About two years ago, I joined the State College Borough Community Development Block Grant Citizens’ Advisory Committee. As a resident of the borough and a union member, I’m deeply concerned about ensuring that working families can thrive in our community. Housing affordability and social services are a critical part of ensuring that State College is an accessible community for everyone.
Just a few months ago, I became chair of the committee. On July 9, I had to give a difficult chair’s report: that CDBG and HOME funds are at risk in the 2026 federal budget.
Even though the “Big, Beautiful Bill” has already created devastation among federal programs, Congress still has yet to act on President Trump’s FY26 budget proposal – which zeroes out CDBG and HOME funds. In exchange for votes for the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” it’s been reported that President Trump promised members of the House Freedom Caucus that spending bills would reflect deep cuts in federal discretionary spending.
I’ve seen the enormous needs in the State College community, and the challenges in meeting them. With the assistance of federal CDBG and HOME funds, we’ve helped financially support critical projects for local nonprofits such as Centre Safe, Out of the Cold, Housing Transitions, the State College Community Land Trust and more.
We’ve also made progress toward needed projects for the borough-owned senior living provided at Bellaire Court, supported State College’s first-time homebuyer program and helped provide additional funding for much-needed borough projects.
Through our work, we’ve helped sustain an essential local safety net for our community and made progress on the pressing need for housing affordability. The United States Conference of Mayors and the Community Development Block Grant Coalition estimate 59 million Americans have benefited from CDBG-funded infrastructure projects since 2005, many of them in cities like nearby Lock Haven, which faces serious challenges as a result of the approved funding cuts.
All of that is at risk because Congress and the White House are poised to recklessly gut more essential funds that help provide critical support for local communities and working families, all to facilitate the unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to the rich that began with the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
The result? State and local governments have to foot the costs, or services go away. The bill isn’t gone – it’s just been given to us to pay. But the borough and other municipalities can’t absorb the loss of these funds, and states are already facing an impossible task in backfilling billions of cut federal dollars.
Needs don’t disappear just because Congress and the White House pretend they’re not there. We still have a housing affordability crisis, and we still have a desperate need for a safety net for our community’s vulnerable. These issues are poised to get worse as the “Big, Beautiful Bill” and the FY26 spending bills promise to rob us of already too-few resources to address them.
Congress needs to act to ensure that these funds remain available in FY26 and beyond. It’s critical that our representatives in Congress, whether Sen. Fetterman, Sen. McCormick or Rep. Thompson, immediately work to fix the proposed elimination of the CDBG and HOME programs.
Without immediate action to protect these funds, communities will face critical losses in services and funding, compounding the already grim consequences working families will face as essential government services are gutted.
Connor Lewis is president of Seven Mountains AFL-CIO and chair of the State College Borough Community Development Block Grant Citizens’ Advisory Committee.
