WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Massachusetts has issued a temporary order halting the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from canceling $30 million in funding for fair housing grants in 33 states.

That means funding will be restored to all 78 affected programs, including Summit Legal Aid’s Fair Housing Law Center in the city of Washington, which uses the funding to fight housing discrimination and enforce the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The Fair Housing Law Center is in the first year of a three-year contract and stood to lose half of the $425,000 it is set to receive for the remainder of this year, and an estimated $850,000 for the remaining two years as a result of the grant freezes.

“It allows us to continue to fully staff our Fair Housing Law Center,” said Brian Gorman, executive director for the nonprofit Summit Legal Aid.

The Fair Housing Law Center is a project of Summit Legal Aid. “We do as much as we can with the money we receive, and to be fully staffed allows us to fully serve our clients, as we have for the last 15 years, so we can field calls and complaints, answer questions, and pursue violations.”

Summit Legal Aid uses its grant money to help people facing housing discrimination in 32 Pennsylvania counties, including Washington, Greene and Fayette counties, and four West Virginia counties – Brooke, Hancock, Marshall and Ohio.

On Feb. 27, HUD canceled 78 Fair Housing Initiative Program (FHIP) grants. The letter announcing the cuts said they were directed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as part of its sweeping federal spending cuts.

The letter also stated that HUD canceled the award because it “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”

Summit Legal Aid is part of a federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts against HUD and DOGE by four members of the National Fair Housing Alliance.

Gorman said the center has addressed a wide range of discriminatory practices that are unlawful under the Fair Housing Act, including racial, ethnic, gender, religious, age, disability-based discrimination, and a number of others.

“We’re serving people with disabilities, including veterans with PTSD or other disabilities, people with physical or mental disabilities, victims of domestic violence or sexual assault, parents with children who have landlords who say they won’t rent to someone with kids; we’re out there throughout Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia trying to protect those people,” said Gorman.

Gorman said the Fair Housing Law Center receives about 800 calls each year, and takes on about 100 cases annually. The cases can last weeks, months, or years.

Over 80% of the Fair Housing Law Center’s clients are low-income residents.

The judge in Massachusetts ordered the immediate restoration of all Fair Housing Initiatives Program grants. The final status of the money will be determined by the eventual outcome of the case.

A loss of funding would impact staffing, Gorman said, but Summit Legal Aid, which handles nearly 6,000 legal matters each year, would make adjustments in order to make sure it could still provide services to housing discrimination clients.

Other recent executive orders are targeting $650,000 in other federal funding sources that enable Summit Legal Aid to help vulnerable residents, including a grant from the Department of Human Services and grants to help victims of domestic violence and low-income taxpayers.

“The judge’s injunction has allowed those funds to come to us. The injunction is operating and preventing the executive order from stopping these funds that were congressionally allocated to us,” said Gorman.

What is still on the table, though, is whether the injunction will be permanent or temporary, Gorman noted. He is waiting to see how Congress handles the funding in its next fiscal year, which starts in October.

Gorman said the Fair Housing Law Center has received bipartisan support for several years, “but we’re caught up in some interbranch disputes and uncertainties.”

“When you have these stops and starts and uncertainties, that does not serve your clients well. You want to have some level of predictability in

your services, and when there’s some measure of chaos, it’s going to impact clients. We’ve spent considerable time dealing with these orders and dictates from the executive branch. That’s time we could have spent on clients,” said Gorman. “All we want to do is the work we’ve done for 55 years in service of low-income clients who otherwise would not have legal representation. But we will continue our work. We will still hold landlords and housing providers accountable who violate the Fair Housing Act.”