A Judge Ordered the Federal Money Paid. L.A. Shelters Are Still Cutting Staff.

Nearly $65 million in grants could stall by the end of 2026, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority says.

House of Ruth, a domestic violence agency in Pomona, has made six months of shelter payroll on a $286,000 federal grant nobody has signed. Chief executive Pat Bell told LAist, which reported the delays on September 18, 2026, that the award has sat unexecuted since April.

So the shelter is getting smaller. Bell said House of Ruth is laying off workers and cutting hours at its transitional housing shelter while it waits on a reimbursement that hasn't arrived.

“We've drained our cash reserves. I'm talking right now to banks about securing a line of credit,” Bell told the outlet.

The money is federal. It's stuck in a fight over who gets to hand it out. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority from federal grant activity this summer, and the agency sued.

In August, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered HUD to sign the agreements immediately. He named a dozen providers whose grant agreements the department hadn't executed after award letters went out earlier in the year. The delays, he wrote, had left them with no money to operate.

About a month later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed that order while it considers HUD's appeal.

HUD told LAist it isn't required to execute the agreements while the stay holds. A spokesperson said the department stands by its legal right to stop supporting LAHSA. The statement called the agency “riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse.”

LAHSA isn't backing down. Spokesperson Chris Yee said the agency is going back to court to make the federal government keep its word. He said frontline providers have kept programs running for months without being paid.

Other providers gave the outlet their own numbers.

• The Downtown Women's Center, a Skid Row provider, has waited since July on a $3.5 million annual contract that pays rent for domestic violence survivors, chief program officer Myong Kim told LAist. It's covering about $150,000 a month out of private donations.
• The People Concern has a little more than $2.2 million tied up across two contracts, chief executive John Maceri told LAist. Other contracts ending in the coming months could push the total to roughly $3.3 million, he said.
• Jewish Family Service L.A. has been waiting since April, chief executive Eli Veitzer told LAist, and is spending reserves — about $300,000 of annual costs — to keep a shelter for women and children open until at least the summer of 2027.

More than 50 local providers are expected to feel the delays, LAHSA said. Most of their renewal grants expire within three months. Dozens of grants worth nearly $65 million could be affected by the end of the year.

It isn't only a Los Angeles problem. Court documents reviewed by LAist showed more than 1,300 federal fiscal 2025 Continuum of Care renewal agreements hadn't been fully executed, about one in five nationally. More than 400 of those HUD hadn't issued at all.

Asking an appeals court for a stay after an order like Carter's is unremarkable, Scott Cummings told the outlet. He teaches legal ethics at UCLA's law school. The delay is its own short-term win for the Trump administration, he said, because litigation runs long and the programs sit still while it does.

L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath raised the unexecuted 2025 contracts at the board of supervisors meeting on September 15, 2026. A week later, she asked the county's Department of Homeless Services and Housing for an update. Court documents reviewed by LAist put arguments before the Ninth Circuit on September 22, 2026, with a status conference before Carter the week after.

Source: laist.com, retrieved September 21, 2026.