The Brief

The House of Representatives narrowly approved legislation Thursday to claw back two years of federal funding for public media outlets. President Donald Trump, who has attacked the mainstream media more broadly, has accused NPR and PBS of bias against conservative viewpoints.

The measure passed largely along party lines, 214 to 212.

The legislation is the first request by the Trump administration for Congress to take back money it already has approved through annual spending bills. The bill reflects a list of cuts totaling $9.4 billion that were requested by the Office of Management and Budget. The bulk of the cuts — $8.3 billion — are to foreign aid programs addressing global public health, international disaster assistance and hunger relief.

The remainder would slash $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates nearly all of the funds to local stations, for the next two fiscal years. By law, that money is supposed to be approved in advance as part of an effort to insulate public broadcasting from political influence over fleeting issues.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise formally introduced the legislation last week, saying it "codifies President Trump's cuts to wasteful foreign aid initiatives within the State Department and USAID, as well as woke public broadcasting, including NPR and PBS, at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is a business the federal government shouldn't even be in."

Heated partisan debate before the vote

Republicans attacked the programs they targeted for cuts in speeches Thursday before the vote. "Don't spend money on stupid things and don't subsidize biased media," Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said.

Democrats defended public broadcasting as providing essential services. They cited the need for local information during natural disasters and balanced news coverage.

"NPR and PBS are targeted here today precisely because they are so good at delivering the truth," Texas Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett said. He pointed to Trump's social media attacks on the outlets, saying, "Trump doesn't want a country of engaged, informed Americans. He prefers those who salute on command."

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who has accused Republicans of rubber stamping Trump's agenda despite their own misgivings, held up a doll of Elmo, the Sesame Street character, on the House floor.

"The letter of the day is 'C'. How appropriate because this bill is cruel, and it cuts children's programs all across the country," he said.

While a handful of Congressional Republicans have expressed support for their local public radio and television stations, there is intense pressure on them to side with the president. Heritage Action, a grassroots conservative group, designated the vote on the rescissions bill as the first "key vote" included on their scorecard tracking lawmakers' voting records this session of Congress.

Some of Trump's supporters have been frustrated that Congress has not moved sooner to officially back the cuts recommended or put into motion already by the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, launched by Elon Musk. Musk initially vowed to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, then scaled back to $1 trillion. The actual amount so far has been a small fraction of the trillion promised. But Musk's imprint slimming down or gutting some federal agencies has already reverberated in fallout in the U.S. and around the world.

Musk's recent departure from the administration and high profile public feud with the president haven't affected the plans of top GOP leaders on Capitol Hill to schedule votes to formally wipe out spending for the targeted agencies and programs. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday he expected additional votes on rescissions requests based on DOGE's efforts.

After the heads of both NPR and PBS testified before a House oversight panel in March, the speaker argued in a statement on social media that NPR and PBS "have consistently and knowingly betrayed the public trust. Instead of fair and balanced reporting, they routinely ignore facts to advance a far left agenda." He added, "The American people support the free press, but will not be forced to fund a biased political outlet with taxpayer funds." This is in alignment with criticism from the Trump administration.

Conservative views on public media have changed

Two former Republican lawmakers say that the GOP sentiment toward public broadcasting has shifted over time — from frequently backing public broadcasting to being skeptical of it, to viewing it as a hostile force.

"I always supported PBS on the rationale that just because Barnes and Nobles sold books didn't mean public libraries were no longer needed," former Oregon Sen. Gordon Smith, who served from 1997 to 2009, tells NPR. "But even in those days, I would admonish my friends in PBS to strive for better political balance. This, they haven't done."

Smith says he gave the same advice after later becoming chief of the National Association of Broadcasters, a trade group to which PBS and NPR do not belong. "Given the size of the public debt and PBS's ability to find other financing and sell advertising, well, they've left themselves vulnerable," Smith says.

Former U.S. Rep. Charles Bass came to office with former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich's big Republican wave. Bass went on to represent New Hampshire's 2nd Congressional District for 14 years.

"The debate over whether to fund public television or public radio networks is more divisive than it was," Bass says. "By that process, it is likely to be more imperiled."

"To some extent it's influenced by the perception that it's more liberal than it actually is," Bass says. "There is a bent to it, but it's not as significant as the commercial networks — Fox and MSNBC on either end and CNN in the middle. They really are."

Bass says public broadcasting stands apart for avoiding commercial priorities. But, he says, technological changes in how people consume media have raised valid questions about the need for federal subsidies.

He says that the shift in formats from music to all news and public affairs talk by many NPR member stations increased content that has proved controversial and attracted scrutiny by critics, especially on the right. 

