This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed the changes that are taking shape at King County and the city of Seattle, as County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson start filling out their staff.
As I reported earlier this week, Zahilay put more than 100 executive branch staffers on notice on a Friday that unless they heard from HR by the end of the day the following Mondday, they should not expect to have jobs after the end of the year.
Employees I spoke to said they expected the executive’s staff, which includes dozen of political appointees, to turn over. But they were dismayed to learn that many other staffers doing technical or bureaucratic work, including land use planners and data analysts, will also lose their jobs in this “restructuring” process. They also said Zahilay’s team handled the delivery of this bad news poorly, damaging morale on teams that worked on reducing the county’s climate impact, promoting racial equity, developing the comprehensive plan, and working to improve the quality of government services.
While I argued (based on what I heard from a half-dozen staffers impacted by the changes) that Team Zahilay could have taken more time and care when deciding the fate of apolitical staff, Sandeep said county employees without civil service protections shouldn’t expect to keep their jobs when a new executive comes in.
We also discussed how the mayor-elect is building her own executive team and speculated about which city department heads she plans to replace or retain. As I reported, Wilson is reportedly still on the fence about Police Chief Shon Barnes, who has fans and detractors inside and outside the city. During his brief time as chief, Barnes has come under scrutiny for the department’s crackdown on nudity at Seattle’s historic LGBTQ nude beach, Denny Blaine, for firing SPD’s top two civilian staffers, and for appointing as East Precinct commander a captain infamous for driving his SUV onto a sidewalk filled with protesters in 2020.
To reiterate something I said on the show (and caught a lot of flak from my co-hosts for saying): Barnes, who has talked openly about how God sent him to Seattle (and, before that, Madison), is a weird cultural fit for a deeply irreligious city with a large LGBTQ+ population and a history of anti-police protests. (And, though I didn’t mention it, an appropriately adversarial press.) Having grown up in the Southern Baptist church myself, I personally have zero patience for the mingling of religion and government, and I’m always surprised when otherwise lowercase-l liberal people argue that it’s intolerant to expect government officials to keep their faith separate from their jobs.
“Knowing how much institutional knowledge is going to be walking out the door—it’s going to have an impact,” one employee said.
By Erica C. Barnett
At 11:30 am on Friday, November 14, more than 100 King County employees, including some who had worked at the county for decades, were called into a meeting about the future of their employment with the county.
The message they received from an HR representative was simple but alarming: The new King County Executive, Girmay Zahilay, would be reorganizing the entire executive branch, starting with the roughly 150 positions that answer to him. If you get a call by the end of the day on Monday, you still have a job. If not, you can apply for a different position, along with the roughly 1,200 people who have already submitted applications.
A followup email, from interim Chief People Officer Megan Peterson, explained that “all positions will be new” in the new executive office structure. “Because these are all new roles, your interest may not align and you will have the opportunity to decline and still stay in your current role until January 2nd.”
“If you do not receive outreach and are interested in joining the administration, we encourage you to fill out a form of interest on our transition website and/or apply when specific positions of interest are posted, which is estimated to be in early December,” Peterson’s email continued. “Based on external interest in joining the Executive elect’s team, these positions will be highly competitive.”
After what several described as a tense, stressful weekend, about 70 staffers waited for a call on Monday that never came. That’s how they learned they would be “affected by the restructuring,” as Zahilay spokesman Erik Houser put it.
Zahilay’s transition team has told reporters, including PubliCola, that they aren’t doing any “layoffs”—they’re just replacing executive staff, the same way any new executive brings in their own people at the start of their term. Change is hard, but normal, they say—it’s just that all these political appointees have been in their jobs so long, they forgot what happens when a new administration takes over.
“Throughout the campaign, Executive Zahilay was clear that he was running on a platform of change,” Houser said. “He pledged to reshape county government so it is more responsive, more present on the ground, and more focused on the issues that matter most. Executive Zahilay was not elected to continue business as usual, he was elected to deliver the change that voters demanded. Now that Executive Zahilay has taken office, he and his team are beginning the work of implementing this change agenda.”
PubliCola spoke to a half-dozen employees, all outside Zahilay’s immediate executive staff. All of them said most of the people whose jobs are being eliminated aren’t political appointees in the traditional sense—they’re public servants doing the technical and bureaucratic work that keeps the county functioning. The employees who are losing their jobs in January include economists, regional planners working on the county’s comprehensive plan, grants and contracts managers, and the county’s demographer.
