Homeless agency sues over funding cutoff

The embattled Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority sued the Trump administration on Monday to stop it from depriving the region of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, saying the effort is unwarranted and violates federal laws.

- BY DAVID ZAHNISER

The authority said in its filing that cutting off the funds would put more than 11,000 people 1,900 of them children at risk of losing housing or other services.

LAHSA, a joint city-county agency overseen by political appointees, is seeking a temporary restraining order to bar the federal Housing and Urban Development Department from suspending the funds.

"The people who will be harmed by this decision are not bureaucrats," Gita O'Neill, LAHSA's interim chief executive, said in a statement. "They are families, veterans, seniors, and formerly homeless Angelenos who rely on these resources to remain housed." Asked about the lawsuit, a HUD spokesperson said the agency stands by its effort to "overhaul America's failed homelessness system, which has relied almost exclusively on permanently warehousing the homeless at exorbitant taxpayer cost while ignoring root causes." "As one of the country's most egregious abusers of taxpayer dollars, LAHSA's systematic and repeated failures can no longer be allowed," the spokesperson said in an email. "HUD will fund results, not just the status quo."

The filing in federal court comes nearly three weeks after HUD officials said they were suspending LAHSA from applying for or receiving federal funds, citing financial mismanagement, fraud and a lack of safeguards to prevent conflicts of interest.

In its 46-page lawsuit, LAHSA pushed back on HUD's allegations, saying they were not supported by the evidence. Lawyers for LAHSA portrayed HUD's actions as part of a larger political agenda- elimination of the federally approved "Continuum of Care" system, which makes LAHSA the overarching applicant for most federal homelessness funding across Los Angeles County.

The Trump administration "has made clear it wants to scrap the program entirely in favor of a homelessness policy favoring criminal enforcement, drug treatment, institutionalization and civil commitment of the mentally ill," the lawsuit states.