Yet he also says the lines have hardened within Republican ranks toward public broadcasting as cultural warfare has become increasingly important to the party faithful: first with Gingrich, then with the Tea Party, and now MAGA Republicans with Trump at the lead, each of which have sought to present public media as unworthy of taxpayer dollars.

"I would be pondering this seriously. I wouldn't be a lock-step supporter or opponent of public radio or television funding," Bass says. "That's true even though I probably listen to [New Hampshire Public Radio] as a news source more than any other source of news."

History of public media funding

Congress created CPB, a private nonprofit entity, in 1967. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the law making CPB the entity to oversee federal grants to more than 300 public television stations and more than 1,000 public radio stations.

In the early years, there were questions about the federal role for CPB. In 1969, Fred Rogers, the host of the popular children's show "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," testified about the benefit of continued federal funding. His defense of CPB was credited with changing the mind of a key senator, John Pastore, D-R.I., who had pressed Rogers on the value of public television.

Rogers described themes in his half-hour program addressing children's feelings and offering ways to handle them. He told the congressional panel, "I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable we will have done a great service for mental health."

Lawmakers from both parties frequently appear on their local public stations for interviews. They participate in debates hosted by local stations during House and Senate campaigns.

But for decades, Republicans in Congress have vowed to defund public media outlets. In 1994, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich argued for zeroing out CPB's budget. That didn't advance, but in more recent years Republicans have included provisions in annual spending bills to strip all federal money for NPR and PBS. But these have failed to be included in final versions of government funding bills enacted by presidents of both parties.

In 2011, the GOP-controlled House approved a bill to bar NPR from receiving any additional federal funding, but that measure failed to advance in the Senate. Seven House Republicans voted against that bill, including then-Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy, who now serves as Trump's transportation secretary.

More recently during years of divided government, GOP leaders had to rely on Democrats to approve must-pass funding bills to avoid shutdowns. The debate over the issue of federal funding for public media became more of a backburner issue. CPB received $535 million for 2025. The spending bill approved with bipartisan votes in the House and Senate and signed by Trump in March approved the same level for the next two years.

Just two months later, Trump issued an executive order to block funding for NPR and PBS. And this first effort by the Office of Management and Budget to ask Congress to rescind federal money lumped in public media with foreign aid — two areas the GOP base frequently holds up as priorities Washington needs to scale back or eliminate altogether.

Concern for rural areas

In advance of the vote, the two House co-chairs of the Public Broadcasting Caucus, Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev, and Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., released a statement urging the Trump administration to "reconsider" clawing back money for CPB.

They touted public media's role in communicating during emergencies and its news coverage, and pointed out that rural areas are "particularly vulnerable" if funding is cut.

"Public broadcasting represents less than 0.01% of the federal budget, yet its impact reaches every congressional district," the two noted. "Cutting this funding will not meaningfully reduce the deficit, but it will dismantle a trusted source of information for millions of Americans."

Goldman told NPR that Trump's role in pushing this issue is "100%" making this a tough vote for GOP lawmakers to break with the president. "I think if they looked at the merits of it they would recognize it's essential funding — and public media, independent journalism plays an essential role." He added that Trump's issue is "effectively that independent media that exposes facts that may look unfavorable to him is therefore somehow biased, but the First Amendment protects freedom of the press specifically because the press is an essential form of accountability in our democracy."

Some Republicans have defended their own local public television and radio stations and expressed a willingness to work with Democrats to avoid cuts that would force them to scale back coverage or staffing.

Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt, a Republican, pressed by Colorado Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat, in a hearing on the bill on Tuesday, said Alabama Public Television "has not been subject to these woke policies that some of these other states have," and suggested he could join a bipartisan effort to continue grants to local stations.

But Aderholt noted "NPR is in a different category" and said most GOP lawmakers have had concerns about the outlet for some time.

Public television and radio stations have mounted a grassroots lobbying effort to urge lawmakers to oppose the package. The Protect My Public Media campaign says more than 2 million messages have been sent to House and Senate offices. "This support is driven by the deep connections Americans have to their local public media stations and the essential services stations provide to their communities."

The rescissions package now moves to the Senate. Under the rules, it needs a simple majority to pass and must be approved within 45 days of the president sending the request to Capitol Hill. That means if the Senate fails to pass the bill by mid-July, the administration would be required to release the $9.4 billion in funding for the foreign aid programs and CPB. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has indicated the Senate would take up the rescissions request soon.

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Congressional Correspondent Deirdre Walsh and Media Correspondent David Folkenflik. It was edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp, Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

Copyright 2025 NPR

After 170 years, one of the great mysteries of early Los Angeles history remains unsolved: Who initiated the freedom suit that emancipated Biddy Mason and 13 other Black women and children in an L.A. courtroom in January 1856?