“There’s the executive’s office, the folks immediately around the executive—those are political folks and senior everyone expects to turn over,” said one longtime staffer who is losing their job in the shakeup. “But we’re all, like, worker bee analysts—just public servants. We’re the biggest part of the executive department.”
“Yes, we’re appointees, in that we’re not civil service and we’re not represented by a union, but it doesn’t mean we’re political appointees because Dow chose us,” another staffer said. “We are bureaucrats and we do the work of bureaucrats.”
Every person we talked to, including those who will retain their jobs, used the word “layoffs” to describe what happened to them or their colleagues this month. They described what one called a “cloak-and-dagger” atmosphere in which decisions are being announced without explanation. “Nobody feels good when it feels like things are happening to you rather than with you,” one staffer said.
The staffers said they understand the need to replace executive staff—the 3o or so people who work directly for the county executive. But they questioned Zahilay’s decision to dismantle and reorganize the county’s Climate Action Office, the Office of Equity and Racial Justice, and the Office of Performance Strategy, and Budget, which includes regional land use planners, policy analysts, and other career professionals who are technical experts in their fields.
“They said it with such disdain in their voice—like, ‘We already have people lined up,’ or ‘We’re wanting to go in a new direction,'” another longtime employee told PubliCola, describing how they felt when they heard the news. “It [felt] like, ‘We want young whippersnappers from Amazon,’ not people who understand how the county works.'”
Executive department staffers called the notices impersonal and disrespectful of their expertise. “We’ve gotten nothing from the executive himself,” the longtime county staffer said. “One of our county values is ‘Respect all people,’ and it feels like they are not doing that.”
“This department has had the best culture of anywhere in the county,” the staffer said. “It’s a fantastic place to work. It feels like that culture has been completely destroyed overnight. … No one is standing up and taking responsibility for the chaos they’re creating. And knowing how much institutional knowledge is going to be walking out the door—it’s going to have an impact.”
A fourth executive staffer described the mood around the office as “melancholy,” while a fifth said the transition team should have done more to acknowledge the value of career public servants doing specialized internal oversight and policy work.
“When it comes to priority areas like climate and equity, nothing is changing about King County’s commitment to these areas,” Zahilay spokesman Houser said. “Executive Zahilay is strengthening, not weakening, this work by organizing it in ways that produce more tangible community benefits, integrate more tightly with operations, and improve financial efficiency.”
Houser, Zahilay’s spokesman, said “every individual is eligible and encouraged to apply for the newly structured roles that will be posted this month, as well as for open positions in county departments.”
But everyone we spoke to who is losing their job said that given the tight timeline and stiff competition for the new positions, they’re not waiting for those new positions. “Very few people are sitting around waiting for positions; instead, we’re looking for jobs,” the staffer who praised their department’s culture said. “There’s lot of people losing jobs, and it’s not like the county is flush with jobs right now.”
At the city of Seattle, where the mayor’s office includes only the 40 or so people who answer directly to the executive, Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson has also pledged to shake things up, and is expected to make announcements about executive staff changes later this week.
But at the city, bureaucratic jobs like the ones Zahilay is eliminating exist primarily inside departments, not under the mayor’s direct control; it wouldn’t be feasible, for example, for the mayor to lay off mid-level staffers working on the city’s comprehensive plan for the Office of Planning and Community Development, or to dismantle the Office of Sustainability and Environment on Day 1.
So far, the only jobs the Zahilay administration has posted are for four high-level positions: Chief Performance Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Director of Policy, and Executive Budget Analyst. County employees first learned of the first two executive-level postings from a LinkedIn posting by an Amazon executive, who invited “Amazon alums” to apply for the jobs.
“Girmay is actively looking to bring in industry talent to make local government more transparent, accountable, and effective. I recently connected with him, and he’s the real deal —thoughtful, mission-driven, and committed to building a modern, high-impact public service organization,” the executive, Heather Zorn, wrote. The administration posted the two jobs publicly five days later, on November 26.
Some at the county think a month is too little time to replace so many people, and believe—or hope—the administration will decide they need to keep some people on longer. In the meantime, they’re winding down their work, organizing their records and trying to distill their jobs into short Word documents for the people who will replace them.
“Maybe there’s going to be communications and planning that’s way more hands-on, but how much can you get done in three weeks” before the Christmas holidays, the staffer who described their role as a bureaucrat said. “If January 2 is our last day, we’re all getting ready to jump ship.”
