Lawmakers on Thursday rejected the White House’s proposed cuts to major housing programs, instead bolstering the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget in a spending package passed by the House.
In May, the White House sent congressional appropriators a letter requesting a $43.5 billion budget for HUD, looking to cut the agency’s budget by half and eliminate a number of housing assistance programs and grants. But in a 341-88 vote for a package that also included spending for the Departments of Defense, Transportation, Labor and Health and Human Services, the House resoundingly voted to increase HUD’s budget to around $84.2 billion.
“It was important not to fund housing at a level that was going to risk people losing housing assistance, so it became a priority for us, and the White House knew that’s where I stood,” Rep. Steve Womack, chair of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees HUD and one of the key appropriators that negotiated the contents of the bill, told NOTUS.
“I commend (the Office of Management and Budget), the White House staff and others for not pushing back,” Womack said. “We were doing it out of an honest desire to help people become fiscally disciplined and not create what I considered to be a potential, serious political liability going into these midterms.
“If people were losing vouchers and ending up homeless,” Womack continued, “we’re responsible for that.”
The Senate still needs to pass the funding bills, but Thursday’s vote was a major step in scaling back some of the broader efforts by the Trump administration to shrink the agency’s footprint.
Republicans in Congress capitulated to many of President Donald Trump’s demands in the first year of his second term. But as the midterms draw closer, they hope to reclaim some of Congress’ authority and create distance between them and Trump’s most controversial measures. The effort to fund HUD is an example of that.
“I think it’s important that we hit the priorities that the president sets out, but then we have our set of priorities as well, and that’s what we focused on,” said Rep. John Rutherford, a member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies.
Over the last year, the administration has pushed for several cuts across HUD, including more than $1 billion in funding cuts to Continuum of Care programs that administer homelessness assistance in states and local communities. Nearly two dozen Republicans criticized the effort to shift funding allocated to CoC programs, arguing that doing so would increase homelessness in the country.
Ahead of the House’s approval of the package, appropriators in Congress met for months to negotiate what would make it into the spending bills.
“We recognize that there were some things in the president’s budgets that were not at the levels we felt like were acceptable in the House or the Senate, and we negotiated those bills, and now the president is supportive of the entire package,” Rep. Stephanie Bice, vice chair of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees HUD and who led the negotiations in recent weeks, told NOTUS.
The White House announced Thursday morning that Trump supported the package, calling it a “fiscally responsible” measure.
Democrats quickly took credit for how the negotiations shook out. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Republicans were on board to oppose Trump’s HUD proposal because they would be “decimated and crushed electorally” in 2025 if they did not.
Republicans, he continued, “recognize” that they “need, perhaps, to partner with Democrats who are leading the way on dealing with the affordability crisis in this country.”
When asked by NOTUS how appropriators managed to include housing assistance funding that the White House initially wanted excluded from the spending deal, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, said simply: “We know how to negotiate.”
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS — a publication from the nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute — and NEWSWELL, home of Times of San Diego, Santa Barbara News-Press and Stocktonia.
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