The City Council’s recent move to rename Pershing Square for Mason has refocused public attention on her history. Yet we’re no closer to identifying the single figure behind her emancipation, a historic case that broke the back of slavery in Southern California.

I’ll confess, I’ve probably spent as much time as anyone trying to unravel that mystery. As a history professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, I spent a decade deep in research, resulting in the first scholarly biography of Biddy Mason, The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West.

Yet it brought me no closer to the truth. My excuse: The 19th-century official court records were either destroyed or lost, while the accounts of Mason’s own descendants point toward different people, in different places.

Only recently did I realize that I’d been asking the wrong questions all along. No single figure was capable of overturning the institution of slavery in California, which had gone uncontested for years, despite the state’s constitutional ban on human bondage.

The only way to understand Mason’s emancipation was to begin, not with a person, but with a network: the hidden history of Southern California’s Underground Railroad.

Proslavery status quo

Southern California and the Underground Railroad are terms not often paired together. The Underground Railroad, after all, is almost exclusively associated with the history of abolitionism in the Northeast. According to common understanding, it was a network of Black and white allies, working in secret, to ferry enslaved people from the South to freedom in the North or Canada.

That’s all true, of course. But those same networks existed in the American West as well. They helped usher Black people from slavery in Texas to freedom in Mexico. And they challenged the entrenched power of slaveholders in Southern California.

Although California had outlawed slavery in its 1849 constitution, that didn’t stop white Southerners from hauling their human property into the state. Perhaps as many as 1,500 enslaved African Americans had been carried into California by the time Mason’s freedom suit came to trial. Black Californians could count on little support from the state’s courts. Nearly every case they tried went in favor of slaveholders.

Whereas most slaveholders made their way to the gold diggings around Sacramento, a sizable colony of Southern transplants settled in San Bernardino, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. There, they held more than two dozen Black people, including Biddy Mason and her three daughters, in bondage.

Robert Mays Smith, pictured here in old age in Texas, traversed the continent in search of fortune, built on the backs of enslaved people.

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Courtesy Kevin Waite

)

By the mid-1850s, San Bernardino was the most prosperous slaveholding settlement anywhere in the American West. And Mason’s owner, Robert Smith, was the single largest slaveholder among them, with 14 people under his control.

California abolitionists challenged the proslavery status quo at their own peril. “The name of ‘black Republicans’ stunk in their nostrils worse than that of a horse-thief,” wrote one Californian of his violently anti-abolitionist neighbors. As the future U.S. Sen. John Conness recalled: “If any man could be found who had temerity enough to believe it [slavery] was a bad system, and his opinions became known, he was proscribed, clubbed, or shot, according to the pleasure of the ruffians who dominated public opinion” in California.

The politics of slavery became a matter of life and death in Los Angeles. In 1851, L.A.’s marshal discovered that a local slaveholder had been whipping a Black man in the courtyard of his adobe home. When the marshal attempted to intervene, he was confronted by a group of vigilantes. “They told me that I was required to leave the city within the space of 24 hours, at my peril,” he later reported in court records, “which I distinctly understood to mean the peril of my life.” The marshal departed the next morning for San Francisco.

“Mob Law,” lamented the Los Angeles mayor, “is triumphant as respects the existence of negro slavery in this district.”

Refuge for Black freedom-seekers

That didn’t dissuade Robert and Winnie Owens, two of the earliest Black settlers in Los Angeles. They knew as well as anyone that freedom often came at great personal sacrifice. They had been enslaved in Texas but managed to purchase their freedom and make their way west with their children. In Los Angeles, they formed the early core of the region’s Underground Railroad.

The San Pedro Street home (right) of Robert and Winnie Owens, a key site on the Underground Railroad of Southern California.

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C.C. Pierce Collection of Photographs, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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They turned their adobe home on San Pedro Street into a refuge for Black freedom-seekers. “Many slave owners have claimed that their property was kept in hiding” at the Owens home, recalled a resident of early Los Angeles in the Los Angeles Herald. In one instance, Bob and Winnie harbored a fugitive woman from her owner, “a drunken brute” from Rancho Cucamonga.

The Owens family did not act alone, however. The enslaved themselves provided the engine for Southern California’s Underground Railroad. Although their actions were circumscribed and their movements policed, they found ways to resist within the bonds of slavery.

Biddy Mason had been chipping away at her owner’s authority for years. In 1849, a Black man named Rande successfully escaped from Robert Smith and made his way to freedom. Mason almost certainly colluded in his escape. Although she couldn’t flee herself as the mother of three young daughters, she could take a vicarious pleasure in depriving her enslaver of his only adult male worker.

