By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Aug 26 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump's administration from restructuring a federal grant program to redirect money away from over 100 non-profit organizations that had historically received funding to help prevent and investigate housing discrimination.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston ruled that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had failed to provide a reasoned explanation for its decision to implement "sweeping
changes" to a decades-old grant program run by the agency designed to combat housing discrimination.
HUD did not respond to a request for comment.
The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden, said that Congress had long recognized the need to provide funding for fair housing organizations to help support the work of HUD, which had funded them through multi-year grants.
Yet he said HUD in July upended that system of enforcing the Fair Housing Act by announcing it would not allocate any of its congressionally appropriated funding for the 2025 fiscal year to private enforcement initiatives or to multi-year grants issued through the Fair Housing Initiatives Program, which Congress created in 1987.
In the past, HUD would typically award over 100 grants ranging from $75,000 to $425,000, according to lawyers for several fair housing groups, including the National Fair Housing Alliance that sued over the changes in July.
HUD instead planned to use $46 million of the $56 million that Congress had appropriated for just five grants, $25 million of which would go to a law school. The remaining $10 million could go to a state or local agency.
"The effect of HUD’s restructure effectively bars the very housing organizations that have been effectuating FHIP’s mission year after year since its enactment," Joun said.
The Trump administration also sought to force grant recipients to sign onto unrelated conditions to receive funding, by imposing requirements that they not use any funding to support "gender ideology" or "illegal immigration."
HUD had argued it had the discretion to impose those conditions and that the changes it was making to the grant program were part of a large-scale modernization effort designed to broaden participation.
But Joun said that "pithy description falls woefully short of the mark in both form and substance," and that it was "hard to see how or where Defendants relied on relevant data in crafting these changes."
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