D. Williams, a LEAD program participant, in his tiny home in North Seattle.
While Seattle’s outgoing mayor and city attorney credit drug arrests and prosecutions, public health evidence suggests other causes.
By Andrew Engelson
Fatal overdoses have declined for two years in a row in Seattle—a sliver of hope in the ongoing opioid epidemic. Mayor Bruce Harrell has claimed greater enforcement of the city’s drug laws has saved lives. Others, including health experts at King County, argue that evidence-based public health approaches should get the credit.
According to Public Health Seattle & King County, the number of fatal drug overdoses in King County has declined 31 percent since hitting a peak in 2023. So far in 2025, the county has confirmed 796 fatal overdoses, including 564 that involved fentanyl—a slight dip since this time in 2024, following a decline of about 22 percent between 2023 and 2024.
Harrell’s office credited a 42 percent increase in felony drug dealing arrests by the Seattle Police Department, along with new programs that have increased access to treatment and buprenorphine, for lowering the number of overdoses.
“Our comprehensive approach to the fentanyl crisis is showing real results, helping keep our neighborhoods safe,” Harrell said in a statement. “We are aggressively targeting and arresting the drug traffickers and dealers who bring these deadly poisons into our city, and I am grateful for our strong partnership with King County prosecutors in holding offenders accountable.”
But Brad Finegood, who leads the public health department’s opioid and overdose response, said the drop in fatal overdoses in King County is likely due to a multi-pronged public health effort across the county that includes increasedaccess to injectable buprenorphine, a drug that helps suppress cravings for more dangerous opioids like fentanyl, and a massive campaign to distribute the overdose reversal drug naloxone.
While the decrease is encouraging, Finegood said the numbers are “still at an unacceptable number, and they could go back up real easily.”.
Data as of November 25, 2025.
It’s been two years since the city of Seattle passed a law making it a misdemeanor to possess illegal drugs or use them in public (previously, possession was a felony that the King County Prosecutor’s Office generally declined to prosecute). SPD has used the law to refer about 800 people arrested for minor drug offenses into the LEAD diversion program, which offers people accused of low-level offenses a way to avoid charges and access services. About 500 of those referrals 500 came about as the result of an arrest; the other 300 were “social contact” referrals, in which police officers refer someone to the program without an arrest.
Meanwhile, outgoing City Attorney Ann Davison’s office prosecuted 215 people under the new drug law between October 2023 and January 2025. Last month, the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD) published a report critical of the law, finding that of the 215 people prosecuted using the law since October 2023, only six completed treatment or received a substance use assessment.
Drug policy in Seattle will likely look much different in the next four years under progressive mayor-elect Katie Wilson, who campaigned on a public health-focused approach to the fentanyl crisis, and under former prosecutor Erika Evans, who will be replacing Davison, a Republican, as city attorney. Evans says she wants to significiantly reduce the number of people prosecuted for drug use and possession and to “bring back a reimagined community court”—a therapeutic court Davison dismantled in 2023.
Evans called the fact that just six people prosecuted under the drug use law went through treatment or evaluation a “huge failure.”
“As the next city attorney, [I’m] going to be working to expand our partnership with LEAD to make sure folks that are dealing with substance use disorder are getting connected with services and treatment,” she said.
D. Williams is just one of many people who turned his life around thanks to LEAD.
Williams, who asked PubliCola to use only use his first initial and last name, lives in a cozy 10 foot-by-10 foot shelter at Catholic Community Services’ Junction Point tiny house village in north Seattle. After serving jail time for convictions on possession charges and violating a no-contact order, Williams was in a bad state.
“It was all bad: homeless, addiction,” Williams said. “Lack of self-worth. A lot of hatred.”
After five people close to him died in close succession, Williams decided he needed to make a change.
In the summer of 2024, Williams asked an officer for a social contact referral to LEAD. He was connected with Casey Pham, a case manager at Evergreen Treatment Service’s REACH program, and started treatment. But like many drug users, Williams only stayed for a few days before leaving the program and going back to using. “I was really sick, real bad,” Williams says of his experience of withdrawal. “But I kept pushing. I kept being persistent.”
Williams said that each time he relapsed, he regretted it. “Every time I did it again, it was with that much more hatred inside of me, and that’s a heavy burden to carry.”
Another time when he sought treatment, William was told he’d need to wait 14 days for an opening. He told the organization, “I don’t know if I’ll even be here. I can’t wait that long.”