Mason’s was a rebellion in slow motion, a campaign built over months and years. In San Bernardino, she began conspiring with other enslaved people. A woman named Elizabeth Flake played a key role in those efforts, according to a later interview with Mason’s eldest daughter. Flake and Mason had formed a friendship through their shared ordeals, including a harrowing overland journey and enslavement in San Bernardino.

Elizabeth Flake (later Rowan), seen here later in life, played an instrumental role in Mason's quest for freedom in 1855-1856.

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San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society

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It was probably Elizabeth Flake to whom Mason first turned when she discovered that her owner intended to transport her family to Texas in late 1855. Somehow, they got word to the Owens family and a small network of Black and white allies.

From there, those allies alerted local law enforcement, who then apprehended Robert Smith on the eve of his planned departure for Texas. The largest freedom suit in the history of the American West was underway.

A suit for freedom

Despite her success in bringing Smith to trial, the odds were not in Mason’s favor. The presiding judge was a former slaveholder himself who claimed to “appreciate the kindly attachment that grows up between master and slave.” Mason was prohibited by California law from testifying against her enslaver or any other white person. Meanwhile, Smith or one of his cronies threatened Mason’s lawyer, prompting him to abandon her case. A gang of local rowdies stood at the ready to help Smith reclaim his property “by force.”

As her case rapidly deteriorated, Mason turned once more to her allies. The Owens family harbored Mason and many of the enslaved petitioners, enduring more threats of violence from Smith’s thugs. A white ally, Dr. A.H. Cooper, narrowly escaped a belligerent former constable who threatened to “blow your brains out” for daring to side with the enslaved.

Benjamin Ignatius Hayes in 1849, several years before he would become district judge for Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego Counties.

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The Bancroft Library Portrait Collection

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It may have been one of Mason’s allies who convinced Judge Benjamin Hayes to interview her privately in his chambers (thereby skirting the ban on Black testimony). That interview finally swung the case in her favor. Mason’s “glorious instinct of freedom,” Hayes wrote, had lifted a “bright torch” to expose the subterfuge of her enslaver and convinced Hayes that justice lay on the side of the enslaved. On January 19, 1856, he declared Mason and 13 others “free forever.”

Mason’s courtroom victory emboldened other Black Californians to seek freedom for themselves. A wave of self-emancipations in San Bernardino followed. By 1857, the institution of Black chattel slavery in Southern California had ceased to exist.

California wasn’t born free through its putatively antislavery constitution. It only became free after the coordinated efforts of a courageous network of abolitionist allies — the westernmost spur of the Underground Railroad.

So, we may never know who, specifically, initiated the freedom suit that led to Mason’s emancipation. But I’d argue we shouldn’t lament our ignorance; we should celebrate it. Mason and her allies so carefully covered their tracks that neither the judge, nor their enslaver, nor anyone else in Southern California uncovered the full extent of their abolitionist network. They confound us still.

If Nithya Raman defeats incumbent Karen Bass on Nov. 3, she’ll become the third mayor of Los Angeles to oversee plans for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games — and the first to have started out as an Olympics critic.

Raman told the Democratic Socialists of America’s L.A. chapter in 2020 that she opposed Los Angeles playing host to the world’s largest sporting event, skewering the city for making a “rushed” deal without public input.

Still, she’ll be stuck with the Games if she becomes mayor, and will also oversee the city in the period that follows, when L.A. will be left with any cost overruns if the private organizing committee LA28 runs out of money.

Depending on how she wields the role, Raman could shift the city’s approach to its host duties, ramping up pressure on LA28 to publicly disclose more about its finances and also changing the leadership on key bodies like the Board of Police Commissioners, Metro Board and even, potentially, the LA28 board of directors.

She’ll also have significant power to set the tone for the Games and the city's agenda leading up to them, observers told LAist.

“I think that she will end up being a booster of the Olympics because she has to be,” said Jim Newton, a veteran L.A. journalist and expert on California politics. “But what she does with that authority is what's up for grabs.”

Would Raman keep police chief through 2028?

The 2028 Games haven’t been a major talking point on the campaign trail, but Police Chief Jim McDonnell's fate has.

Bass nominated McDonnell to the post in 2024, and Raman voted to confirm him. But Raman said she’ll replace the chief if elected as mayor, criticizing LAPD’s response to federal immigration enforcement in Los Angeles. She has declined, however, to say if she’d do this ahead of 2028.

The mayor can’t directly fire the chief, but appoints the Board of Police Commissioners, which can. If Raman appointed a new chief ahead of the Games, the person would need council approval.

