Guarantees for bank loans would remain at current levels and basic rent aid for tenants would continue, but other rural housing assistance would be wiped out under the Trump Administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2019 released on February 12, 2018. Although tenants would continue receiving assistance, they would face a new requirement to pay at least $50 per month in rent unless they are deemed to experience economic hardship.

This budget is much the same as last year’s proposal for rural housing. Last year the Section 504 grant program – which offers small grants to elderly homeowners with very low incomes to repair health and safety hazards in their homes – would have been rolled into a new pool of money called the Rural Economic Infrastructure Grant program. This year’s budget does not include that infrastructure grant proposal, and would simply eliminate Section 504 grants. The House incorporated the infrastructure grant idea into its FY18 appropriations bill, but both the House and the Senate rejected most of the program eliminations proposed by the Administration last year.

The guarantee programs that would remain – Section 502 guarantees for homebuyers and Section 538 guarantees for builders of rental housing in rural places – cover their own costs through fees, so the government pays only the costs of administering them.

USDA’s Section 521 Rental Assistance and Section 542 voucher programs, which assist tenants in two different sets of circumstances, would be funded at levels similar to current amounts. The $20 million proposed for vouchers, however, is too low to help all eligible tenants who want vouchers. HAC believes at least $27 million will be needed for these renters whose landlords pay off their USDA mortgages, either early or at maturity.

In addition to the new $50 rent requirement, the budget proposes to allow USDA to recapture Rental Assistance funds from past years’ agreements if the department determines a property no longer needs RA, and to use those funds for other properties. It would also let USDA transfer unneeded RA or voucher funds to any other rural housing programs. [tdborder][/tdborder]

a. FY18 appropriation is not yet final.
b. Includes $40 million in advance funding for FY18, so total available in FY17 was $1.365 billion and total available in FY18 would be $1.385 billion. The FY19 budget assumes that this “forward funding” continues, so more than $1.331 billion would be available in FY19.
c. Section 504 loans and other non-housing loans would have been rolled into a new Rural Economic Infrastructure Grant program.