Despite the barriers, Williams eventually completed treatment, and though his path to recovery still has its ups and downs, he has a roof over his head and is attending computer science classes at North Seattle College. “I feel much better. I can lift my head up now,” he said. “I don’t have to walk around with that shame on my back.”
But the fact that the city attorney’s office still prosecuted 215 people was a waste of resources, DPD contends.
Katie Hurley, special counsel for criminal practice and policy at DPD, said many of the people who end up getting prosecuted for drug misdemeanors were arrested for possessing “incredibly small” amounts of drugs.
In April, according to Seattle Municipal Court records, SPD arrested a man at 12th Ave. S and S Jackson St.—a longtime hot spot for drug activity—and was charged him with possession based on traces of drugs, tin foil, and a straw. The police report did not mention any attempts at diversion.
Also in April, a man who had previously been found incompetent to stand trial on an unrelated charge was arrested for smoking an unidentified substance. Despite his previous evaluation, Davison’s office charged the man, and two weeks later he was found incompetent to stand trial. He received no referral to LEAD or services.
Last September, another man was arrested at 12th and Jackson for allegedly smoking an illegal substance. He was booked into jail and charged, but later the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.
“It’s an obscene use of resources,” Hurley said. “It’s very dehumanizing that we’re going to lock a person like this up, considering the amount of resources it takes.”
Tim Robinson, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, pointed to the city attorney’s new Drug Prosecution Alternative (DPA) program that debuted in August, which offers people a chance to avoid prosecution if they get evaluated for substance use disorder. So far, 34 out of 70 people who received offers to participate in the program have chosen to do so, Robinson said.
DPA participants must agree to a “stay out of drug area” (SODA) order, which banishes a person accused of breaking the city’s drug laws from specific areas; violating a SODA order is a separate misdemeanor.
Evans, the incoming city attorney, said that Davison’s drug prosecution alternative is “pretty ridiculous” because it requires people who are using fentanyl to get an evaluation to see if they have a drug problem. “If they get charged with smoking fentanyl, all that’s required is for them to agree to a SODA order placed on them, and then having to get an assessment that tells them whether or not they have a fentanyl addiction. That is wasting our public dollars.”
The city attorney’s office disagrees, claiming the approach has improved public safety. “Drug overdoses in Seattle have declined since the law was enacted and the areas hit hardest by open-air drug markets have seen some meaningful improvement,” Robinson said. “There is more work to be done, but Seattle is safer today than it was four years ago as measured by crime statistics and public opinion polls.”
Items SPD recovered from a felony drug bust (photo via Seattle Police Department).
In September, SPD’s blog featured a flurry of posts about drug seizures and arrests, with accompanying photos of baggies of drugs, cash, and confiscated guns—part of the surge of felony arrests that Harrell said contributed to the recent reduction in overdose deaths.
But a closer look at the cases reveals that many of these arrests were for small-time deals by people who are likely drug users themselves.
A post on September 29 celebrated SPD arresting a 34-year old man found with a “handgun, $203 cash, and 0.9 grams of Fentanyl.”
A post on September 24 described the arrest of a man on First Hill who had a gun and about 147 grams of cocaine, meth, fentanyl and heroin (about the weight of a deck of cards) who was booked into jail on gun and narcotics violations.
Another September post officers nabbing a suspect and confiscating a whopping $62 in cash, 4 grams of meth, and a set of brass knuckles.
SPD did not respond to requests for comment on the increase in drug distribution arrests.
Evidence suggests that disrupting the illicit drug supply can actually lead to an increased risk of overdose, as drug users switch to lesser-known dealers who may be selling a more toxic supply.
Nabarun Dasgupta, a senior scientist at the University of North Carolina whose work on harm reduction earned him a 2025 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, said attributing the decline in overdoses to arrests “seems really naive.”
“There’s no reliable evidence that drug seizures of this magnitude lead to declines in overdose,” Dasgupta said. A peer-reviewed study of trends in drug arrests and overdose rates in Indianapolis, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2023, found that on average, one week after a police drug seizure, the number of fatal overdoses doubled within a 500 meter radius of the arrest.
“I think the way to interpret these data [about overdoses in Seattle] more scientifically is that overdoses are dropping despite the felony arrests,” said Dasgupta, who was involved in the Indianapolis study. “It’s not the other way around.”
Lisa Daugaard, the co-director of Purpose Dignity Action and creator of the LEAD program (for which she, too, received a genius grant) said it’s ineffective to focus on small-time drug dealers, pointing to research by Dasgupta and other scientists.
