Among the losers in this year’s budget fight could be the city’s office focused on homelessness.
Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2027, which she released in April, includes cuts for the office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services (DMHHS) and the Department of Human Services (DHS). These will be felt severely by D.C.’s Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH), Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Wayne Turnage testified at a May 11 hearing.
Under the proposed budget, the office would have just one staff member to coordinate meetings across homeless services and create and implement the city’s new plan to end homelessness. The cut to the ICH comes in a budget that also proposes reducing homeless services programs and permanent supportive housing.
The ICH is the sole office in the District dedicated exclusively to homelessness. The council brings together advocates, homeless service providers, representatives from local government, and community members who have experienced homelessness to inform and guide policy on homelessness. The ICH runs weekly meetings to discuss the state of homelessness in the city and coordinate solutions.
The ICH is responsible for completing D.C.‘s “Homeward” plans, which have governed the District’s response to homelessness during Bowser’s time as mayor. While the latest plan, Homeward DC 2.0, expired in September 2025, the ICH has yet to issue Homeward DC 3.0, partially due to a staffing shortage.
The ICH has not had a full staff in years, and had only one employee for several months last year during the mayor’s hiring freeze. When short on staff, the office has sometimes had to scale back on meetings and delay legally mandated reports on homelessness in the District.
The proposed fiscal year 2027 budget eliminates seven full-time positions, including five that are currently filled. If the budget passes as is, the only remaining employee would be executive director Theresa Silla, who has been the council’s only consistent staff member since 2021.
This comes just months after Rachel Molly Joseph, DMHHS chief of staff, testified ICH had brought on new staff to “kickstart” the council’s update to its annual priorities. (As of January, the office was still operating on its 2024 priorities.) However, this new budget would eliminate all of these positions.
“What changed was the lack of dollars to pay for the positions,” Turnage testified at a May 11 Committee on Health budget oversight hearing, referencing cuts at DHS, which partially funds ICH. “The agency that funds those positions is under significant stress, and given the other challenges they had. So we, at the end of the day, decided that we should do as much as we can to preserve as much as we can of the funding agency, and as a result those positions were eliminated.”
The city created three of the new staff positions with the possibility of them being short-term. The staff will work through September to support the completion of Homeward D.C. 3.0. At the May 11 meeting, District officials said they expect to present the plan in June, before the proposed layoffs.
Joseph testified that two vacant positions within DMHHS could be repurposed to support ICH efforts if needed. Silla, the ICH’s executive director, did not testify at the May 11 Committee on Health budget oversight hearing and did not respond to a request for comment.
Turnage stressed the struggle these budget cuts would create for Silla and her work at the ICH. “I don’t want to dismiss the difficulty that the ICH director will have in continuing to do the kind of work that she has expertly provided,” he said. “It will be a challenge with no staff. And frankly, we will have to huddle with her to see how we can best move forward in the absence of the support she customarily has.”
This article originally appeared in Street Sense’s May 20, 2026 edition.
