On Tuesday, right before a court hearing in the lawsuit filed by Washington State and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it’s pulling the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for homeless investments—the subject of the lawsuit.
HUD filed a “notice of withdrawal” in the Rhode Island federal district court where the case is being heard, and claimed in their filing that the issues the state and NAEH raise in the lawsuit are now “moot.” The judge in the case, District Judge Mary McElroy, said the federal government’s last-minute withdrawal “feels like intentional chaos” during a hearing on Monday.
Local agency and elected leaders and a spokesperson for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority told PubliCola they’re still trying to figure out what the decision means for local agencies that rely on federal funds. HUD’s one-paragraph announcement shed little light on the timeline or potential changes, saying only that “the withdrawal will allow the Department to make appropriate revisions to the NOFO, and the Department intends to do so.”
The NOFO—there’s simply no way of getting around the acronym— is an annual funding process for homelessness programs, administered in the Seattle region by the KCRHA, acting as the region’s Continuum of Care. A mandatory committee, the Continuum of Care Board, considers a consolidated regional application for funds each year and approves it for transmission to HUD.
As we reported last month, HUD’s latest NOFO includes many provisions that could exclude KCRHA and other CoCs in blue states and cities from receiving funds, including provisions that prohibit funding for programs that acknowledge and accommodate trans and nonbinary people, those that help specific racial minorities, and those that allow—or have ever allowed—drug use on site.
Beyond those restrictions, the new NOFO also strictly limits funding for permanent housing of all types, from rapid rehousing vouchers to service-rich permanent supportive housing, to 30 percent of total NOFO funding. In Seattle, where more than 90 percent of HUD funding pays for permanent housing, this new restriction alone could put thousands of housed people back onto streets or into the overtaxed shelter system.
KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said the agency has been planning since last month for the impacts of the delayed NOFO, which was supposed to come out last summer. The November announcement left housing and service providers with just two months to submit new applications under completely different rules by January, with decisions from HUD coming down in May; now, it’s unclear when HUD will release a new version of the NOFO and what kind of restrictions on funding it will include.
According to Edge, some current homeless service contracts were scheduled for renewal in February, March, and April; if the NOFO gets delayed further, pushing back the January deadline for applications, even more contracts may expire without new funding, depriving these housing programs of federal funds.
Slide from KCRHA Continuum of Care board presentation illustrating the “hungry hungry hippo” nature of the competition for federal funding
One step KCRHA is taking to improve its competitiveness for federal funding is a new recruitment push that’s partly aimed at getting elected officials and at least one representative from law enforcement to join its Continuum of Care board. NOFO applications are judged on points; under the NOFO that HUD just pulled, the federal agency planned to allocate extra points for CoCs that have at least three elected officials, and at least one law enforcement official, on the board.
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Under its original 2020 charter, the CoC board was composed largely of members of the Lived Experience Coalition, an advocacy group, and is still made up largely of people with direct, sometimes current, experience with homelessness. The board has had its share of controversy over the years, including a meeting that devolved into a shouting match over the nomination of a man who’d been convicted of multiple sexual offenses involving minors as young as 13.
Since that controversy, the agency has tried to add more homeless service providers to the board and bring more conventional professionalism to its work. CoC meetings are generally less structured than typical government meetings, and often spin out into conversations about topics that are tangential to the official agenda; last week, for instance, a CoC meeting about the new NOFO included a digressive debate about whether a “dog catcher,” which is not an elected position, would have particular insights about homelessness that would make them a valuable elected addition to the board.
Later in that meeting, multiple board members appeared to be learning about the changes to federal funding requirements for the first time, asking a staffer questions about how the overall NOFO process works and what the potential impact of the changes will be.
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.
In a guest post, King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay (who just won his election and will be the next county executive) laid out things the county can do right away to ensure that people losing federal assistance can get access to healthy food.
On our final episode of the podcast before Tuesday’s election, we discussed the two mayoral candidates’ closing arguments to voters. We also talked about PubliCola’s article this week about Harrell’s payment of $25,000 to the head of an Eastside taxi company who was at the center of a previous Harrell election controversy.
Mayor Bruce Harrell attacked his opponent, labor organizer and renter Katie Wilson, as an out-of-touch elite because her parents helped her pay her $2,000-a-month childcare bill while she campaigned. But records from the city show that he paid for luxury upgrades to travel with his wife on city-sponsored trips, splashing out for lie-down beds on international flights and top-of-the-line hotels while others made do with midrange accommodations paid for by the city.
