About $5 billion in federal money set aside to help people living on the verge of homelessness to pay the rent is running out, and no one has a plan to keep roughly 60,000 renters, more than 15,000 of them in California, from losing their housing after the last dollar is spent.

In a March 6th letter to local public housing authorities, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced the expiration of funding for the Emergency Housing Voucher Program.

A final payment this spring may allow some agencies to keep their emergency programs running into 2026, the letter reads, but housing authorities were advised to move forward with "the expectation that no additional funding from HUD will be forthcoming."

The letter shocked San Diego Housing Commission CEO Lisa Jones She said the commission could conceivably pay its share of the rent for the nearly 400 San Diego renters currently assisted by the program through December.

After that, she saw no obvious way to make up for the missing federal dollars.

The emergency program was never meant to be permanent.

Congress funded the pandemic-era emergency vouchers in 2021 with $5 billion.

Once those funds were spent, the program was meant to end.

The federal housing department was given until 2030 to spend all $5 billion, leading many local officials and housing advocates to assume the program would be funded through the end of the decade.

Winding down the emergency program is the latest in federal housing policy changes enacted by President Donald Trump.

After temporary freezes on all categories of federal funding in late January, the administration has more quietly extinguished select federal housing programs in the months since.

It is not clear whether the end of the emergency program is the latest cut or if it just ran out of money more quickly than expected.

The federal housing department did not respond to CalMatters' repeated emails and voice messages.

For CalMatters, I'm Ben Christopher.