Congress Should Support Rental Assistance in 2027 to Prevent Increased Homelessness and Evictions

A House subcommittee is expected to release next week its 2027 housing funding bill, giving Congress an opportunity to support resources that make housing more affordable. This is a key priority: public opinion polls routinely cite affordability as people’s top concern and housing is often a household’s largest monthly expense. Nearly half of all renters pay more than 30 percent of their income – the federal government’s measurement of housing affordability – on rent each month.

Rental assistance bridges the gap between a family’s income and rent, helping prevent evictions and reduce homelessness for renters with low incomes — the people who struggle the most with affordability — such as workers in low-paying jobs or people on fixed incomes, including older adults or people with disabilities. Despite the need for and effectiveness of these programs, only 1 in every 4 low-income renters who need assistance actually receives it due to funding limitations (see graphic). With the cost of food, rent, utilities, and gas rising, rental assistance is critical in helping families afford the basics.

Against this backdrop, the Trump Administration’s 2027 budget proposed cuts that would reduce the number of people who get help paying the rent, which if enacted would cause more people to experience hardship and homelessness. As Congress considers 2027 funding legislation, lawmakers should prioritize housing affordability by taking at least the following steps:

1. Provide enough funding for Housing Choice Vouchers to ensure that there is no reduction in the number of families helped and to begin to address the large unmet need for rental assistance. Vouchers help more than 5 million people in 2.3 million families pay rent in the private market, so the program requires annual funding increases to cover rising rents and continue helping the same number of families. The number of households with vouchers already fell by about 10,000 from December 2024 to December 2025 due to tight funding and disruptions including the October-November 2025 government shutdown.

   In its 2027 budget, the Trump Administration requested funding too low to keep pace with inflation and proposed prohibiting housing agencies from reissuing vouchers to families on waiting lists when another family leaves the program (with narrow exceptions). This would lead to hundreds of thousands fewer households getting the help they need and would prevent communities from addressing people’s immediate needs, such as providing stable housing to survivors of domestic violence or people experiencing homelessness.

   Congress should instead provide enough money to prevent further loss of assistance, help agencies restore vouchers that they lost in 2025, and fund additional vouchers so more families get the help they need affording rent and as a step toward the goal of providing assistance to everyone who needs it.

2. Ensure stability for families with Emergency Housing Vouchers. The Emergency Housing Voucher (EHV) program, created in 2021, has helped more than 70,000 households at risk of or experiencing homelessness secure stable housing. The program received a set amount of funding that could run out as soon as this year, with about 46,000 households still relying on it to pay rent each month.

   The 2026 spending law included enough funding for these households to continue receiving assistance through 2026 and appears to give the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) authority to issue new vouchers that would be funded through the annual appropriations process in 2027 and going forward. HUD should use this authority to ensure that people with EHVs are able to receive assistance as long as they need it, enabling them to stay stably housed and avoid returning to homelessness. If HUD doesn’t take adequate steps to protect assistance for people with EHVs before the end of this fiscal year, Congress should direct the department to do so in the 2027 funding bill.

3. Support reliable funding for communities to help people experiencing homelessness have long-term housing stability. Like with housing vouchers, programs connecting people experiencing homelessness with rental assistance and services need more funding to cope with high rental costs while also helping communities respond to record levels of homelessness. In addition, the Administration’s recent actions attempting to gut and redirect funding for HUD’s main homelessness program that supports long-term solutions have disrupted funding for some communities and created uncertainty for many more. Congress should reject the Administration’s proposed cuts and increase funding to address rising costs and need, while also requiring, as it did in 2026, HUD distribute funding in a timely way and limit disruptive changes.
4. Maintain and preserve public and other subsidized housing. The 2026 funding law cut resources for public housing, which has long been deeply underfunded. In addition, the Administration proposed inadequate funding in 2027 for privately owned subsidized housing under Project-Based Rental Assistance and two smaller programs. Congress should provide enough 2027 funding to maintain and preserve housing under these programs, which together provide stable, affordable homes for 3.7 million people in more than 2 million households.

In addition, spending bills for 2027 should include strong, government-wide language to ensure that the funding Congress appropriates is spent for the intended purpose, in a timely manner. The Trump Administration, including HUD, has been delaying, withholding, canceling, or clawing back funding approved by Congress, violating federal law and harming people and communities.