WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Peter Welch (D-Vt.) on Friday convened Vermonters to discuss how the Trump Administration’s federal funding freeze has impacted communities, families and workers across the state.
“This Administration is blocking the federal funding that Vermonters rely on—for their health care, child care, education, nutrition, community safety, disaster recovery, firefighting, and so much more. This is shocking, appalling, and it also happens to be illegal. When it comes to Congressional appropriations and the Article I powers of Congress, President Trump does not have the right to pick and choose what he’ll honor. It’s clear his main mission is to create incredible chaos and confusion for our communities,” said Senator Welch. “I am working with my Democratic colleagues in the Senate and with the Vermont Delegation to push back on this cruelty and do everything we can to stop this federal funding freeze.”
President Trump’s order to halt the disbursement of trillions of dollars in federal funding was issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The federal courts temporarily blocked the order, and on Monday extended the temporary restraining order. In addition, the court has required OMB to re-open funding currently held by the government and provide the court a compliance report by the end of the week.
Senator Welch heard directly from a variety of impacted Vermonters on Friday. Read the concerns of Vermonters below, and watch the full roundtable to hear from every participant here:
“Federal funding in Vermont supports emergency shelter and hotline services for victims of domestic and sexual violence, and many of our programs also provide rapid rehousing, including paying rents for survivors who have had access to housing. And as with the other nonprofits on this call, our work is done on a reimbursement basis with the federal government. So many of our organizations were frozen out of payment systems earlier this week, and for those that have been able to access those portals, many of the payments still show us pending and not deposited. Despite this, these amazing organizations continue to provide 24-hour access to services to victims of domestic and sexual violence.” – Sarah Robinson, Vermont Network Against Sexual and Domestic Violence
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“This has been a week like none other that threatened the continuation of our health center in operations and has dearly affected the feeling of safety for our staff and patients…This week when the Health and Human Services payment management system went down—and it really did, I have the screenshots of the different statuses it had had—it literally brought us to our knees. And we’re here standing strong…It rippled through all our staff, our board of directors, and threatened the care of about 10,000 Vermonters. We also have capital projects that have had long standing federal loans across Northern Borders, USDA, Health and Human Services. We had a pause, and the current next step for progression on those was approval by USDA, and they weren’t able to work with us…which puts a threat on our subcontractors, which then puts a threat on completing these projects…But we’re here. We have a lot of tenacity.” – Andy Barter, Little Rivers Health Care
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“Our agencies are currently serving 78 youth, and any further delay in receiving our resources would be hugely detrimental to the 78 youth. And this is at a time when we’ve seen the number of Vermont’s youth experiencing housing instability or homelessness quadruple in the last five years. We meet a fraction of the need in the state. Right now, our programs are already underfunded due to years of level funding with the expectation that our agencies would continue to do the same level of work. There is inadequate support provided for grants administration and no possibility of using funds to maintain reserves, meaning that direct program work always takes precedent over capacity building and development work. So, things are tight.” – Vermont State Rep. Kate Logan, Elevate
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“We have 79 families in temporary housing. This is very challenging for us. It’s a lot of funds—we don’t have the funds, and it’s a public safety issue because there’s homelessness, and we don’t have the funds to go on paying their rents.” – Sonali Samarasinghe, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants
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“The Executive Order, and the memo, has thrown all of our funding that we have relied on into disarray. We had problems accessing our funding portals. On Tuesday, we had no idea whether we would receive any more funding. We suspended all of our planned activities. We talked about furloughing our employees…We have employees, we have operational expenses. Cash flow for a nonprofit like the [Family Network] is tight, we cannot sustain a prolonged non receipt of funding. Every day since Tuesday has been filled with anxiety and uncertainty.” – Karen Price, Vermont Family Network
