It took some raucous protesting and a pair of lawsuit threats, but a coalition of lawmakers and advocates recently forced Mayor Muriel Bowser to send more money to hungry families instead of using it to close mysterious budget gaps elsewhere. Can lightning strike twice?
Bowser’s Department of Human Services has begun demanding budget cuts at the various housing and homelessness nonprofits that provide services to the District or rely on the agency for grant funding, staffers at five different organizations tell Loose Lips. DHS is apparently citing the exact same “spending pressures” within the agency that precipitated the fight over food stamps funding in order to justify the move, setting the stage for a similarly contentious tug-of-war between the mayor and the D.C. Council.
Agency leaders are still meeting with nonprofits to hash out the exact size of the cuts, but, broadly, DHS is asking its partners to “analyze your contract and/or grant to identify areas for cost savings and efficiencies,” per a Dec. 12 email forwarded to LL. The nonprofit leaders, all of whom requested anonymity to avoid reprisal from Bowser’s deputies, say the midyear cuts would likely represent a loss of thousands of dollars in badly needed revenue. All of the staffers to speak with LL say they’ve been forced to consider laying off staff or abandoning crucial housing programs just as the coldest months of winter arrive, endangering their clients; in most cases, the cuts will fall on young kids, LGBTQIA people, or domestic violence survivors who don’t have anywhere else to stay.
“We’re serving the very vulnerable, who need really enhanced and enriched services and programming, but there’s no money to do that,” one nonprofit leader says. “There is going to be a loss of services in the city.”
This demand echoes a similar edict DHS handed down to nonprofits at the height of the pandemic, when the agency asked for 5 to 10 percent cuts from programs funded by District grants. (The nonprofit workers say they’ve heard similar numbers suggested by the agency this time around, but individual situations vary.) But Bowser ultimately abandoned the worst of those reductions in the face of pushback from the organizations most affected. Advocates are hoping for a similar change of heart this time around.
“The mayor is always able to come up with money for all kinds of other issues, but never human services,” says At-Large Councilmember Robert White, who chairs the Council’s housing committee and has been slamming Bowser at every opportunity on this particular subject. “We’re pushing on this, but it’s falling on deaf ears at this point.”
The problem for White and anyone else interested in reversing these cuts is that there’s still very little clarity about the exact size of the need within DHS. Plainly, the agency has seen cost overruns that it did not anticipate in the last budget cycle, after Bowser first tried diverting rental assistance money to cover these gaps and then attempted to swipe the SNAP funds. Beyond vague allusions to budget issues, however, her administration has yet to deliver a complete accounting of how much money it needs in this department.
Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Wayne Turnage told the Washington Post in early December that the agency was facing a $22.5 million shortfall that was sure to grow. By the end of the month, Council Chair Phil Mendelson said the number he was hearing was closer to $75 million. How is the Council supposed to know how much money it needs to find if these estimates keep changing?
“I have an agency director telling me they’re in a hiring freeze here after we just added 18 positions to their budget,” says At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson, who’s taken a leading role in the negotiations as part of her advocacy for the SNAP increase. “So what’s causing this? If we find money, where will it go?”
A spokesperson for DHS didn’t respond to LL’s request for comment.
The situation has left the nonprofits uncertain about their futures, considering they don’t know how much money they’ll need to cut or whether to expect another reversal from Bowser. Many have struggled to make ends meet for the past few years, as their funding from DHS hasn’t increased to keep pace with rising expenses and surging demand, and previously pleaded with the agency to offer more generous reimbursements for their overhead costs. So this latest move feels like yet another sign of disrespect.
“They know that our motivation is our mission,” one nonprofit exec laments. “And so they know that they can rely on us stretching ourselves to the max.”
Some of the nonprofit workers to contact LL say they plan to stretch their resources as far as they can, for now, in the hopes that they can fundraise enough money to cover whatever cuts DHS orders. But others say they’ll likely have to take more drastic steps, like laying off staff or rolling back existing services.
And that will have impacts that can’t easily be reversed. Consider that some of these nonprofits rent spaces to provide temporary housing for kids and adults that need to get off the street. If the organization has to terminate those leases to account for unexpected budget cuts, it will require a grueling search for new rentals even if the group can find more money later on.
“It’s just continuing to put the burden on our staff to do more with less,” another nonprofit leader says. “And that really leads to burnout, as well as high turnover. We also lose consistency in how we implement our programs when funding continues to be in jeopardy.”