“The mayor appoints the Board of Police Commissioners, so they are unlikely to retain a chief that the mayor doesn't like,” said Raphael Sonenshein, an expert on the city charter and the executive director of the Haynes Foundation. He said it’s more typical for new mayors not to appoint a police chief to a second term than to remove them early. McDonnell’s five-year term is up at the end of 2029.

Moderator Conan Nolan pushed Raman to clarify if she’d remove the chief ahead of 2028 at the NBC4 and Telemundo 52 mayoral debate, citing the high-security status of the sprawling sporting event. Raman responded, saying it would depend on conversations with “other decision-making bodies.”

“I will work towards that with all of the responsibility and all of the care that this moment requires,” Raman said of removing McDonnell. “And I promise you Angelenos, I promise you, there is no decision that I will take as your mayor that will put you in danger.”

Bass pushed back, saying Raman didn’t have “any idea” what identifying a new police chief required.

“We are 640 days away from the largest sporting event to ever take place — a major national security event — and if you think that you’re going to find a police chief, you would send the department in disarray,” Bass said.

The U.S. Secret Service leads security for the Games but works closely with LAPD and other law enforcement agencies. In the spring, LAPD estimated its policing costs for the Games would exceed $730 million.

Other leadership roles could change

Raman could also shake up the L.A. Metro’s Board of Directors, which is overseeing Metro’s 28 by 28 initiative and steering the temporary bus system planned for the Olympics and Paralympics. Mayor Karen Bass currently chairs the Metro Board, and if Raman is elected, she would hold that position through June 2027, the end of the fiscal year.

She could replace any of the three mayoral appointees: Jacquelyn Dupont-Walker, president of the Ward Economic Development Corporation; and City Councilmembers Imelda Padilla and Katy Yaroslavsky

“I want to use those four seats to push Metro to invest in the biggest bang for the buck in terms of public transit investments,” Raman said at a mayoral forum in September, referencing her own spot on the board and her appointees'.

Alissa Walker, a mega-events expert who writes the popular newsletter Torched, told LAist that the mayor’s role on Metro is another way she can flex power ahead of the Games.

 “You could push forward an agenda,” Walker said, referring to former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s plan to accelerate transit infrastructure for the Games. “Let’s remember Garcetti's 28 by 28, that came from him being on the Metro Board. It wasn't something that he pushed through the city.”

The mayor also has direct influence on the makeup of LA28’s board of directors, a body that has faced scrutiny for its Trump allies and its chairman, Casey Wasserman. The city has six members on the board who were appointed by the mayor without city council approval, the mayor’s office told LAist.

The board mainly operates behind the scenes, but the City Council can require the city’s board members to report back on the board’s progress and decisions that impact the city — a right the mayor could encourage the council to flex.

LA’s financial gamble

Then there’s the question of how Raman would navigate the city’s complex relationship with LA28, and unlimited financial risk as the backstop of the Games. The host deal was championed and brokered by then-Mayor Garcetti, but it’s the coming mayoral term that will oversee the actual event and its aftermath.

The Olympics committee is operating mainly on its own to deliver the Games with a $7.2 billion budget, but will use many city resources to pull them off, including police, traffic control, trash collection and more.

Raman was one of four council members to vote against the city’s agreement with LA28 on how it will be reimbursed for those services during the Games earlier this year, saying it left taxpayers too exposed to unexpected costs. The deal established that the city will seek reimbursement for the cost of policing venues from the federal government, which is overseeing Olympics security.

“Would you agree to cover someone else’s bills without knowing what you might have to pay — or even being allowed to see what they’re spending? Of course not!” Raman wrote on X.

If elected, Raman could throw her weight behind her ally, City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who subpoenaed LA28 this month for financial documents he said the organization owed the city.

“Right now you have a mayor, Karen Bass, who's really highlighted the Olympics as a signature moment for Los Angeles, and certainly as a signature moment for what she hopes will be her second term,” Newton, the L.A. journalist and historian, told LAist. “Raman, if she were elected, is not as invested in that and may see that she has some leverage over LA28.”

She has also said she would appoint “an experienced financial executive to oversee the City’s Olympic costs” in her first 100 days in office. LAist asked Raman’s campaign whether she would remove Paul Krekorian, who currently leads the city’s Office of Major Events, but did not receive a response.

Kavish Harjai contributed to this story.

Los Angeles Unified will hold another round of community meetings in November as it begins to consider school closures and mergers.

“We're gonna be embarking, I would say, on one of the most consequential initiatives that this district has completed and done over the last 30 years,” said Pedro Salcido, a deputy superintendent, at a similar community meeting in early October.

LAUSD officials’ decisions could reshape the experience of 374,000 students from transitional kindergarten through high school. The meetings, scheduled from Wednesday, Nov. 4, through Monday, Nov. 9, offer community members a chance to share their concerns and questions directly with district staff. Most are virtual, but there are two opportunities to attend in person.