“Disrupting harmful dynamics has an obvious superficial appeal, but in a time of ultra-toxic illicit drug supply, many interventions that seem appealing actually are counterproductive,” Daugaard said.
Dasgupta, who worked with harm reduction experts in Seattle while conducting his research, says the decline in Seattle’s fatal overdose rate is likely the result of four trends that are happening across the country. First, he says, illicit drug manufacturers are making the drug supply less toxic by improving quality. “This is a market correction, independent of any law enforcement action,” Dasgupta said.
Second, Gen Z is less inclined to use opioids than its predecessors. “We have a million and a half kids who lost parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents to an overdose in the United States,” Dasgupta said. “That experience of going to those funerals, I guarantee you, is way more likely to change their behaviors and attitudes towards opioids than any educational campaign.”
Third, Dasgupta said, drug users have learned not to use alone, and when they have the resources available, to get their drugs tested for potency.
And fourth, Dasgupta credits “all the community-based interventions that are going on. Clinic-based interventions have greatly expanded availability of addiction treatment as well as naloxone, especially having that be accessible with as little red tape as possible.”
The county public health department is on pace to double the amount of naloxone it distributes through community-based organizations in 2025 over last year, with 30,000 doses distributed in the first half of this year. The department has also trained more than 2,700 people in how to administer naloxone since 2024. In addition, the agency has installed vending machines with free naloxone at five sites across the county.
Finegood says community groups have reported back to Public Health that naloxone from those vending machines have reversed at least 800 overdoses, and 85 percent of drug users told county researchers that they now keep naloxone around when they use.
Making treatment and medications available to those who want to quit using or reduce their drug use has also been a priority, Finegood said. “We’re continuing to work on lowering those barriers so people can provide access.”
A fleet of methadone vans run by the county are helping bring treatment closer to where people typically use drugs.
And in August, the Downtown Emergency Service Center opened the Opioid Recovery & Care Access (ORCA) center, which provides 24/7 care to people recovering from overdoses.
Public Health, Finegood said, has also made an injectable version of buprenorphine much more accessible by setting up a hotline where users can easily and immediately get a prescription when they’re ready. Finegood also praised the city’s first-in-the-nation pilot buprenorphine program, in which Seattle Fire Department paramedics can administer the drug after overdose to anyone who requests it.
Kristin Hanson, a spokeswoman for the Seattle Fire Department, said first responders have administered 160 doses of buprenorphine since the program began in 2024.
Finegood says continuing to focus on making access to treatment easier has been a key pillar in Public Health’s efforts to stop the deaths. “We need to continue to do what we know is working, and what evidence shows is working: which is lowering barriers to care,” he said. “Because people want care, people want help. We should be giving people access to care when they’re in a place where they’re willing to receive it, and giving them what they want.”
An interview with Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson, federal cuts that could leave thousands homeless, the city council adopts a budget that pushes off hard choices, and much more.
Changes to the type of homelessness programs the Department of Housing and Urban Development will fund could slash most federal funding for permanent housing in Seattle—a shift that will force the city and King County to come up with new funding sources or allow thousands of people to fall into homelessness starting next year. We took a deep dive into the local implications of the changes.
On this week’s show, we debated how Katie Wilson won the mayor’s race, why she won it, and how incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell tried to keep her from winning it. We also discussed Harrell’s claims, during and after his concession speech, that there had been “anomalies” in King County Elections’ vote count and his insistence to the end that it’s “offensive” to ask whether he understands the affordability challenges Seattle residents face in 2025.
Incoming King County Executive Girmay Zahilay is the first new executive in 16 years, and he’s shaking up the executive’s office and county departments, announcing around 100 layoffs last week. Some staff reported feeling shocked and demoralized by the changes, which Zahilay’s transition team says are a normal part of every election.
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The city council made a number of last-minute changes after mayor-elect Wilson was elected, including provisions designed to force the new mayor to preserve the encampment-sweeping Unified Care Team, which has swelled to 116 members. The budget also bans the city from spending money on harm reduction supplies for drug users (except needle exchange, which has reached a degree of cultural acceptance even among centrists), and requires incoming city attorney Erika Evans to preserve her predecessor Ann Davison’s approach to misdemeanor drug crimes.
We had Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson on Seattle Nice this week for a wide-ranging interview about her priorities as mayor—as well as how she plans to deal with the massive budget deficits set up by Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council and the constraints the council has placed on her administration.