Election night began a week of waiting on returns in the mayor’s race, which won’t be decided until next week at the earliest. Both Harrell and Wilson found reason for hope in the initial results, which went strongly for Harrell but generally represented mailed ballots that trend more conservative. City Attorney Ann Davison and citywide City Councilmember Sara Nelson are out, and Eddie Lin will replace appointee Mark Solomon in District 2 (Southeast Seattle).
Less than 12 hours after the first election results came in, Harrell’s police chief, Shon Barnes, fired two longtime civilian staff, general council Becca Boatright and chief operating officer Brian Maxey, a shakeup that eliminates two people with institutional knowledge and could represent a tightening of the ranks around Barnes, whose small inner circle has no prior history in Seattle.
On Wednesday, ballots continued to roll in more slowly than usual, leaving the outcome of the mayor’s race uncertain as a second count moved the numbers just a hair in Harrell’s direction.
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In a guest post, City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck made the case for adopting a city budget that focuses on those who will be most impacted by federal funding cuts, including victims of gender-based violence, tenants at risk of losing their homes, and the service providers who keep the city’s social safety net going.
The batch of ballots released on Friday narrowed the gap between Wilson and Harrell to just 4,300 votes, representing a strong upward surge for the challenger among people who voted later. Wilson needed roughly 55 percent of the outstanding vote to pull off a victory, and that’s still the overall math going into next week, with around 44,000 ballots uncounted.
A month after announcing he would reassign Mike Tietjen, the recently promoted captain who became infamous in 2020 after driving his SUV onto a sidewalk filled with protesters and likening them to “cockroaches,” Barnes finally took action, moving Tietjen and assigning Captain Jim Britt, who recently took over at SPD’s Real Time Crime Center, to the role.
The mayor said he fully supports a new SPD campaign to shame men who pay for sex by sending letters to their homes letting them know they’ve been busted. The mayor’s office says these stings reduce demand, citing claims from a Christian fundamentalist group that opposes same-sex marriage, porn, and sex shops, in addition to sex work.
Seattle Nice moderated a debate between incumbent Ann Davison and challenger Erika Evans, and you can still listen to it before Election Day! The candidates debated the uses of Davison’s “high utilizers” list of frequent misdemeanor offenders, the elimination of community court (a therapeutic alternative to prosecution), and banishment zones for drug users and sex work.
PubliCola reported exclusively that the Office of Economic Development director under Mayor Bruce Harrell, Markham McIntyre, used an internal city of Seattle system to solicit department heads’ contact information on behalf of Harrell’s campaign; department heads who provided their information through the city Teams chat got emails from the campaign asking to help get Harrell reeelected.
We took a deep dive into Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2026 budget, which uses a series of short-term budget tricks to pay for a ton of new spending next year while creating massive budget shortfalls for the future mayor and city council. The council’s proposed budget amendments only make this structural problem worse by piling on still more new spending.
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Another PubliCola exclusive: The Harrell campaign paid Abdul Yusuf, a rideshare company owner active in the Somali community, $5,000 a week—the same amount Harrell’s consultant Christian Sinderman gets from the campaign in a month—to do unspecified “outreach and engagement” to the Somali community. The nature of this outreach is unclear; Yusuf is not authorized by the city to collect vouchers for the campaign.
It’s not unusual for some city employees to give money to the incumbent. What is highly unusual is for more than half the city’s department heads and director-level employees to donate to their boss, as they have to Harrell. The donations suggest less a spontaneous outpouring of support for the mayor than an expectation that donating to Harrell’s campaign is a good form of job security.
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority laid off 13 staff and cut 15 vacant positions, citing a need to save nearly $5 million in administrative costs the city has declined to fund. These jobs include several top executive roles, including the deputy CEO with whom CEO Kelly Kinnison clashed over Kinnison’s hiring decisions. In an internal email announcing the layoffs, Kinnison also said she was hiring five new positions, including three executive-level staff.
In a press release from the Trump Department of Justice, SPD Chief Shon Barnes thanked “federal partners” for aiding in the arrests of 10 people accused of participating in a drug-trafficking ring earlier this week. The arrests were part of an anti-immigration effort by the Trump Administration called “Operation Take Back America,” whose top goal is to “repel the invasion of illegal immigration.”
Police Chief Shon Barnes speaks at a recent press conference.
By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes celebrated earlier this week after an anti-drug trafficking operation recovered fentanyl, guns, and cash from a stash house in Sammamish. The operation resulted in at least 10 arrests.
“This violent organization not only trafficked dangerous drugs but was responsible for putting firearms on our city streets,” Barnes said in a press release. “I’m thankful for the great work of our Seattle Police officers and our federal partners.”
