Trump Administration Releases “Skinny” FY26 Budget Proposal

Refer to NCSHA’s June 2 blog, White House Releases Additional FY26 Budget Documents, for updated information.

The Trump Administration has released a preliminary version of the President’s Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request. Information in the materials provided so far is extremely limited, but the budget proposes an overwhelming reduction in federal resources supporting affordable housing. This blog will be updated when additional supporting materials become available.

Discretionary HUD Program Highlights

The budget proposes eradicating large swaths of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) budget. With respect to rental assistance, the budget would eliminate federal rental assistance programs such as tenant-based and project-based rental assistance and replace them with a yet-to-be-released state-based formula block grant, while encouraging “states to provide funding to share in the responsibility to ensure that similar levels of recipients can benefit from the block grant.” The budget also would impose a two-year cap on rental assistance for “able-bodied adults.”

The budget would dramatically cut or eliminate most HUD block grant programs. It would fully eliminate the Community Development Block Grant and HOME Investment Partnerships Program, arguing in the case of the latter that “[t]he Federal Government’s involvement increases the regulatory burden of producing affordable housing . . . [s]tate and local governments are better positioned to address comprehensively the array of unique market challenges, local policies, and impediments that lead to housing affordability problems.”

The budget would further eliminate or significantly cut other HUD programs, including by consolidating Continuum of Care and Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS programs into the Emergency Solutions Grant, eliminating competitive Native grant programs and the Native Hawaiian Housing Block Grant, and eliminating Family Self-Sufficiency Programs.

USDA Rural Housing Program Funding Highlights

The budget would eliminate U.S. Department of Agriculture single-family housing direct loans, self-help housing grants, and rural housing vouchers, arguing these programs “are duplicative, too small to have macro-economic impact, costly to deliver, in limited demand, available through the private sector, or conceived as temporary.“