Loose Lips previously suggested that Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration was guilty of a mix of incompetence and audacity when it comes to its management of crucial housing programs. Apparently, LL didn’t know the half of it.
Bowser’s Department of Human Services dropped a bombshell on the Council last week, claiming in a letter to Chair Phil Mendelson that lawmakers screwed up when they tried to fund housing vouchers to help struggling families in the 2025 budget. Back in June, the Council thought it had found money for 451 new vouchers, but DHS Director Laura Zeilinger writes in a Sept. 11 letter that only 38 additional vouchers are actually be available. She’s blaming the Council for the mix-up, arguing that its haphazard shuffling of funds caused this current conundrum.
The reversal has left some lawmakers simultaneously apoplectic and befuddled. The Council worked to fund these vouchers (despite deep budget cuts proposed by Bowser) in order to help roughly 2,000 families who were expected to be pushed out of their homes as their temporary subsidies expired. Their goal was to keep those people in the rapid rehousing program until newly funded vouchers became available, despite resistance from DHS. Now, Bowser is not only pushing those families out, but she’s also telling them that the resources they thought were on the way have gone up in smoke.
Advocates dubbed the last bit of drama over rapid rehousing a bait and switch. But this strikes LL as more of a double whammy.
“I think the mayor is being really messy here,” says At-Large Councilmember Robert White, the Council’s housing committee chair. “And that’s both in how she’s operating and that she’s pointing the finger at the Council on this. I don’t want myself or the Council to look like we’re engaging in finger pointing here, too. I want to focus on solutions, but what they have not offered on this is any solutions.”
Fundamentally, Bowser’s claim is that the Council should’ve known that moving this money around would screw up other voucher programs managed by the D.C. Housing Authority, which shares responsibility for rental assistance programs with DHS. Zeilinger writes in her letter that lawmakers took existing funding from DCHA that the agency intended to use for families who’d been assigned vouchers but who hadn’t actually signed leases yet. Accordingly, DHS plans to keep helping those people before funding any new vouchers, Zeilinger writes.
“This is extremely unfortunate, and it forces DHS to rely on the new [fiscal year 2025] allocation to offset the reductions,” Zeilinger writes in a statement to LL.
But the problem with this argument is that the Council relies on representations from the agencies themselves—in this case, DHS and DCHA—to set its budget. And lawmakers have been signaling since the spring that they intended to make this change to fund more vouchers. LL has spoken with councilmembers, Council staffers, housing activists, even people inside DCHA, and they are unanimous: The mayor’s team never flagged this funding issue, though they’ve had the chance to do so for months. (In fact, LL had a lengthy conversation with DHS officials on Friday to hear their concerns about his lastest story about rental assistance and they never mentioned these disappearing vouchers.)
Zeilinger told the Washington Post that DHS raised these concerns privately but that the “last-minute” nature of the budget changes meant they were lost in the shuffle. “While the timing is not ideal, DHS notified partners and stakeholders as soon as we understood the problem and had identified solutions,” she adds in her statement to LL.
But that, too, doesn’t hold water with the half-dozen sources LL consulted, who argue that the Council made its intentions clear in committee reports as early as May. Besides, the budget process is always a bit chaotic—it’s up to Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee to double-check the Council’s math and ensure the budget is balanced, and he never uttered a peep about this problem. A spokesperson for the Office of the Chief Financial Officer confirms as much, telling LL via email that “OCFO reviewed historical trends as well as the actual spending to date for the [voucher program] and did not see any issues, from a financial standpoint, with the Council’s budget adjustments.”
“Although the OCFO does not monitor the specific number of vouchers issued, we continually monitor spending in this area to ensure the budget remains balanced,” the spokesperson adds.
The Council is now facing a troubling question: How can it ever appropriate any money if it can’t trust that Bowser’s agencies won’t just change their minds a few months later?
“After the fact, for agencies to be able to say, ‘Well, we changed our minds,’ that’s crazy,” White says. “It’s not appropriate to hamstring a legislative body that is supposed to have the power of the purse.”
Lee’s spokesperson says that the CFO based his assessment off of DCHA’s figures. It’s possible those numbers were faulty—a DCHA spokesperson says she can’t account for the calculations because they were completed by now-former staffers.
But LL would note that the housing authority has consistently provided both DHS and the Council with data on how many people with vouchers are leasing apartments, so it’s unlikely that the error originated there.
That leaves at least two possibilities for what really happened: Someone at DHS didn’t notice this deficiency during the budget process, or the agency needed this voucher money to cover other budget gaps and is now creating this justification retroactively. Considering that DHS has been warning about a lack of funding for a variety of programs (including rapid rehousing) for months, most of LL’s sources would bet on the latter.
“DHS is continuing to have financial problems, and they’re covering it up by stealing from programs the Council enhances in the budget,” Mendelson said during the Council’s breakfast meeting Tuesday.
Mendelson’s harsh words for the administration likely stem from the fact that there’s not much he can actually do to reverse Bowser’s actions. With the budget set for the year, the Council is powerless to continue moving money around. Lawmakers can only hope their outrage is enough to get someone in the administration to listen.
“I don’t see what we can do at this point,” White says. “It seems like the administration is dead set on evicting these folks.”
The official line from DHS is that rapid rehousing is a time-limited subsidy program, meant to help people stabilize their lives and chart a course to financial independence. The agency was always planning to move these 2,000 families out of the program. DCHA has agreed to prioritize 1,300 of its vouchers to reach these people as they exit rapid rehousing, and is in the process of matching families to these resources. What’s more, “we know that not everybody’s going to be eligible” for those vouchers, Rachel Pierre, the head of DHS’ Family Services Administration, told LL last week. (The agency has estimated that at least 70 percent of families will meet the eligibility criteria, per data provided to Mendelson.)
Basically, Pierre feels it was wrong for the Council to expect that either their newly funded vouchers or the DCHA assistance would serve everyone forced out of the program. And she was particularly insistent that her agency never made promises that it would seek to keep people in the program until they could be matched to vouchers, arguing that these families will still end up getting help, though there may be a gap between the end of their rapid rehousing subsidy and when they receive a permanent housing voucher.
“We made no assurances to the families, to the housing authority, to Council, or to the public,” Pierre says. “We’ve been completely, completely transparent about this.”
Council sources dispute this vociferously, arguing that the whole point of moving these voucher resources to assist these families was to prevent any gap in their rental assistance.
But that’s a moot point now. DHS won’t have nearly as many vouchers to offer as the Council once thought. Anyone forced to exit the rapid rehousing program will probably need to move if they can’t afford the full rent. Their lives will be disrupted, and they may be forced back into the shelter system while they wait for help. Others will likely be evicted from their homes once unpaid bills pile up, making it all the more difficult for them to lease an apartment even if they’re matched to a voucher months from now.
Maybe next year’s budget won’t be quite so dire if the local economy keeps improving and the Council can fund more vouchers to make up for this year’s snafu. But there is no denying that this debacle amounts to a tremendous missed opportunity for the city to help people in need, one that will almost certainly contribute to the District’s growing homelessness crisis.