Tanisha Thomas isn’t usually one to ask for help.
But when she dialed 2-1-1, Texas’ free hotline that connects people to local resources, three and a half years ago, she was at rock bottom.
Thomas and her 1-year-old son were experiencing homelessness after she'd lost her job, and they'd worn out their welcome with friends and family. With no car, her phone shut off, and her three oldest children staying with their dad back home in Iowa, she arrived at the door of Center for Transforming Live’s historic old lodge in Fort Worth with a weight on her shoulders and nowhere else to go.
That's when the shelter's intake coordinator, Miss Sydney, gave Thomas exactly what she needed.
"I just remember when I got to the room, I was looking out the window and I started crying and she came and gave me a hug and... I guess you just, you don't think about hugs and stuff like that at a time like that," she said. "But I really needed, I really just needed to feel, you know human, like somebody loved me or somebody cared."
The nonprofit later helped Thomas and her son move into an apartment — where she received counseling, childcare, financial coaching and 18 months of rental assistance to get back on her feet.
But now, Thomas' program, and others like it across the country, are on the chopping block as the Trump administration threatens to overhaul the federal homeless aid program that fuel them.
Last Friday, a federal judge in Rhode Island struck down a second attempt by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s to significantly restructure the Continuum of Care program.
The ruling blocked changes that critics said would have put more than 5,000 Texans at risk for re-entering homelessness next year.
The Continuum of Care program partners with over 400 local communities nationwide, known as CoCs, to provide housing and supportive services to people experiencing homelessness.
For at least 15 years, it's almost exclusively funded permanent housing programs, which provide short-to-long-term rental assistance, case management and support services to families and individuals experiencing homelessness.
But for the past nine months, the Trump administration has been trying to overhaul the program to shift funding away from permanent housing assistance and toward transitional housing and supportive services only projects — like emergency shelters, street outreach and addiction treatment.
It's a move that the National Alliance to End Homelessness says could, in its most recent form, jeopardize the housing of at least 97,000 people nationwide — and reflects the Trump administration's guiding effort to dismantle over two decades of national precedent in "Housing First" policy.
Once considered bipartisan, the Housing First model has largely guided U.S. homeless policy since it was first introduced in the early 2000s under the George W. Bush Administration. But in recent years, it’s faced growing criticism among conservatives, who argue that providing housing without preconditions has encouraged government dependency, enabled addiction and wasted taxpayer dollars.
That's why HUD says it's reforming the Continuum of Care program to "invest in recovery and self-sufficiency” by diverting funding away from Housing First interventions like permanent housing and toward a Treatment First-future.
In its latest attempt, this meant setting aside $1.3 billion — over 30% of the program’s $4.04 billion budget for fiscal year 2026 — exclusively for new projects, with a priority for transitional housing and supportive services only projects. The change would divert a significant portion of federal funds away from permanent housing projects, which typically make up around 90% of the budget.
“The ‘housing first’ experiment failed Americans by warehousing the vulnerable without results,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a June 1 statement announcing the changes. “Housing alone will not solve a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness. Under President Trump’s leadership, HUD is making necessary reforms to put recovery first.”
The agency said the overhaul would "root out waste, fraud and abuse" in the program, and wouldn't cut funding or force individuals out of permanent housing.
But some local homeless service providers disagree, saying it would threaten funding for crucial programs that keep thousands of Texans out of homelessness annually.
A landscape of uncertainty
This isn't the first time HUD has tried to overhaul the program, and it likely won't be the last — the agency can still appeal the ruling or try again for the next funding cycle.
Nationwide, CoCs have been tasked with the challenge of navigating what a federal departure from the Housing First model might mean for their communities and the programs that serve them.
For Partnership Home, the lead agency for the CoC serving North Texas' Tarrant and Parker counties, June's changes would have threatened about $9.5 million in funding for permanent housing projects — meaning around 700 households, or 850 people in Tarrant and Parker counties would lose assistance, said Lauren King, the nonprofit's CEO.
That includes the around 150 families annually — about 175 adults and 250-300 children — who, like Thomas, are served by the Center for Transforming Live's Rapid Rehousing programs, said Carol Klocek, the organization's president and CEO. To avoid losing their grant, Klocek said the organization made the decision to transition the program from a RRH to a transitional housing project.