The “audit the budget” cohort of councilmembers elected in 2023 haven’t cut spending as they promised during their campaigns. Instead, they’ve approved most of the new programs Mayor Harrell has proposed while adding their own. The result is a budget that plunges into nine-figure deficits starting in 2027, when incoming mayor Katie Wilson will have to figure out how to address the budget cliff her predecessor, and the council, kept pushing off.
In a packed Friday Afternoon Fizz, we reported on King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Kelly Kinnison’s visit, with The More We Love director Kristine Moreland, to learn about a Christian recovery program for homeless people in Baltimore; Mayor-Elect Wilson’s plans to simplify and reorgnize the mayor’s office; who will be the next City Council president; and my appearance on a recent episode of City Cast, the new podcast about Seattle.
The layoffs aren’t unusual for a new executive, Zahilay’s team says—it’s just that the county hasn’t had a new leader in 16 years.
By Erica C. Barnett
King County Executive-Elect Girmay Zahilay, the first new county executive since Dow Constantine was elected in 2008, reportedly plans to lay off his predecessor’s entire executive staff, along with at least some department heads and deputy directors, as part of a major restructuring of the executive branch of county government.
According to Zahilay’s transition team, the restructure will impact around 100 out of 133 people currently serving in appointed positions.
Some of these appointed staffers will have the opportunity to apply for new positions (Zahilay’s transition website has an open application page), while others, whose jobs are being eliminated, will be encouraged to apply for other county positions. Zahilay reportedly plans to announce a new organizational structure for his office this week and start hiring for new positions in December.
“All current appointees are eligible and encouraged to reapply for new job postings when they come up,” Zahilay transition team spokesman Erik Houser said. “If current appointees are not a fit for the new job postings, the transition is supporting them to find other opportunities in county government.”
The changes, which come after 16 years of relative stability under Constantine, came as a seismic shock to many longtime executive branch staffers when Zahilay’s team announced them at a meeting last Friday. Staff reported feeling disrespected and caught off-guard by the sudden, disruptive change.
Houser said it’s “normal” for a new administration to come in with their own team and priorities. “Appointed staff working in the Executive Department are advised at the time of hire that they serve at the pleasure of the Executive,” Houser said.
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The move, Houser added, “is a structural one based on the strategic shift in direction that a new Executive brings, and not a reflection of how current staff are performing.”
While the mass layoffs have come as a surprise to many county employees, a similar process has become routine in Seattle, where voters have elected a new mayor every four years starting in 2009. Seattle mayor-elect Katie Wilson is announcing more details about her own transition team tomorrow, and is expected to bring in her own executive staff and announce new directors for many city departments.
Because Constantine stepped down early to take over as Sound Transit director, Zahilay’s term will start on November 25, but he plans to continue paying appointed staff who will lose their jobs next year through January 2, which will also keep them on county health insurance through the end of January.
DESC’s Hobson Place, a permanent supportive housing development that provides housing and health care for chronically homeless people. Image via Runberg Architects.
The city and county are working on plans to offset potential federal funding cuts under the Trump Administration.
By Erica C. Barnett
Major changes to the way the federal government funds programs that house people experiencing homelessness could put most of Seattle’s homelessness system at risk at risk, and thousands of people living in the Seattle area could become homeless as soon as next year as the Trump Administration shifts homelessness funding from permanent housing to short-term transitional housing with new strings attached.
“This is another cruel policy choice intentionally designed by the Trump Regime to harm our most vulnerable community members, and once again local governments are being asked to step up to meet the moment,” Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said last week.
The potential cuts come from changes to an annual funding process known as a Notice of Funding Opportunity, or NOFO, which is administered in Seattle by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, acting as the Continuum of Care (CoC) for the Seattle region. (A spokesperson for the KCRHA did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, including phone calls and text messages, last week).
Currently, housing and rental assistance programs in Seattle and King County receive around $67 million of federal funding through this process, almost all of which—around $60 million—goes toward permanent housing. Of that amount, around $36 million, or 60 percent, pays for permanent supportive housing for people with disabling behavioral health conditions, such as severe addiction or mental illness, who need intensive case management and other services in order to stay stably housed.
Under the new rules, just 30 percent of federal funding can pay for permanent housing of any kind, including rental assistance; the rest must go toward short-term approaches like temporary housing. Assuming current funding levels, the new rules would provide less than $20 million for permanent housing, potentially putting thousands of people who are currently housed back on the street, including 4,500 in the Seattle area alone.
