Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

15. Department of Housing and Urban Development · Notable · Needs Congress

Prioritize mobility vouchers over site-based rental assistance subsidies

Not started

511 15. Department of Housing and Urban Development

“Additionally, enhanced statutory authorities for local autonomy should extend to the prioritizing of federal rental assistance subsidies that emphasize choice and mobility in housing voucher subsidies over static, site-based subsidies and provide authority for maximal flexibility to direct PHA land sales that involve the existing stock of public housing units.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing prioritizes tenant-based assistance over site-based assistance. The word "mobility" does not appear in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and the Act's rental-assistance provisions push both ways: § 405 makes vouchers easier for landlords to accept by deeming units inspected under other programs to satisfy § 8(o)(8), while § 212 makes the Rental Assistance Demonstration permanent and raises its conversion cap from 455,000 to 555,000 units — converting public housing to project-based assistance, which is site-based. The administration's own proposal is a third thing again: the FY2026 discretionary request would fold tenant-based rental assistance, public housing, project-based rental assistance and the elderly and disabled programs together into a single State Rental Assistance Block Grant, which devolves both kinds of subsidy rather than choosing between them, and a Budget that proposes something else for the same object does not move the ask. Checked again on 2026-09-06 against Notice PIH 2026-23, the demolition and disposition notice that moved #1438: it is the nearest in-window instrument to this half of the sentence, because repositioning public housing onto the Section 8 platform is what replaces a site-based subsidy with a tenant-based one, and it does **not** prioritize tenant-based assistance. Tenant-protection vouchers are not automatic on approval — a PHA must apply separately under the annual Housing Choice Voucher funding notice — and the notice **caps** TPV awards at 25 percent of occupied units for dispositions justified by improved efficiency or effectiveness. The one place it tilts toward tenant-based assistance is a prohibition, not a preference: a PHA "may not place PBVs at an existing structure that has been approved under section 18 pursuant to the functional obsolescence justification".

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • A Federal Register full-text search for “mobility voucher” over the whole window returns zero documents.
  • The PHA land-sale half of the same sentence is #1438, which did move administratively. Both halves now rest partly on Notice PIH 2026-23, and two asks resting on one document must each say what that document does to their own Quote: for #1438 it is executive action routing around the statutory authority Congress has not granted (attempted); for this ask it is an application framework that rations rather than prioritizes tenant-based assistance (not started).
Action
expand
Object
choice and mobility housing voucher subsidies
ID
1437