Enrollment has fallen more than 40% in the last two decades, and the district has closed relatively few of its more than 1,000 schools. District officials say resources are often stretched thin at underenrolled schools. For example, small high schools may not be able to offer as many electives or advanced courses.

The district is also under increasing scrutiny by state and county officials because current projections show LAUSD will be unable to pay its bills by the end of the next school year. In response, the district is considering a series of budget cuts that could lead to the elimination of thousands of jobs.

When are the meetings?

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is losing control of responsibilities tied to about $239 million in federal taxpayer funds as the Trump administration continues a push to strip power from the joint city-county agency. Now, Los Angeles and L.A. County are competing for control of some of those federal roles.

A key vote scheduled for Monday could help chart the future of the region’s response to its homelessness crisis.

And it’s happening in a unique format. Anyone, including you, can join and likely cast a vote.

Here’s what to know about what’s happening and how to get involved.

How we got here 

A regional planning group called the L.A. Continuum of Care voted earlier this month to designate L.A. County to take over at least two federal roles currently managed by the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA — running the homeless count and managing the region’s federal funding application.

The city and county have been competing for two other federal responsibilities currently held by LAHSA — managing a database that tracks unhoused people receiving public services and administering a system used to match people who need help with housing and shelter.

The local process to select LAHSA’s replacements began after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended the embattled agency from these federal roles in June, citing financial mismanagement.

Independent reviewers scored the county’s applications higher than the city’s. On Oct. 6, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s 21-member board voted to recommend L.A. County for all four roles.

The following week, the L.A. City Council instructed its attorneys to explore potential legal challenges to the L.A. Continuum of Care’s selection process while negotiating with L.A. County for shared control of these responsibilities.

This week, city officials said those negotiations paid off. On Friday, the City Council voted 10-0 to support a tentative agreement with the county on the two remaining federal roles.

How to participate

The L.A. Continuum of Care’s general membership meeting is scheduled Monday at 3 p.m. The group will vote on whether to approve designating L.A. County for the two federal roles still up for grabs: managing the unhoused database and the housing matching system.

You can attend in person or online via Zoom, and anyone who attends might be eligible to vote.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is a regional planning group required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that chooses which agencies handle the region’s federal homelessness responsibilities. It’s a nebulous body without a fixed roster. It technically includes all “persons and entities interested in collaborative, solution oriented planning to address homelessness in L.A. County (with the exception of Glendale, Long Beach, and Pasadena)," according to its charter. Anyone who fits that description is allowed to vote.

Because L.A. County is the only candidate under consideration in the vote, county officials encouraged county employees not to vote to avoid potential conflicts of interest, according to an email from the county’s homelessness department.

Attend in-person at 637 Wilshire Boulevard, 1st Floor Commission Room, Los Angeles, CA 90017

Register to attend online here.

Worth noting: These are yes-or-no votes. If L.A. County is not approved, no decisions will be made.

How might this change things?

Since 2020, the homeless population has increased by nearly 10% in both the city of L.A. and across L.A. County, according to the official homeless counts.

The region’s homelessness budgets swelled over that same period, with hundreds of millions more spent on shelter beds, housing and services for unhoused Angelenos. Much of that money was available because of local voters who in recent years approved several sales taxes and other measures to fund homeless services.

The decisions getting voted on by L.A. Continuum of Care determine who runs the systems that track and direct that money and who answers to the public when results fall short.

After Monday’s vote, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s selections will go to a federal judge for review on Tuesday. The court will then largely determine when and how the transition away from LAHSA happens in the coming months.

It’s unclear how the shift in control will impact homeless services on the ground. LAHSA leaders and employees have warned that transferring these responsibilities is complex and could take up to a year.

A bitter fight over the best path forward played out ahead of the vote.

L.A. city officials, including Mayor Karen Bass, said they want collaborative governance, and argued giving the county sole authority over federal responsibilities would hurt city residents.

“The City of Los Angeles provides the overwhelming majority of housing for the region,” Bass and several city council members said in a statement earlier this month. “The City must be able to help the people on our own streets by placing them into the housing that we build and fund in order to solve the homelessness crisis,” the statement continued.

This month, Bass and a group of L.A. City Council members sent a letter to the L.A. Continuum of Care, arguing that the city’s applications should have scored higher, and urging more support for the city’s bid.

Leaders of the L.A. County Department of Homeless Services and Housing said the county applied for all four functions because it’s best positioned to represent and collaborate with the region's 85 cities and hundreds of service providers.

