Congress Should Reject House Cuts That Would Leave Nearly Half a Million More People Without Stable Homes

Congress has passed a short-term funding measure to fund the government into December, but it still must pass full-year funding bills for fiscal year 2027. While the Senate has not yet introduced any of its 2027 appropriations bills, House funding bills introduced so far propose major cuts. In June, a Republican-led House committee passed a funding bill for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that would leave about 471,000 fewer people receiving housing vouchers to help them afford rent in 2027. (See Table 1 for state-level estimates and Table 2 for a demographic breakdown.) Final 2027 funding must prevent this loss of assistance and advance other important housing priorities, such as protecting homelessness assistance.

Housing vouchers and other rental assistance bridge the gap between a family’s income and rent, providing stable, affordable housing and helping prevent evictions and reduce homelessness. Research shows these programs have cascading benefits in other aspects of life, such as supporting people’s mental and physical health, helping children thrive, and improving households’ financial security.

Yet only 1 in 4 renters with low incomes who need assistance actually receive it due to funding limitations, even though a near record number of renters are paying more than half of their incomes on rent. Without the stability that rental assistance provides, these families don’t have the money for other basic expenses. Many are only one setback away from losing their homes.

The House bill’s funding levels would leave even more people struggling to afford housing because they aren’t sufficient to maintain current levels of assistance in the Housing Choice Voucher program. Since families use these vouchers to rent homes in the private market, the program needs annual funding increases to respond to fluctuations in rental costs. Without an increase in 2027, local agencies that administer vouchers would have to stop helping new families from the waiting list when others leave the program.

People left on the waiting list, many of whom have waited years for a voucher, must then continue to pay unaffordable rents with little money left over for food and bills, live doubled- or tripled-up with other families, sleep in their car, or live in other precarious situations.

Under the House bill, about 471,000 fewer people — including 178,000 children, 81,000 older adults, and 121,000 people with disabilities — would receive rental assistance that can help stabilize their lives. The majority of those losing out would be people of color, particularly Black and Latine households (see Table 2). Because of structural barriers to housing and economic security that stem from generations of discriminatory policies, people of color are more likely to have low incomes, which makes affording a good-quality home much more difficult. As a result, about three-quarters of people with vouchers are people of color, and slightly more than half of households who need rental assistance but don’t have it are headed by people of color.

Congress did recently address one pressing rental assistance concern. The short-term funding measure includes a provision that directs HUD to provide new vouchers to about 40,000 families that would have otherwise lost assistance at the end of the year when the Emergency Housing Voucher program runs out of funding. The new vouchers will enable these families to continue to receive assistance as long as they need it, protecting them from being pushed back into homelessness.

While Congress averted that crisis, the inadequate voucher funding levels in the House 2027 funding bill would deny many other families the rental assistance they urgently need. As Congress continues its work on the 2027 appropriations bills, it should reject the cuts in the House bill. Lawmakers should also fund additional vouchers so more families get the help they need affording rent, a necessary step toward the larger goal of providing assistance to everyone who needs it.