What the President’s Budget Proposes for Homelessness in FY27

Last week, the Alliance published its conscientiously-prepared recommendation for how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should fund homeless assistance programs. The Administration released its proposed budget shortly afterwards, including funding recommendations for those programs; Congress is already undergoing the process to determine how much money will be allocated to them.

While the Alliance is making a recommendation of $5.1 billion overall for the Continuum of Care (CoC) and Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG) programs, the Trump Administration’s recently issued budget proposal for FY2027 is far more bleak.

What’s in the President’s Budget Proposal

The Alliance’s FY2027 recommendation reflects a thorough understanding of what’s needed to maintain homelessness and housing programs at their current capacity. The $5.1 billion recommendation takes into account increasing market rents and cost of living that affects people working in these programs. It also identifies the most important needs for expanded program capacity and emphasizes the importance of local decision making.

The Administration’s budget proposal, on the other hand, seeks to codify the harmful approaches to homelessness laid out in the Executive Order, Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets, and reduces or eliminates programs that make up the nation’s already scant social safety net. Most significantly, the President’s budget proposal eliminates the Continuum of Care Program: instead, the proposed budget would fold all homeless assistance funding into a greatly expanded and modified ESG Program for a total request of $4.42 billion, a $400 million overall reduction from FY2026.

What the Budget Proposal Means

The proposed President’s budget explicitly shirks accountability for results on homelessness by promoting interventions that are not cost-effective. And by ending assistance for hundreds of thousands of people, the proposed budget would put people who receive this assistance at risk of experiencing homelessness once again. These changes would most significantly impact people with disabilities and older adults who rely most heavily on Permanent Supportive Housing funded through the CoC Program. The changes in the President’s budget proposal would also put the responsibility of responding to homelessness entirely on the shoulders of state and local governments.

What Congress Could Consider

The President’s budget proposal is just that—a proposal—and Congress is under no obligation to adopt it in whole or in part. As we saw in FY2026 when the Administration proposed a similarly irresponsible budget, Congress rejected it entirely. In fact, history has shown that Congress is more likely to consider the Alliance’s recommendations, recognizing that these asks are directly informed by their constituents and with an analysis that is done with a higher level of care.

The CoC Program, in particular, has had strong bipartisan support since Congress authorized it and made it permanent more than 15 years ago. Only Congress can decide the future of its funding. Last year, the Alliance’s advocacy partners in the field relentlessly made sure their lawmakers in Congress understood what was at stake. A clear bipartisan majority in Congress knows, from listening to people they represent and looking at facts and data, that these programs work to the extent they’re funded.

Congress also knows that severe shortages of affordable housing is the real problem, resulting in more than 17,500 people becoming homeless for the first time each week. While there’s been talk from the Administration recently about housing affordability, its budget proposal zeroes out HUD programs that help communities solve that problem, like the HOME program and Community Development Block Grants. With your advocacy, Congress will likely ignore these proposals as well, and instead fund the programs that are proven to work.

Next Steps

The Administration, judging by its budget proposal, is less concerned with solving these problems and more concerned with finding someone else to blame for why homelessness exists. But the blame game doesn’t work to get people off the streets, and isn’t a helpful solution. People’s lives are at stake.

The fight to preserve and expand these critical resources for FY2027 is just getting underway. To make sure you stay informed, be sure to sign up for the Alliance’s Advocacy Alerts. You can also take action today by reaching out to your Senator and asking them to sign on to Senator Reed’s “Dear Colleague” letter, which supports the Alliance’s recommendation of $5.1 billion.