On July 23, 2026, Relman Colfax filed a lawsuit in the U. S. District Court in the District of Massachusetts on behalf of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) and the Massachusetts Fair Housing Center against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to halt its attempt to dismantle the primary funding program used to support fair housing in the country.
This complaint is in direct response to what amounts to HUD’s third direct assault on the Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP) under the current Administration. HUD and HUD Secretary Scott Turner are named defendants in the complaint, where it is alleged the agency’s latest funding directives seek to take away the primary source of funding for over 100 private fair housing organizations throughout the country—the recipients that drove Congress to establish FHIP in the first place—and instead channel huge sums to a few favored entities.
Recognizing that the federal government lacked resources to adequately enforce the Fair Housing Act (FHA), Congress created FHIP in 1987. Congress declared the work of these organizations as necessary—not optional, not interchangeable, and not subject to political whim. When Congress made FHIP a permanent federal program, it wrote its rationale directly into law, finding that “the proven efficacy of private nonprofit fair housing enforcement organizations and community-based efforts makes support for these organizations a necessary component of the fair housing enforcement system.”
Fair housing organizations have become essential to preventing and remedying housing discrimination. They facilitate meritorious fair housing claims, weed out non-meritorious claims, conduct investigations into acts of illegal discrimination, collect critical evidence of discrimination, efficiently resolve disputes between housing consumers and housing providers, provide much-needed services to housing consumers, work with industry stakeholders to develop and implement fair housing protocols and products, develop and implement remedies to overcome illegal discrimination, and educate housing seekers and providers about the protections and responsibilities under the FHA.
For the almost four decades since the FHIP program was established, the resulting network of nearly 100 community-based fair housing organizations has worked tirelessly to ensure that all people can obtain and maintain the housing of their choice free from discrimination. In short, they are the boots on the ground that make the FHA’s protections real in the communities they serve.
Yet on July 2, 2026, HUD issued Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs) for the Fiscal Year 2025 and 2026 FHIP appropriations that radically and unlawfully restructure the program. The changes in the NOFOs have the purpose and effect of disqualifying most private fair housing enforcement organizations from funding in direct contradiction of the law.
In an unprecedented move, the 2025 NOFO eliminates the two primary forms of FHIP funding and the 2026 NOFO includes conditions that effectively prevent local, nonprofit fair housing organizations from receiving money. The FY2025 NOFO contemplates using $46 million of the $56 million in the FY2025 appropriation for just five grants–as opposed to the usual of over 100 grants. One of the grants outlined in the FY2025 NOFO will be worth $25 million, made available to a single favored law school. Typically FHIP grants go to established fair housing organizations and range from $75,000 to $425,000. The remaining $10 million of the FY2025 appropriation will be for an unprecedented Administrative Enforcement Initiative award to a state or local agency–those agencies are separately funded by Congress through a different program. This extreme change in direction is illegitimate and stands in direct contradiction of the Fair Housing Act, Housing and Community Development Act of 1992, and otherwise violates the law, as described in the complaint. The NOFOs also introduce new eligibility criteria that will disqualify nearly all existing fair housing organizations by allowing no more than 50% of the organizations budget to be met through FHIP grants, allowing an organization to only have one FHIP grant at a time, overhauling the merit review process in a way that disfavors existing organizations, introducing a subjective “risk review”, and requiring recipients to comply with a host of vague, inapplicable, and potentially unlawful executive orders.
The result will be a steep and immediate drop in fair housing work across the country. Without intervention, funding for fair housing enforcement and education will cease and many fair housing organizations will be forced to shutter. This means no fair housing services for many overlooked and underserved communities and populations, including rural residents, veterans, people with disabilities, and more.
This complaint marks the Administration’s third direct assault on the FHIP program Relman Colfax has had to challenge. In March of 2025, Relman Colfax filed a case on behalf of a class of over 60 fair housing organizations, including both plaintiffs in this suit, whose FHIP grants were unjustly terminated by HUD. The court granted a temporary restraining order and HUD reinstated the grants.
In June of that same year, Relman Colfax, representing NFHA and the Tennessee Fair Housing Council, filed a federal lawsuit against HUD’s unprecedented and unlawful refusal to administer the Fiscal Year 2024 FHIP funds. That court, too, enjoined HUD’s unlawful conduct.
If this latest attempt to gut much-needed funding for fair housing organizations is allowed to stand, the funding changes will leave everyday people in communities nationwide with little recourse to combat illegal housing discrimination.
“Depriving these organizations of their funding will have catastrophic consequences and the well-being of families across the nation hangs in the balance. If allowed to continue, HUD will leave seniors who cannot navigate the steps into their apartments with no one to call, force people facing eviction to stand up in court alone, leave people experiencing domestic violence without help, send families illegally excluded from housing into homelessness, deny housing access to disabled veterans, and more.” said Reed Colfax, Co-Managing Partner at Relman Colfax. “We will continue to ensure the Fair Housing Act is upheld by those sworn to protect it and not subject to political whim.”
Relman Colfax is asking for the Court to grant relief by declaring the FY2025 and FY2026 NOFOs unlawful, ordering HUD to vacate the NOFOs and use FHIP funds consistent with the law, and ordering the FY2025 FHIP appropriation to remain available after September 30, 2026 and to expeditiously fund second and third years of multi-year FHIP grants.