This literally has me shaking in anger.

When Shawn Pleasants first heard that the federal government was tearing up almost two decades of homelessness policy, it sent chills up his spine.

Pleasants, 58, was brought right back to the moment he lost his car and was forced to start living on Los Angeles’s streets. “That feeling of, you could never be safe – there’s no more future,” he said.

He’d spend a decade living on the streets of Koreatown, until the day he and his husband received a section 8 voucher from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care (CoC) program.

Continuum of Care is the federal government’s flagship program to support state and local governments and non-profits in funding housing and other services for individuals, like Pleasants, at risk of or experiencing homelessness.

The program is built on the principle that getting unhoused people housed can get them on a path to address other challenges. It has worked for Pleasants, who has had an apartment for the past six years, and more than 100,000 other Americans per year.

But in the past months, the Trump administration has tried to issue sweeping policy shifts to the program, some of which it has since reversed, others of which have been temporarily halted by the courts. The chaos has sown widespread confusion among local governments, providers and people unsure whether they will face eviction in the winter months.

“It has been a massively chaotic and disruptive moment for our organization and all of the local governments and non-profit homeless service providers that we partner with,” said Amanda Wehrman, the director of strategy and evaluation at Homebase, a non-profit that provides technical assistance to many CoCs.“It’s been really chaotic both in terms of the stops and starts, the uncertainty about funding, the inability to think strategically about what comes next.”