Legal aid under threat: the human cost of federal budget cuts
Manhattan’s housing court is hectic. At street level, a line of seven people forms just to go through the metal detector. Once inside, another crowd waits by the elevator. It’s a continuous cycle—as some make it in, more line up. Upstairs it’s not any better. Tenants and landlords alike wait some more outside the courtrooms for their cases to be heard. Some pace the corridor, others sit restlessly and few chat with their lawyers. All while a mix of languages fill the space as translators briskly walk from one room to the other. In one of the courtrooms, a judge asks the landlord and tenant attorneys: “So, did you reach an agreement?”
The ambiance mirrors the complicated process behind an eviction case. “It’s very intimidating for ordinary people,” 59-year-old James Quinn says. For the last couple of years, with his wife Brenda, they’ve been fighting an eviction from their one-bedroom apartment in the Upper West Side and have visited this court several times. “It feels like the landlord’s lawyers know everything, and they know the judge or whoever. And it always seems like it’s stilted towards them.”
However, James and Brenda did have one advantage: a free lawyer on their side through their local legal aid organization. Attorney Sagar Sharma ultimately helped them keep their place, something invaluable in a city with as expensive and tight a rental market as New York City. But these kinds of resources, traditionally funded through the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), are in jeopardy. In May 2025, the Trump administration proposed defunding LSC, and only after months of debate, the Senate and the House decided to avoid drastic cuts, but still decreased the funding on 3.6%. This new budget was signed into law by President Trump on January 23.
LSC may not be a household name, but for millions of Americans navigating the civil legal system, it’s a critical lifeline. “We fund 130 locations or legal services organizations across the country and all of the U.S. territories. They provide services in every zip code across the United States,” Holly Stevens, chief data officer of the Legal Services Corporation, explains. Since COVID, housing has become the main area of concern for legal aid organizations. “That’s about 40% of the cases that LSC grantees handle annually at this moment.”
Although the cut of 3.6% looks small compared to a full defund of LSC, the budget in the last three decades has constantly been decreasing. In 2024, LSC received $560 million. But in 1994, the organization received $400 million, which adjusted to today’s numbers would be equivalent to roughly $787 million.
Funding for legal aid work comes from a variety of sources, including donations, state, county, and city funds, and the federal dollars that LSC distributes to fund lawyers for eviction cases, as well as other civil legal matters. While some legal aid agencies don’t rely on any LSC dollars, in some states, organizations can receive anywhere from around 20% of their funding from LSC to over 70%. In states that are more heavily reliant on federal funding, cuts to LSC would leave agencies at risk of closing or drastically cutting their services.
This map shows how much of the funding for organizations comes from LSC. It’s important to note that this only includes institutions that are LSC grantees. There are legal aid organizations across the country that choose to fund themselves independently.
The cuts may also hit certain regions of a state harder than others. “Clearly, [for] rural areas and grantees who serve more rural populations, any cut to their funding hits harder, because those legal deserts […] already need all of those dollars,” Stevens explains. “The impact would be more than in other jurisdictions where there may be other funding to offset that impact.”
Even in places where LSC is not the main funding source, Stevens explains it’s a stable and flexible revenue: Many other sources can come with strings attached, limited in time or only available for certain kinds of cases or clients. For this reason, LSC can be even more important in places where there aren’t many alternatives for funding.
Cuts also hit the poorest and most vulnerable American citizens the hardest. “LSC funds folks who are at 125% poverty, which is obviously very, very low. And so these folks are most often women, often with children. They’re seniors. They are veterans. They’re just everyday Americans,” Stevens says. “Most of them are working. Most of them have jobs.”
This is why Shamas Malik, mayor of Akron, OH, describes these funds as “essential.” “[Legal aid services] are generally just a safety net for folks who are low income,” Malik says. Previously, as a city councilmember, he would constantly refer constituents’ eviction cases to local legal aid, and he also pushed for a right to counsel program, now underway as a pilot in the city. The city council has invested money, which adds to already existing funds from legal aid and other organizations. This allows them to provide renters with a wide range of support, including a hotline, mediation, and legal representation.