“This crisis should horrify and unite us,” said Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness. “[T]he ideologues are firmly embedded and the attempts to defund housing are even worse than feared.
In addition to reducing funding for housing in general, the new regulations stipulate that permanent supportive housing—a kind of service-rich long-term housing designed specifically for people whose disabling behavioral health conditions have made it impossible for them to retain housing on their own—should only be for people with physical disabilities and those who are elderly.
Downtown Emergency Service Center director Daniel Malone said says this change represents a complete misunderstanding of why permanent supportive housing exists, not to mention the needs of people with physical disabilities. DESC, which receives about $20 million a year in federal funding for its permanent supportive housing and rental assistance programs, stands to lose a quarter of its supportive housing budget because of the federal changes.
“The vast majority of people with physical disabilities don’t need what you would call ‘support’—they need physical accommodations,” like wheelchair ramps and grab bars, Malone said. Permanent supportive housing provides similar accommodations for behavioral health conditions. On-site behavioral health services “are what allows someone to be successful in retaining their housing, and this administration is turning that on its head,” Malone said.
At a webinar on the changes last week, two HUD representatives, both previously affiliated with Seattle’s right-wing Discovery Institute, reportedly alarmed participants with their ignorance about the purpose of permanent housing. One, Robert Marbut, is the head of the Interagehcy Council on Homelessness. During the first Trump administration, he advocated for forcibly moving homeless people to “campuses” on the outskirts of cities on the threat of arrest. The other, Caitlyn McKenney, worked briefly as a research fellow at the Discovery Institute after graduating college in 2022; she’s now a HUD policy advisor on homelessness.
During the webinar, Marbut and McKenney told reportedly housing and service providers from around the country that they could easily follow the new rules by simply converting their permanent housing units into short-term transitional housing with mandatory treatment that would quickly cure whatever behavioral health problems people have, such as lifelong addiction or schizophrenia.
“Instead of understanding that mental illness and substance use disorder are often lifelong disease processes, HUD is instructing communities to move stably housed people by the tens of thousands into transitional housing (with a two year maximum stay) and require them to work and accept treatment, despite much evidence that this is a failed approach,” Eisinger said.
Imposing treatment and work requirements on people with long-term disabilities is also impractical, since most housing projects receive funding from many sources (such as state Low-Income Housing Tax Credits) that are earmarked for permanent housing.
On top of all that, the Trump administration has repeatedly delayed the release of the NOFO, which was supposed to come out last summer. The delay leaves housing and service providers with just two months to meet an end-of-year deadline to submit new applications under completely different rules; it also means that money for both new and existing programs won’t start flowing until later in the year, after funding for existing programs runs out.
“Homelessness is a current, large problem across the country, and they’re effectively doing something that will put federal homelessness dollars more or less on hold because they waited so long to come out with this,” Malone said.
Malone says HUD could fix the problem for this year by simply extending the existing contracts and letting providers spend the next six months coming up with new proposals before releasing another NOFO in the summer of 2026—something even Republican lawmakers, whose own districts stand to lose millions in federal funding under he new rules, have requested.
Local Solutions
It’s far from certain that the Seattle area will get the same amount of federal funding it has in the past, because the new rules penalize progressive policies adopted by most blue cities. Programs that operate on harm reduction principles, like those that allow people to use drugs on site, are no longer eligible for federal funding; those that include any kind of racial preference or explicitly acknowledge the existence of transgender people are also out. Organizations that check people’s immigration status get preferential treatment under the new rules.
Even if HUD agrees to delay its funding process until next year—a big “if,” given the Trump administration’s wrecking-ball approach to governance—the city, county, and state will need to come up with creative ways to address and offset the likely cuts. Last week, state and local leaders met to discuss options to fill the gap.
One (complex, but likely) option is to swap out funding for programs that currently rely on federal dollars, like permanent supportive housing, for programs that come closest to meeting the new criteria. The city, for example, might decide to pay for direct rental subsidies with local funds that previously paid for abstinence-based treatment, applying for federal dollars for the treatment program.
Lisa Daugaard, co-director of the nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action, whose CoLEAD program moved people living in state-owned rights-of-way into housing before the state defunded it earlier this year, said, “With care and a strategic approach, it’s likely that we can put together a strong application for comparable funding to what we currently receive, but it’s also clear that much of what we propose should be different from our region’s traditional Continuum of Care package.”
