BUTTE — Cuts made by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are going to affect the Montana Fair Housing organization headquartered in Butte, which will slash its annual budget by about 80%.
“I was quite taken aback to see an email, open it up and find out everything stops this minute,” said Montana Fair Housing Executive Director Pam Bean.
In a Feb. 27 email from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Bean was informed that a grant that provides Fair Housing with $425,000 in funding each year was immediately terminated per executive order requiring DOGE cuts.
“Oh, it was quite a shock. We were preparing—we had interviews scheduled to hire a couple folks, cases in the midst,” said Bean.
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Montana Fair Housing is a non-profit that intervenes in discriminatory housing practices, settles tenant and landlord disputes, and other matters in the federal Fair Housing Act. Bean said she gets about 180 inquiries a month.
“Services are going to be markedly cut back, so we’ve had to really scale back what we're going to be able to do and in what time frame,” she said.
DOGE is an effort headed by Elon Musk at the direction of President Trump to reduce the federal workforce and trim what it sees as wasteful government spending.
Bean agrees that there’s a need to cut back on federal spending, but she says some of DOGE’s methods — like cuts to fair housing- are going too far.
“There is a way to approach scaling back government and addressing abuse without across-the-board harming millions and millions of people,” said Bean.
The fair housing office has three employees and plans to continue by seeking funds through other grants and donations.
