“It was chaos,” sighed Stacey Hall Burge, CEO of Found House Interfaith Housing Network, which provides emergency shelter and programs for families dealing with housing loss and insecurity in the Cincinnati area.
“From Monday to Friday, we had no specifics, no clarity,” said Burge, recounting the past week at her organization. “There are rents and supports for hundreds of families I am not sure how to pay right now. Families that worked hard to get off the streets, who may go right back. Many of them working, but unable to fully afford rent in the current housing crisis,” she told Sojourners in an interview over Zoom.
“At any given time, we could be letting down a couple of hundred families who would be left on their own to figure out their housing,” she said.
For Found House, the saga began when the White House’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo freezing all federal grants and loans on Jan. 27, following an executive order from President Donald Trump requiring all federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to … disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.”
Legal experts argue the executive order directly violated Article I of the Constitution and decades of legal opinion. Cerin Lindgrensavage and William Ford, staff for the nonpartisan, anti-authoritarian nonprofit Protect Democracy wrote the Trump administration was trying “to wrest the spending power away from Congress and into the hands of the president and his appointees.”
“The system of checks and balances the Founders designed does not give the president unchecked power to execute only the laws passed by Congress that he agrees with,” they wrote. “When Congress appropriates funds, the president must spend them.”
The order put a temporary freeze on hundreds of billions of dollars, impacting a vast array of services provided by thousands of nonprofits working in education, social services, science research, health care, or refugee resettlement, who were unable to access federal government systems used to withdraw funds as last week began.
Though judges have ordered a temporary pause on the administration’s efforts to freeze federal funding and the OMB memo was rescinded by a two-sentence notice on Jan. 29, uncertainty continues for faith-inspired and faith-based nonprofits like Found House.
Compounding the fear across the faith-based services sector, the back-and-forth with federal funding comes as the Trump administration also put a 90-day freeze on almost all foreign aid and Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” is shutting down payments to federal contractors.
On Sunday, Musk shared a post by Michael Flynn on X, Trump’s former national security adviser who previously plead guilty to lying to the FBI, listing what purported to be payments to Lutheran charities that receive government funding, ranging from Lutheran Social Services to Global Refuge — formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services.
Musk tweeted, “corruption and waste is being rooted out in real-time” and claimed DOGE is “rapidly shutting down” payments to the charities.
Though the OMB memo was rescinded, nonprofit leaders remain nervous, anxious about what the future holds for their organizations, staff, and the families and individuals they serve.
“The question becomes: What do we actually have to work with?” said Burge.
Found House’s current contracts with the Department of Housing and Urban Development go through the end of June, but Burge and colleagues are openly questioning if those are safe. “The honest answer is: We are not sure.”
Just the beginning
Daniel Jenkins, president of StoryFind Films, which works with a range of faith-based groups, said his heart went out to nonprofit leaders when he heard about the freeze.
“I saw numerous CEOs, presidents, advancement directors, and fundraising professionals express concern about their companies’ future sources of money,” Jenkins said. Even at organizations that do not receive government funding, leaders are concerned about a domino effect, he said. They fear other organizations will be forced to turn towards private foundations and donors to make up a funding gap, thus creating greater demand on a seemingly finite pool of resources.
“This is one of the greatest periods of stress for nonprofit leaders since COVID first began,” said Jenkins. “These are unprecedented times and there is no playbook for anybody to follow. There are no quick answers coming.”
Though he recommended nonprofits avoid making panic-induced decisions or treat other nonprofits like the enemy, Jenkins admitted faith-based nonprofits will have to navigate increasingly choppy waters.
“There will continue to be numerous legal challenges and political actions in the future with no guarantees on the outcomes,” he said. “Gird yourself for months or even years of uncertainty.”
“Horrendous and earth-shattering”
Preparing for years of uncertainty is exactly what Ruth and James Padilla DeBorst, who help run Casa Esperanza, a shelter and dining room for migrant and refugee families in Los Chiles, Costa Rica, are doing now. UNICEF alerted the Padilla DeBorst’s on Jan. 28 that, due to federal funding cutoffs, they were no longer able to provide funds for several months of the shelter’s operations.
“That means we had to immediately lay off staff and leave nine children and 24 adults — including a high-risk pregnant woman and elderly adult — out on the streets,” James Padilla DeBorst told Sojourners. “It’s horrendous and earth-shattering.”
Though the situation remains fluid and judges’ temporary orders mean funding may yet be available, he and his team are doing what they can to scrape together money from private funders to maintain minimal operations at the shelter.
Padilla DeBorst fears it is only a matter of time until something more tailored and precise comes from the Trump administration. Though the wording may be different the next time around, the effects will be just as devastating, he said.
“It will mean releasing migrants and families onto the streets, where he said they are immediately vulnerable to drug cartels and human-traffickers,” he said. “If they’re not in our shelter getting warm meals and counseling to deal with this trauma, they are out on the street not only facing the physical rain, but the deluge of predators out there.”
Padilla DeBorst said the whole experience has been a rollercoaster of emotions for him, his staff, and those they serve. “Our team was in tears, some of them willing to stay on as volunteers to do the work.
“That’s because the motto of Casa Esperanza is to ‘be good neighbors,’” he said. “That’s how Jesus summed up the whole law.
And so, for now, Padilla DeBorst said, they will continue walking the path of justice and welcoming, protecting and including, no matter the party politics or political maneuvers that threaten to shut them down.
“As Christians, we follow a different narrative and a different imaginary and different set of guidelines,” he said. “This shouldn’t be about our political tribe winning or losing.”
The ripple effects
Back in Cincinnati, Found House’s Burge also said the funding freeze is not about politics. “Housing is not a political issue, it’s a human right,” said Burge.
And that’s not naivety talking. Working with hundreds of families every year to provide emergency shelter and, with the help of the federal government, temporary rental subsidies and long-term housing support, Burge has seen firsthand how whole communities fare better when people are housed.
“It doesn’t matter who I am speaking to, I always share how federal funding dollars not only get people off the street, but contribute to local, state, and national economies,” she said. “You can’t have a healthy work force or next generation without this basic need taken care of.”
Though Found House is putting contingency plans in place and also relies on private funding, Burge fears the ripple effect to come in her community.
“When you have a reduction in staffing, families cut off from funding, other programs in the community not able to provide emergency support because they are experiencing the same thing, property owners who can’t float or wait for clarity, it creates a flood of people needing immediate assistance and few available to provide aid,” she said.
“Then a bunch of families who have worked really hard to get out of homelessness are now put immediately back in danger,” she said. “Nobody wants that.”
Above all, this is what has made the freeze so shocking, stressful, and terrifying, Burge said.
“I have to believe that even for my loved ones that voted for Trump, they did not vote for the chaos and cruelty his acts are causing,” she said.
In the end, Burge feels this is about the American social contract — the mutual responsibilities citizens have for one another in a constitutional democracy.
“If the social contract is totally dead, if America is not a place where we look out for the vulnerable, for neighbors in need, I am truly at a loss.”
Ken Chitwood (@kchitwood) is a religion scholar and newswriter based between Germany and Arizona.
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