This option, which would have to take place on a tight timeline, would require nonprofits that have never applied for federal funding to get up to speed on the application process and apply for funds, knowing that if they don’t get picked, their current funders (the city, county, or both) might not be able to backfill the losses. For nonprofits, that scenario creates considerable risk, and it’s still unclear what incentives the city and county might offer to make it worth their while.
Since swapping is unlikely to close a potential gap on its own, the city and county are also working to create reserves, or contingency funds, in their 2026 budgets that could help keep programs going.
This week, King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda is introducing a budget amendment that asks incoming County Executive Girmay Zahilay to propose a supplemental budget by March that establishes a reserve to address any federal funding shortage. Although the amendment doesn’t require a specific dollar amount, it does note that the total gap is at least $36 million, and calls out three types of funding—new revenues, existing county budget reserves, and any funds left unspent at the end of 2025—as sources for the reserve.
“The Continuum of Care funding is the fabric of our safety net,” Mosqueda said. “It helps people not only stay housed, but get access to the critical services they need to stabilize people. If there are going to be impossible contingencies tied to federal dollars that make it hard to not only house people but meet their health needs, we need to step up to make sure that the Continuum of Care is truly a continuum.”
County Councilmember Jorge Barón, who is supporting Mosqueda’s amendment, said the county “should be advocating and doing whatever we can to have federal support in this area—we should not give up and assume all is lost—but at the same time, we need to be cognizant of the fact that there’s risks in this area and we should prepare to have contingency funds available if the worst outcomes do turn out to be true.”
Given limited funds, Barón said, the county opted not to add a lot of new spending in this year’s budget, and to use most of the proceeds from its new public safety sales tax, about $175 million, to address its own budget deficit and preserve funding for programs that would otherwise be cut—like the Salvation Army homeless shelter in SoDo, which started during COVID and relied on federal emergency funds.
That’s a sharp contrast to the city of Seattle, where, in an election-year swan song, Mayor Bruce Harrell piled tens of millions of dollars in new spending onto an already unsustainable budget that the council is currently in the process of padding further.
In addition to Harrell priorities like graffiti removal and police surveillance, the proposed budget included $8 million in one-time funds for new shelter, plus $4 million for a new Pioneer Square encampment resolution program that would be run jointly by the Downtown Seattle Association and Purpose Dignity Action.
“The Pioneer Square effort, which could later move to other neighborhoods if continued, would bring back the same model used in the Right of Way encampment resolution program, and JustCARE before that,” in advance of the FIFA World Cup games next year, Daugaard said.
But many advocates, including Eisinger and Rinck, argue that now is not the time to invest in new homelessness programs. “We should not be spending public dollars do something new before we have secured the housing that exists,” Eisinger said. “This is a crisis. In a crisis, you have to make hard decisions. I do not in any way, shape, or form believe that we should be putting money into a whole slew of new things during an authoritarian takeover.”
Last week, Rinck passed a budget amendment that prohibits the city from spending $11.1 million of the $11.8 million allocated to the new shelter beds and the Pioneer Square encampment resolution program until at least next year, when HUD releases the details of its 2026 grants. An amendment from Councilmember Bob Kettle removed $700,000 of the total to fund a quarter of the proposed encampment pilot, for which the PDA has already master-leased an apartment building. Combined with the $9 million Harrell’s budget set aside to address federal funding cuts, the money will bring the city’s total contingency fund to $20.4 million.
Arguing for her proposal on Friday, Rinck said it was important to “pause on expansions for the next couple of months until we resolve and understand the outcome” of the changes to federal funding requirements.
Council members who support sweeps, surveillance, and graffiti vigilance expressed outrage about federal funding cuts—Maritza Rivera, referring to Trump, said, “I just can’t understand why anyone would not want to house people, feed people, care for children, care for families”—but couldn’t seem to find a spare dime in other parts of the budget to help offset those federal cuts.
In fact, the council took proactive steps to prohibit the incoming Katie Wilson administration from using city funds to pay for needs like shelter and housing in the future. Rob Saka, who delivered his own high-volume diatribe against the Trump Administration, proposed an amendment prohibiting the new administration from repurposing funds dedicated to Harrell’s newly expanded encampment sweeps team on any other purpose. After several councilmembers delivered paeans to the team and its longtime advocate, outgoing deputy mayor Tiffany Washington, they passed Saka’s spending restriction on a 6-2 vote, with Rinck voting no and Dan Strauss abstaining.
By Erica C. Barnett