This same nonprofit exec says these cuts feel particularly inexplicable after they watched DHS solicit applications for new grantees just a few months ago, only to turn around and cut existing grant-funded programs. Similarly, a different nonprofit leader says they only recently won funding to launch a new housing initiative in the fiscal year that started back in October, but they’ll probably have to shutter it just a few months into its existence if DHS asks for substantial cuts.
These organizations say this sort of disjointed decision-making has become par for the course at DHS over the past few years. Several of the executives to speak with LL complained that the agency has been prone to micromanaging their operations without truly incorporating their feedback. A more collaborative and responsive agency might be a little less prone to these sudden reversals, they reason.
“I don’t feel like I am a valued partner,” the head of one nonprofit says. “The message we get from DHS is that we are expendable, that if we don’t do what we need to do, there will be another entity that’s going to be granted that grant. And then [DHS is] going to find out that they don’t have the experience we do. It takes time to be seasoned the way our organizations have been seasoned.”
This sort of attitude from agency officials is why several nonprofit execs describe DHS as “punitive” and why they would only speak with LL anonymously. Many are working to lobby the Council and the administration as subtly as they can—though the progressive group DC Action has launched a more aggressive public campaign—to make clear the potential effects of these cuts without irreparably damaging their relationships with the agency.
“I feel like the city’s trying to pit us against each other,” one nonprofit exec says. “But we are still finding ways to do this collaboration and coalition building, and really splitting up and using our power in whatever way we can to fight this back.”
White says he’s “encouraged” to see that the Council has been similarly united in opposition to Bowser on the SNAP funding issue, and he is hopeful that will continue when it comes to these cuts. But he notes that “the Council doesn’t have the same visibility into the budget during the year” as it does when the mayor is proposing a new year’s spending plan. She’ll pitch a 2025 budget a little over two months from now (and that could include a “supplemental budget” making changes to DHS spending for the remainder of 2024). But that will leave several months before the Council can approve any real changes to the budget.
All White can do in the meantime is push Bowser to search for savings elsewhere. For instance, he says his staff identified $26 million sitting unused in the Department of Housing and Community Development’s budget last fall, even as the mayor tried to redirect $20.6 million away from emergency rental assistance to cover DHS gaps. Although DHCD said it had no plans to use that money for its originally intended purpose (acquiring bridge housing for people trying to rent homes using vouchers), White says Bowser’s team refused to shift it over to DHS. The Council simply voted to block Bowser’s transfer instead, much to her chagrin, but he says there’s no reason she couldn’t still use that money to avert cuts to the nonprofits.
“These are bad budget decisions that the administration is consciously making,” White says. “And I don’t want to see it hurt the most vulnerable people in our city.”
As Bowser’s most recent mayoral rival, White probably has an uphill battle in convincing Herroner to do much of anything (and LL noted with interest that White tactfully avoided a question about whether he’s planning another run for mayor or some other office in 2026 during his Friday appearance on WAMU 88.5’s Politics Hour). Mendelson and Henderson may have better luck, and both have signaled an interest in continuing negotiations even after the SNAP fight’s apparent resolution.
But both have also been clear that Bowser will need to be more forthcoming about the realities of the DHS budget if they’re going to agree to these unpopular cuts. The mayor’s deputies have been vague about what is causing the budget squeeze, but to the extent they have addressed the matter publicly, they’ve blamed Council legislation making it more difficult for the agency to kick people out of apartments secured via the rapid rehousing program. A Bowser administration official complained to reporters last week that this has become a “pretty significant obligation.”
But Henderson has repeatedly noted that the Council’s bill specifically says the agency shouldn’t keep people in these apartments if it doesn’t have the money to afford them, so she’s not sure what to make of Bowser’s claims of poverty here.
“They’re telling us that DHS is in meltdown, but the [chief financial officer] didn’t press any alarm bells” when he revised the city’s revenue estimates upward last month, Mendelson says. “I need to better understand what the problem is, how real it is.”
The best-case scenario for these nonprofits increasingly feels like they’ll merely avoid the most devastating cuts. That may feel like a win, but the sobering reality is that the city government will have to invest more money, not simply keep budgets flat, if it hopes to actually solve the problems of housing insecurity and homelessness in the District.
“It continues to be an afterthought, and something that continues to be put on providers to solve,” one nonprofit leader says. “And it is not. It is the entire D.C. community’s problem.”