Uncertainty over the continuation of federal fair housing grants under Trump administration cuts is keeping a West Tennessee legal aid nonprofit from helping as many clients as they typically would.
West Tennessee Legal Services provides free civil legal aid to limited-income clients in counties west of the Tennessee River, helping people secure or retain housing and meet other family safety needs.
The organization gets more than half of its housing services budget from an annual Fair Housing Initiatives Program grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help people who believe they have been victims of housing discrimination. The Fair Housing Act bars discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status and disability.
The funding helps pay for education, outreach, legal casework and investigations, Director of Special Projects Vanessa Bullock said.
Bullock served as the nonprofit’s Fair Housing Project director and was involved in these grants for many years. She said most of the housing work they do — about 50-65% — benefits people with disabilities. The organization serves around 200 West Tennessee housing clients each year and sub-grants funding to Legal Aid offices in Middle and East Tennessee for similar programs.
But on Feb. 27, West Tennessee Legal Services received a letter informing them that the remainder of their $425,000 grant for the year was terminated immediately. The grant was one of 78 fair housing grants scrapped by HUD under the cost-cutting mission of President Donald Trump’s newly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The termination came with no explanation.
West Tennessee Legal Services is used to navigating presidential transitions — every four to eight years, they go through grant re-negotiation when administrations’ priorities change. This time, there was no opportunity to have those conversations, Bullock said.
“There’s been speculation about why certain grants were cut and certain ones weren’t … Did we use too many of their target words in our application when other people didn’t? We honestly don’t know,” Bullock said. “In general, it’s just further fallout from cutting things without really understanding what they’re doing, without clear reason why.”
Four fair housing organizations filed a class action lawsuit in March contesting the sudden clawback. After a judge issued a temporary restraining order, HUD reinstated funding for West Tennessee Legal Services — which was not involved in the lawsuit — and others. The judge has since dissolved the order, noting that the lawsuit should be filed in the Court of Federal Claims.
“This decision should not be read as an endorsement of the brusque and seemingly insensitive way in which the terminations were announced,” Massachusetts District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns wrote in his decision.
The housing organizations are appealing the dissolution of the restraining order, and the lower court case is stayed in the meantime, court records show. HUD has not sent out fresh termination letters as of May 16.
West Tennessee Legal Services is treating the grant as reinstated, for now, but the future remains murky. The first year of the 3-year grant ends on July 31. It’s not clear if HUD intends to renegotiate the grants for years two and three, leaving a total $850,000 in question.
HUD could not be immediately reached for comment.
The organization is stuck in limbo, preparing for the worst and hoping for the best, Bullock said. That means taking on fewer cases than they normally would. If the grant funding doesn’t come through after July 31, they will have to reallocate cases to other funding sources.
The uncertainty, she said, is causing chaos.
“We could have helped a lot of people with the time we spent trying to figure out the fallout from this,” Bullock said.
Ripple effects go beyond fair housingWest Tennessee Legal Services’ most typical housing cases involve people of all ages with disabilities. This could mean helping people know their rights and ask for things they are entitled to, like landlord approval for their service animal, or a release from their second-floor apartment lease if a mobility impairment forces them to seek more accessible housing, Bullock said.
Other disabilities are not as easily seen. The nonprofit helps people who are in recovery from addiction — considered a disability under the Fair Housing Act — find housing despite rental histories tarnished by their addiction and past behavior. They also help survivors of domestic violence either terminate leases to seek new housing or get other reasonable accommodations like additional locks.
Current clients will be taken care of, Bullock said. They may not even be aware that future funding is at risk. But moving those cases to other eligible funding sources has ripple effects.
“It’s not necessarily going to affect just housing funds. It’s going to affect our whole organization, to some extent, because we’re going to be taking funds that our family law unit might have been using to do family law work to do some housing work,” Bullock explained.
The biggest impact will be for future clients that they will have to turn away, she said.
Tennessee’s recent law disbanding the Tennessee Human Rights Commission and moving its functions into the Attorney General’s Office compounds the confusion, Bullock added.
By law, the Attorney General’s Office has until June 30 to reassign the now-defunct commission’s caseload.
“The loss of (funding) for our agencies, plus the loss of the Tennessee Human Rights Commission happening at the same time is going to lead to people falling into the cracks,” Bullock said.
Another consequence of the potential funding loss could be felt by congressional offices and HUD itself, West Tennessee Legal Services Executive Director Ashley Holliday said.
The nonprofit’s screening process helps educate people about their rights, what the Fair Housing Act protects, and what proof is needed for a successful case, Bullock said. If West Tennessee Legal Services has less resources to take calls and provide education to tenants and landlords alike, those calls are likely to end up going to congressional representatives and HUD instead.
“Frankly, we’re constituent services,” Holliday said. “When congressmen get calls from constituents saying, ‘I can’t get my Social Security case handled, I need help,’ we’re one of the agencies that they send their constituents to … This obviously affects the services that we can provide.”
This story was originally published by the Tennessee Lookout.