Ben Kay, chair of the L.A. Continuum of Care board, wrote to the mayor, City Council and county supervisors on Oct. 14 that the dispute had shifted from “a united front against federal encroachment to splintered infighting.” Kay warned that it could squander the chance to keep local control of these systems and head off further federal involvement. He defended the scoring and selection, saying the board “stands firmly behind the integrity of that process.”

The L.A. City Council held a special meeting on Oct. 14 to discuss the city’s next steps. City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo laid out some options: negotiating with L.A. County for co-leadership of federal roles, separating from L.A. County and forming a city-only continuum of care or potentially filing a lawsuit challenging the whole court-ordered selection process.

After a closed-session discussion, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson announced the council was formally requesting that the L.A. City Attorney’s Office “develop options for litigation to protect the city and to protect our constituents, both housed and homeless.”

The council also asked the city administrative officer to keep negotiating with the county.

Those talks produced a tentative agreement, which the council voted to support on Friday.

It covers the two federal roles still up for a vote Monday. If the county is picked to run both, the agreement would give the city a bigger role in each.

For the database, city staff would keep their current access. The city would also get all data in the system on unhoused people within city limits, including those enrolled in county-funded programs, according to the agreement.

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who chairs the council’s homelessness and health committee, said the city would get the raw data behind the system so it can build its own reports and dashboards. “That’s something we’ve never had,” she said.

For the matching system, the city funds the vast majority of permanent supportive housing in the city, but it doesn’t currently manage matching for any of those units, Szabo said. LAHSA does. Under the agreement, the county would contract with the city to do that matching in buildings funded by the city or its housing authority.

“We’re going from nothing to something, and something substantial,” Jurado said.

The deal isn’t final. Its terms still have to be turned into binding agreements approved by both the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, according to a report from Szabo’s office.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told the court in an Oct. 20 filing that L.A. County’s homelessness department is an acceptable applicant and that it “prefers” the county over the city.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s court order requires the L.A. Continuum of Care to make its selections by Tuesday. Then, these complex federal responsibilities, supported by scores of LAHSA staff, have to move away from LAHSA on a timeline that will be set by the federal court.

LAHSA workers represented by union SEIU Local 721 have urged both the city and county to protect their jobs during that transition. They argue competent and experienced employees shouldn’t be sidelined because of leadership’s failures.

“We have spent years building relationships, learning these systems, and helping people move from homelessness into housing,” said Heather Varden, a LAHSA employee who posted an open letter from the union. “That experience should not be thrown away because the name at the top of the contract changes.”

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, is losing its federal responsibilities.

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How to understand the context 

City and county officials created the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, in 1993 as a joint powers authority between the two overlapping jurisdictions. Both the city and county appointed members to LAHSA’s governing commission and relied on the agency to manage public homelessness dollars for the region.

The federal roles were delegated to LAHSA by the L.A. Continuum of Care, an obscure but newly powerful planning group that HUD requires regions across the country to maintain if they want federal money.

Since late 2024, LAHSA has faced a string of critical audits and other scandals, putting its management of L.A.’s growing homelessness crisis under scrutiny.

L.A. County’s Board of Supervisors voted last year to divert more than $300 million in county homelessness funding from LAHSA and manage the funds itself. The county's new Department of Homeless Services and Housing took control of those funds in July.

On June 11, HUD suspended LAHSA from federal programs, citing alleged failures in financial management, internal controls, grant oversight and conflict-of-interest policies.

The move, according to the Trump administration, meant LAHSA wasn’t able to do the jobs the continuum of care had delegated to it, including applying for $239 million in federal funds on the region’s behalf.

The federal housing department said that with LAHSA suspended, it intended to have L.A. service providers apply directly to HUD for the funds — a move that would have ignored regional priorities.

LAHSA sued. In August, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter issued a preliminary injunction on LAHSA’s suspension through Oct. 27.

This allowed LAHSA to submit the region’s collaborative application for federal funds by an Oct. 14 deadline. (The agency has since provided notice that it has submitted the application on time.)

Carter also ordered the L.A. Continuum of Care to start taking applications to consider replacing LAHSA as soon as possible. The group hired consultants and ran an application process over about a month, beginning on Sept. 11. LAHSA leadership decided the agency would not compete in it.

L.A. County applied for all four federal roles and was the only applicant considered for two of them. The city applied for and competed against the county for the other two.

A panel of reviewers (whose identities were kept private) scored written applications and interview responses for each of the federal roles up for grabs. L.A. County’s pitch to operate a key database, known as HMIS, used to track service participants through the system earned a score of about 87 out of 100, compared to the city’s score of about 82. On Oct. 6, a committee focused on the database voted 8-0 in favor of the county’s application. Later that day, the board voted 10-4 to pick L.A. County for that role.