Still, transitional housing is temporary and lacks the stability that permanent housing provides — which is especially important for families with small children who are trying to get back on their feet, the primary demographic for RRH programs, Klocek said.
"If you can imagine being a woman who has two or three small children, being in her car or in a shelter, it's not a stable enough environment for her to start a job search, even get into child care supports..." Klocek said. "Being able to take care of her children and manage life in a shelter and start a new life, it's virtually impossible."
In its current form, Klocek said more than 90% of their clients remain stably housed after going through the program. She said she worries the transition would mean less support for families in need, despite increasing demand for housing assistance in Tarrant County.
"That movement towards stability in families is what we all want and need," she said. "We don't need further destabilization of families.”
As communities across the country grapple with similar concerns, Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, warns some CoCs would feel the burden of HUD's overhaul more than others. That includes rural areas, which often have less access to local resources like city dollars and rely more heavily on federal funds.
"I think that the approach that HUD is taking is going to leave a lot people behind," Oliva said. "It is not going to be felt evenly across different populations of people experiencing homelessness. Local communities are really struggling with these kinds of decisions."
Among them is the Texas Homeless Network, the lead agency for Texas' Balance of State CoC. As the largest of the state's 12 CoCs, it covers 214 of its 254 counties and about 84% of its land mass.
Under HUD's changes, the Balance of State CoC was at risk of losing up to $7.5 million in funding, or 339 permanent housing beds, said Hope Rodgers, senior director of CoC programs.
"(We're) already under-resourced and there's already not enough funds and resources to meet the need," Rodgers said. "Any kind of cap on permanent housing within our Continuum of Care would really just widen the gap that exists between the need and the available resources."
To mitigate this loss, Rodgers said the agency made the difficult decision to require the community's lower-performing permanent housing projects to transition to new transitional housing projects.
"We know that with that will come changes to local communities as new resources come online and, potentially, existing resources go offline and transition to these new project types," Rodgers said.
Alternatively, the CoC that serves Dallas and Collin counties did not anticipate major impacts to their funding under HUD's changes, said Sarah Khan, president and CEO of lead agency Housing Forward.
In fact, they expected the community to bring in more funding than previous years because the CoC is aligned with the Trump administration's priorities for addressing street homelessness, treating mental health issues and demonstrating efficient use of resources, Khan said.
"That is where Dallas and Collin counties really shines, and that's why we've been able to increase our portfolio of funding every year,” she said.
Khan said the area's homeless response system is fully resourced through a combination of federal, local city and private funds, which allows the CoC to provide a "spectrum of interventions" from crisis response to exit pathways like permanent housing. When one funding source shifts, other sources come in to fill the gaps, she said.
Housing First, not housing only
Service providers like Partnership Home aren't against more funding for interventions like transitional housing and supportive services — which are critical parts of a community's holistic response to homelessness, King said.
"The problem is it's not an 'either or,' it's a 'both and', right?" King said. "So yes, we need more money for treatment, and also, those people have to have some place to live when they finish their treatment. I think if you were to ask any provider, 'do you need more supportive services?' The answer is yes. But not at the expense of the housing."
Partnership Home has seen success with Housing First interventions because they are not treated as "housing only" — programs are designed to be integrated, King said, And if a client turns down supportive services one day, the case manager will come back the next day to try again, she said.
"We have seen housing really benefit clients, especially housing and services that wrap around people and give them what they need to recover," King said.
That includes Thomas, who said every aspect of CTL's program worked together get her back on her feet.
“I don't think I would have been able to do one without the other. I know every program in there helped me,” she said. “I needed them all. And they all were very, very beneficial to me and my child."
While King — and leaders of the 400 plus other CoCs nationwide — awaits more information on the future of fiscal year 2026, she said her primary concern is how the ruling might impact the timing of funding awards moving forward.
Following Friday's ruling, Oliva said the ball is in HUD's court now, and their next move is still unknown.
As for Thomas, she and her son moved to Oklahoma in June after she graduated with honors with her associate's degree from Tarrant County College. In a few weeks, she'll start at the University of Oklahoma to earn her bachelor's in social work — with the goal of someday helping other women who are going through similar situations.
"We're just living," she said. "We're living, we're out surviving and we are living now."
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