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“We administer federal funds that helped build housing and help to make farmland affordable to farmers, and this week we had to contemplate what it looks like to Vermonters to not have that support. We see that federal funds play a critical role in filling the gaps in projects to make sure they can go forward, and that they’re done through a reimbursement basis, which puts housing projects to fill Vermont’s great housing need at incredible risk…We have developers that want to meet the housing needs of our state, that would not be able to do so if this federal funding were to be pulled back, so we are highly concerned about the path the federal government is going down, and what it means to builders, to construction teams, to anyone who is on wait lists depending on these homes, to secure housing if these federal funds are pulled back.” – Pollaidh Major, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board
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“We do things like weatherization, housing, our food insecurity programs, and our Head Start programs. So primarily, about 50% of each of our community action agencies’ budgets are federal funding, that we don’t have access to right now. Head Start, although it’s been rescinded, we do not have access to payments. So, we are able to get into the payment management system, but we are not able to draw down any funds…We have many leases on properties our Head Start sites that were unable to pay landlords, and we are, we are in a really tough situation.” – Jenna O’Farrell, Northeast Kingdom Community Action (NECKA)
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“For Landmark College specifically, this funding represented the single greatest, largest grant in our 40-year history, and if granted in full, it will be transformational to our research endeavors, creating new opportunities for our faculty and students, as well as for innovative businesses, not for not-for-profits and local governments in our area. As a college that serves exclusively neurodivergent individuals and is proud to do so in rural Vermont, we are firmly committed to the success and wellbeing of our students, as well as the families of the more than 200 individuals who make our college run in both white and blue collar jobs. For all of these folks, students, parents, staff and faculty alike, Monday night’s Executive Order up ended daily life, introduced new and urgent questions and severely disrupted our ability to do our jobs…” – Jim Dlugos, Landmark College
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“70 percent of our work is with the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the State Department. Before Secretary of State’s and Secretary Marco Rubio’s foreign assistance stop work order, we had 88 full time staff here in the United States. With the stop work order, 62 of those have now been laid off, furloughed or put on reduced hours…We are currently owed in excess of $3 million in current and past due invoices from USAID and State. This is for work that has been completed to the full satisfaction of the government, and we are not receiving payment. USAID has switched off its payment systems, so no payments are being processed. We believe this is illegal. Best estimate right now this is happening across the foreign assistance field. This is a $40 billion field.” – Steve Schmida, Resonance
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“When you’ve already got nine months out the door and you’re expecting money back, and suddenly that’s in question, you really have to think about laying off this staff immediately to stop the bleeding at that point, which is extremely painful. For the municipal and the nonprofit projects that are either ready to go or already have a shovel in the ground, it means they really have to stop and think about whether they want to continue at this point.” – Andy Julow, Regional Development Corporations of Vermont
If allowed to proceed, the order would cause chaos in Vermont. The funding freeze could:
- Freeze funding for Head Start, which provides early childhood education for around 1,200 children in Vermont. The state received around $26.8 million last year for the program.
- Freeze funding for Community Health Centers in Vermont, which supported the state with $25.1+ million in funding for health care in 2023 and served nearly 200,000 patients.
- Freeze funding for more than 10,000 women, infants, and children in Vermont who use WIC to keep from going hungry, as well as stop funding for more than 12,000 Vermont seniors who rely on nutritious food from Meals on Wheels and at senior centers.
- Freeze grant funding from the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Program, which provided $625,000 for our law enforcement in Vermont last year.
- Freeze funding for home heating assistance for nearly 24,000 Vermonters who use the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to stay warm through the winter.
- Freeze funding for 9,000 Vermonters who rely on Section 8 vouchers to keep a roof over their head, and risk shutting down housing and shelter services for unhoused youth.
- Freeze funding for Vermont’s opioid response, which could lose around $5.9 million in funding to prevent, treat and support recovery services.
- Freeze funding for Vermont’s small businesses impacted by disasters, which would lose $30.3 million on small business loans.
- Freeze funding for Violence Against Women Act Grant Funding for Vermont.
- Freeze funding for disaster recovery for Vermont.
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