As policymakers moved forward on a partisan spending package for the remainder of Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 last week, the Coalition on Human Needs urged the House and Senate to reject the package, lifting up the bill’s harms to people including veterans to children to the elderly, cuts to programs including affordable housing, public education, care for children and adults, taxpayers looking for assistance from the IRS (exacerbated by further rescissions in IRS funding) and the staffing to help Social Security beneficiaries, including the aging and those with disabilities. This final spending bill drastically increases in funding for detention of immigrants with no oversight, while underfunding efforts to combat illegal drugs or human trafficking. This proposal would force the District of Columbia to slash more than $1 billion from its budget in the next six months, leading to widespread layoffs of teachers, service providers, first responders, and transit workers- compromising essential services that D.C. residents rely on [though we hope that the House will take up the bill passed unanimously in the Senate to remedy this]. Instead of bipartisan legislation prioritizing investments in human needs, the final FY2025 bill allows the administration to disregard Congressional directives on spending.   

Even before this vote, the Trump administration’s shutdown of our government had already begun. In February, the Trump White House sent a memo to federal agencies, instructing them to submit plans to reduce their workforce by March 13, with additional plans to follow up by April 14. We’re already beginning to see the staggering amount of workforce reductions across multiple agencies including: 

• The Department of Veteran Affairs will cut 80,000 jobs, many of which are staffed by veterans themselves. This will result in massive reductions and delays in the services veterans will be able to receive and result in longer wait times for benefits.  

• The Internal Revenue Service will cut up to 45,000 jobs. This comes after major investments by the Biden administration to hire more IRS agents and go after wealthy tax cheats, which has paid off by more than $1 billion collected; to better-serve everyday taxpayers and reduce call-wait time; and modernize technology by creating the Direct File program which saved taxpayers millions of dollars last year. 

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would lose half of HUD’s workforce of 9,600 employees. The American Federation of Government Employees revealed that the Trump administration has called for dismissing up to half of the workers at HUD. Staffing cuts reported to be a shocking 84 percent at HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development would cripple homelessness and affordable housing services. A destructive and foolhardy cut has already been made by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)―of dubious legal status―ending the Resilient Retrofit program that provides funding to repair low-income housing to keep them livable and undermining of HUD’s capacity to underwrite mortgages could dramatically reduce.  

• The Department of Education has seen 1,300 employee layoffs, cutting its staff in half, and the closure of 5 offices across the country that investigate civil rights violations. 

• The U.S. Postal Service will cut 10,000 jobs, further undermining the constitutionally mandated service as corporate interests seek to privatize the USPS. 

These cuts are their own form of a government shutdown and will impact every single person in the U.S. in drastic ways that will take decades to recover from. By moving forward the continuing resolution that enables this autocratic administration to continue its attacks, majorities first in the House and now the Senate have let down the American public. We must not stop our work – and instead, we must highlight the devastating consequences of impoundments of federal funds and gutting the workforce that is essential in addressing human needs. 

Many CHN members and partners have sounded the alarm about the administration’s attacks on federal funding for communities and the federal workforce, and the impact on human needs.  Together, over the last few weeks, we sent nearly 500,000 messages to members of Congress, made thousands of phone calls, and directly engaged with Congressional offices on Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and enough of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate voted with Republicans to move forward on a government funding bill and it was signed into law. Our work is not done — we must not sit back and accept the unrelenting attacks by this administration on our communities. We will keep sounding the alarm and fighting back against the administration’s firing of tens of thousands of civil servants and illegally freezing congressionally allocated funds – together.