Which federal partners was Barnes referring to? The arrests, conducted in collaboration with the US Drug Enforcement Administration, were part of a Department of Justice effort called Operation Take Back America established in a Trump executive order whose primary purpose is “Repelling the Invasion of Illegal Immigration.” All 10 people arrested in the operation have Hispanic surnames.
Trump’s order, according to the press release for which Barnes provided a quote, is “a nationwide initiative that marshals the full resources of the Department of Justice to repel the invasion of illegal immigration, achieve the total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and protect our communities from the perpetrators of violent crime.” In addition to focusing on “Transnational Criminal organizations… such as Tren de Aragua (TdA) and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13 ),” the order expresses support for “bringing back the death penalty” for certain drug-related capital crimes.
Court records do not yet indicate what penalties the DOJ plans to seek against the men, who have all been indicted on felony charges in the US District Court of Western Washington. But the Trump Administration’s approach to both drug trafficking and immigration, in general, has been appalling.
In addition to just straight-up killing people on boats and claiming they were “traffickers,” the Trump administration has falsely accused many immigrants of being members of Tren de Aragua and MS-13, including Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador and is currently fighting a second deportation attempt. Operation Take Back America has resulted in thousands of arrests so far, including “1,300 illegal aliens,” as the DOJ put it in a different press release, during a single operation in May.
State law prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies from participating in civil immigration enforcement—for example, by helping out in ICE raids. Earlier this month, Harrell issued two executive orders on immigration—one affirming and strenghtening the city’s commitment to the state law, and one committing to spend more money on immigration services and ban law enforcement officers from wearing masks to conceal their identities.
Neither Harrell’s office nor SPD responded to our questions about the Operation Take Back America arrests.
The city is already expanding its police camera surveillance program to three new areas, including a large swath of the Central District.
This week’s roundup, featuring a proposed camping ban, tons of election updates, and news about the city council, SPD, and the impact of Trump’s executive orders on Seattle.
Two stories in Monday’s Afternoon Fizz: Former elected councilmember Debora Juarez, whose appointment to her old position was never truly in doubt, will serve out the term of Cathy Moore, who quit the council after just 18 months. And two candidates for the District 2 council seat accuse a third of illegally farming democracy voucher contributions.
On the podcast this week, we spoke to Purpose Dignity Action co-director Lisa Daugaard about a Trump executive order slamming harm reduction and housing first. Unlike many advocates, Daugaard said the executive order will probably still allow most housing-first programs to continue, and doesn’t mandate arrests or involuntary commitment, despite its pugnacious language.
A proposal from head tax opponent Saul Spady, whose grandfather founded Dick’s Burgers, would make it a misdemeanor to sleep outdoors in unincorporated King County. In addition to the “camping” ban, Spady’s group wants to impose mandatory minimum sentences for fentanyl and meth dealing, force people who overdose or get caught using drugs three times into mandatory six-month rehab, and open 3,000 shelter beds.
Tuesday’s Afternoon Fizz features two stories: After Councilmembers Rob Saka and Sara Nelson shut down a committee meeting to consider appointments to the city’s long-unfilled Renters Commission, possibly at the behest of ex-councilmember Moore, the council seated the full commission this week without comment or dissent. And: New city council rules, proposed by Councilmember Dan Strauss, set parameters around public comment so council members can’t cut people off quite so arbitrarily.
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A proposal to increase business and occupation taxes on the city’s highest-grossing businesses moved forward, now loaded up with tax exemptions that will cut annual revenues from the tax by more than $10 million and additional spending areas that could dilute the impact of the tax, which is supposed to go to housing and human services.
The council is preparing to approve an expansion of police surveillance cameras into three new areas, just two months after SPD installed dozens of CCTV cameras in three Seattle neighborhoods. The city has no data yet to justify the expansion of the new program, which supporters pitched as a solution to human trafficking and gun violence.
It’s pretty unusual for a brand-new consultant to arrive on the scene in local Seattle politics. It’s even more unusual for that consultant to conceal their identity using an out-of-state LLC, proxy registrar, untraceable private mailbox, and a weird corporate name that yields exactly one search result. Whoever’s working for Ann Davison, Seattle’s Republican city attorney, doesn’t want to be known.
Three stories to round out the week: Former police chief Adrian Diaz mysteriously dropped Mayor Harrell from his lawsuit against the city, which relied heavily on claims that Harrell defamed Diaz and fired him unfairly. Harrell, who’s running for reelection, stood alongside Davison as they announced they’re suing the Trump Administration over two seven-month-old executive orders, less than a week before Election Day. And two councilmembers send a message to their colleague Alexis Mercedes Rinck: In case you were wondering, we don’t like you.