Decreasing LSC funding could put all of these programs in jeopardy. “Cutting back on LSC funding is just going to cause more homelessness. It’s going to cause more bad outcomes for folks. And at the end of the day, the legal system is already complicated enough,” Malik explains.
In Akron’s case, the Right to Counsel (RTC) program has been open since September 2025 and is serving low-income tenants with children or who are older than 60. RTC initiatives, which have sprouted across the country, also rely on LSC funds in other cities. In New York City, which has the largest RTC program in the United States, LSC helps to fund many of the organizations that provide legal services. In the case of the Quinns, they got help from Legal Services NYC, which received $17 million from LSC last year.
In theory, the RTC program in New York City guarantees tenants access to a lawyer during eviction. But in practice, the program is underfunded and has never reached its full potential: Roughly a third of all cases have received representation. Organizations like Legal Services NYC depend on the money given by LSC to pay their lawyers and cover shortfalls from other sources. For example, they routinely have to deal with delays in the payments for these programs coming from the city.
“The only way that we can make payroll and not close our doors as an organization is the LSC funding,” said Rosalyn Black, citywide Housing Director of Legal Services, NYC. “That funding comes in every month, regularly in a known amount. We rely on those funds to pay the bills and make ends meet until the city pays.”
The impact of LSC funding is felt nationwide, and perhaps especially in smaller and rural communities where other supports are often not available. This was true for Lisa Vasquez, a 43-year-old resident of Poughkeepsie, NY. Housing court in Poughkeepsie is a smaller, quieter affair than downstate in New York City, with twelve chairs and judges only hearing a handful of cases a week. But the situation was equally overwhelming for Lisa and for her teenage daughter, as they feared homelessness.
“I fell into some hardship. I had some issues with my car”, she remembers. Vasquez had to use her old Kia to get to her job at a gas station, but it finally broke down, and she had to start taking Ubers. Money became more and more scarce and she finally fell behind on rent. “I felt that I was never really going to get back on track. I’ve never had that problem before.”
Through a friend, she heard of Legal Services of Hudson Valley and she started talking with the lawyers in this LSC-funded organization. They helped her clarify exactly what was owed, which she had doubts about because she had been making partial payments all along. She was busy working at a gas station, trying to get the hours to catch up, and her lawyer accommodated to jump on the phone or quickly reply to emails if she had doubts about the case.
“They heard my stress, they heard my heartache and my hardship,” she remembers. “You don’t have a lot of agencies out there like that.” Legal Services of Hudson Valley, the organization that helped her, received $3 million from LSC this last year. If these funds disappear, people like Vasquez won’t get the support she had.
“This can mean cutting staffing across the board,” Marcie Kobak, director of Litigation at Legal Services of the Hudson Valley, explains. In her organization, they handled over 12,000 cases in 2024, and LSC funding helped them not only pay for lawyers, but also for staff and infrastructure to coordinate these cases. “Any little bit of efficiency that we lose when the volume is so high, it ripples through.”
Beyond the fact that the budget was approved on this occasion, there are still reasons to be concerned. LSC has expressed that this funding still won’t be enough to help all the Americans who deserve eviction legal aid or help in other civil law cases.
“We are grateful for the bipartisan support shown in [January 8th’s] House vote and for the strong appropriation, especially in the current political climate,” said LSC president Ron Flagg in a press release. “However, LSC’s current funding level doesn’t begin to meet the needs of low-income seniors, veterans, and families in dire situations like natural disasters and domestic violence.”
While this is seen as good news given the initial intention from the Trump administration, the threat of budget cuts remains for the upcoming years. The need is still overwhelming and bigger than the resources available. Meanwhile, tenants like the Quinns believe that the consequences of a drastic cut would have been clear for people like them.
“In a system that’s already set up against the little guy, things like Legal Services NYC… They’re saviors,” James Quinn says. “We’d be homeless without them, and I’m sure many other people would be, too.”
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