A structural argument for King County and beyond…
Written by PEL Lab Leader Faduma Fido
A government that abandons its people in enough places at once is policy. This is an account of what that choice looks like on the ground—across housing, emergency management, and healthcare—in one county, all at the same time.
In King County, the evidence is local and specific. The HUD Continuum of Care program, which funds permanent supportive housing for about 4,500 of our most vulnerable residents, is facing new rules that the King County Regional Homelessness Authority says would “immediately create a funding gap of up to $40 million” compared to $65 million that it “typically receives” for Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), Rapid Re-Housing (RRH), and Transitional Housing (TH).” Emergency housing vouchers, which have kept families, survivors of domestic violence, and people escaping homelessness in stable housing are ending in 2026, years ahead of when recipients were told they would.
FEMA, which stationed more than 150 personnel in Washington State after the December 2025 flooding, has been cut so deeply that a former regional employee told Cascadia Daily News there is “absolutely no way” the agency has the staffing it had a year ago to handle federal disaster declarations. And that is before the Medicaid cuts reach Harborview Medical Center, where hospital leadership has told the King County Council that every 1% of patients who lose coverage translates to $8.4 million less in operating funds at the same moment demand for their services rise.
Local leaders are doing what the federal government will not. King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda’s amendment to the 2026-2027 budget established a contingency fund to absorb Continuum of Care losses and directed the new Executive to transmit an appropriations bill by March 16th, noting a likely gap of at least $36 million in the region. “Our strongest defense against these federal cuts and chaos,” Mosqueda said, “is the strength of our local partnerships.” The Seattle City Council allocated $11.8 million in emergency reserves to cushion the impact on local housing and shelter programs. Councilmember Claudia Balducci called for a full stress test of County funding sources after hearing from a youth homelessness organization in her district that if their federal disbursements were stopped, they would have to “close their doors within days, not weeks,” putting young people directly onto the street.
Communities are doing what communities have always done when institutions fail them. They are showing up. The Seattle Social Housing Developer built by community organizing expects to receive $115 million in payroll tax revenue, more than double initial projections, and is preparing to acquire its first property. Seattle’s social housing movement did not begin as a response to federal failure. It began as a rejection of the premise that the market was ever going to solve this. The federal funding retreat just made the argument for them.
Alison Eisinger, Executive Director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, has named what is also true: “This is a crisis. In a crisis, you have to make hard decisions.” The burden of substituting for the federal government does not fall evenly. Nationally, the cuts to federal intermediary organizations—nonprofits that bridge smaller community groups and rural agencies to federal support—have hit the smallest, least-resourced communities hardest. In King County, it is the organizations serving people with the least power who are handed the hardest choices.
The problem is not that funding is being cut left, right, and center. The problem is that local governments and community organizations have been designed as delivery mechanisms for federal resources. HUD sends money, local agencies distribute it. FEMA declares disasters, local governments respond. Medicaid flows from Washington, D.C., hospitals stay open. The entire architecture assumed federal good faith. That assumption is gone. And any organizations built around this are losing more than just funding. They are losing the structural role they were designed to play, which cannot be fixed with a contingency fund or emergency reserves.
King County and every county experiencing this should be looking into an alternative architecture. The federal-local relationship in housing, healthcare, and emergency management was built on an implicit contract: the federal government would set standards, provide resources, and backstop local capacity. Local governments would deliver, and nonprofits would fill the gaps. But that pipeline was never codified. It was assumed. When the contract fails, the entire delivery architecture fails simultaneously. The HUD Continuum of Care, FEMA’s regional capacity, and Medicaid reimbursements are three simultaneous ruptures in the same load-bearing wall. The organizations feeling this most acutely are not the largest institutions. Harborview can absorb a shock that would close a community clinic in a week. The Downtown Emergency Service Center has 1,776 tenants and a track record that gives it options a smaller provider doesn’t have.
It is the organizations with the thinnest margins and the most vulnerable people—the ones a King County councilmember described as being days, not weeks, from closing—who are being asked to absorb what the federal government will no longer carry. The burden of withdrawal is distributed according to fragility.
Local community leaders and organizations have already started working on promising solutions that put us in charge. For example, Seattle Social Housing Developer is the most important experiment in this region right now, because it is proof of concept for a different model. It was built on the premise that the market or federal funding cycles were never reliable foundations for permanent housing. It is funded by a local payroll tax and accountable to the public that created it.
So, what does it look like to build public infrastructure that is sovereign at the local level? Three things: (1) a dedicated, locally controlled revenue source, (2) a public development mandate rather than a service model, and (3) a long time horizon that is insulated from federal political cycles.
Right now, the missing ingredient is the political will to treat the current threat as permanent rather than temporary. The federal government is counting on most people to not see what is being withdrawn until it is too late. It is a good measure for King County to do real time accounting of what has been lost: the programs, dollars, and the people. The cost of federal withdrawal should be visible, specific, and impossible to downplay. Federal withdrawal at this scale is deliberate redistribution of who bears the cost. In response, we should be building local political power that makes federal abandonment politically untenable.
There is a word we use when communities hold themselves together after everything meant to support them falls away. We call it resilience. We say it with admiration. We rarely ask who decided they should have to be resilient in the first place. But relying on community resilience isn’t good policy. Instead, let’s build something the public owns, and the public will defend it. It is how we transcend resilience towards sovereignty. Indigenous nations have been building sovereign institutions since the federal government began breaking treaties. It is a painful yet liberating truth that those who were never afforded the illusion of federal protection have always understood better than anyone else.
