful work requirements and time limits.  

Other HUD Program Cuts 

Other important HUD programs would be severely cut or eliminated.   

• HOME Program: The HOME Investment Partnerships Program, which provides grants to state and local governments to create affordable housing, would receive zero funding under the House Committee bill. The Subcommittee report indicated that this is because many communities still have HOME-ARP funding remaining (from the American Rescue Plan Act). These are entirely different programs with different purposes, and communities that have obligated their HOME-ARP funding would be prevented from developing new housing by this provision. 
• Public Housing: Funds for public housing would be cut by $1.5 billion.   

What’s Next? 

The Alliance will be releasing more detailed analysis of the House Transportation-Housing and Urban Development bill in the coming days (the subcommittee that covers HUD).  

The Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to consider its bill on HUD funding within the next few weeks. The Alliance believes the Senate version will be better than the House bill, but will likely still be inadequate to meet the current need.  

At some point within the next few months, leadership in both the House and Senate will determine a final number for each Appropriations subcommittee. For the T-HUD subcommittee, it is possible that this final number will be higher than either of the committee bills if the outcry over the need for funding from these programs is assertive and sustained. 

What You Can Do  

The Alliance counts on the network of wonderful people around the country to educate Members of Congress about the importance of this funding – especially when your delegation is in District and can see for themselves the work being accomplished in their home community. Please be sure to sign up for our Advocacy Alerts, and stay tuned for more details on how to register for the Alliance’s upcoming Virtual Capitol Hill Day on September 17.