The county scored about 91 on its application to manage the system that matches unhoused people with available shelter and other resources — known as the Coordinated Entry System or CES — compared to the city’s score of about 73. The board voted 12-1 to select the county to run CES.

A 21-member board speaks for the L.A. Continuum of Care and guides decision-making. That board voted Oct. 6 to recommend L.A. County for all four federal roles currently held by LAHSA. Bass and several city council members had been urging people to attend the upcoming meeting and vote against the L.A. Continuum of Care board’s recommendations and in favor of the city.

Reba Stevens, a community advocate who serves on the 21-member L.A. Continuum of Care board, reviews materials in October 2026.

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How does the Continuum of Care operate?

Communities like L.A. must form and operate a “continuum of care” if they want federal homelessness money. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, introduced the model in 1994 to promote communitywide collaboration toward ending homelessness. Congress wrote it into law in the 2009 HEARTH Act.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is the largest in the U.S. — covering all of L.A. County, except Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale, which each run their own.

It isn't a government agency with its own staff. It’s a group of service providers, city and county agencies, housing authorities, advocates and people who have experienced homelessness. Known as the L.A. CoC, it operates under a governing charter.

Federal rules require the L.A. Continuum of Care to apply for HUD funding each year, decide which local projects receive it and oversee how the money is spent and how programs perform. The group must delegate who operates a shared database, runs a system for matching people to housing, applies for federal funding and counts the region’s homeless population.

Because it has no staff of its own, the Continuum of Care delegated those jobs to “lead agencies.” Until now, the group had chosen the city and county’s shared homelessness agency, LAHSA, to perform all four of those federal functions:

• Federal funding (Collaborative Applicant): submits the region’s annual funding application to HUD.
• Homeless Count (Point-in-Time count administrator): conducts the annual unhoused population census that shapes funding and policy.
• Homeless Database (HMIS Lead): runs the database where homeless service providers track who they serve and what housing and services those people receive. In Los Angeles, about 400 agencies feed into a system holding about 175,000 active participant profiles.
• Housing matching (CES Lead): manages the system that assesses people and matches them to shelter and housing. That system runs on the HMIS database. 

Sarah Mahin, director of the L.A. County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, made the county's case to the L.A. Continuum of Care board at meeting in October 2026.

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Canceled meeting stirs controversy

On Oct. 9, the Continuum of Care’s general membership held a meeting to formally designate the county to fill the administrative roles. Because that general membership is broad, the vote was likely to be decided based on turnout.

The day prior, the L.A. mayor’s office sent text messages to “thousands of community members,” according to that office, urging them to attend the meeting and vote against the Continuum of Care Board’s recommendations and in favor of the city.

County agencies also sent out notices about the vote, including a warning to county employees not to participate because of conflict-of-interest concerns.

More than 1,000 people attempted to attend the meeting online, exceeding the Zoom call’s capacity, according to organizers. The meeting was immediately adjourned by organizers, who told attendees they had to stop the meeting to avoid violating California’s open meeting law.

Katie Hill, CEO at Union Station Homeless Services in Pasadena, called the L.A. mayor's office’s efforts to stack the meeting with voters “outrageous” in an interview with LAist.

“There’s a process that everyone has agreed on that is fair and represents our collective best interests,” Hill told LAist. “We were supposed to ratify it in the same way that Congress ratifies electoral votes. And then all of the sudden they said they didn't like the outcome, and now they want people to not ratify it.”

Some city officials defended the mayor’s push to involve the public. Councilmember Tim McOsker said the board’s recommendations are “not a rubber stamp.”

“The [Continuum of Care] has a responsibility to scrutinize the recommendations, evaluate the scores, and exercise its own judgment rather than blindly accepting them,” McOsker said in a statement. “Public meetings should be attended by the public,” McOsker’s statement continued.

Hill’s organization has several contracts with L.A. County and just one with the city of L.A., she said. Hill previously served on LAHSA’s governing body as an L.A. County appointee.

While Hill thinks the county is better suited to run the system, some homeless services providers are staying neutral.

“We did not mobilize participants for Friday’s meeting,” Jerry Jones, executive director of the Greater L.A. Coalition on Homelessness, a network of more than 60 service providers, told LAist. “The best path forward is for both groups of elected officials to work together.”

“Regardless [of] who the [Continuum of Care] lead is, there are 20,000 people being served — we need to keep that funding,” Ivet Samvelyan, vice president of Hope The Mission, told LAist.

After the capacity issues, the Continuum of Care upgraded its Zoom account and now has capacity for 10,000 people for Monday’s meeting, according to a report the group submitted to the court on Oct. 13.

The group must make its final selections by Oct. 27, the same day the preliminary injunction is set to expire.