Steve Womack Cost of Living Checks & Balances Arkansas

Steve Womack Toured a Shelter for Homeless Teens and Called It a 'Growing Issue.' Eight Weeks Earlier He Wrote the Bill Cutting Homeless Aid by $256 Million.

Womack chairs the House subcommittee that writes HUD's budget. His FY27 bill cuts homeless assistance grants by $256 million and public housing by $1.3 billion — while finding $875 million for the 2028 Olympics.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 09, 2026

On Monday, July 27, 2026, Steve Womack toured a new emergency shelter for homeless and runaway youth in Mulberry, Arkansas. He called teen homelessness a "growing issue" in the state.

He would know. He's the one writing the budget.

Womack's actual job

This isn't a congressman who happens to have an opinion about homelessness. Steve Womack is the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development — the subcommittee that writes the annual funding bill for the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development. Homeless assistance grants, public housing, Section 8, homeownership counseling, lead paint removal: those line items are his line items. He picks the numbers.

On June 3, 2026, he presented his Fiscal Year 2027 bill to the full Appropriations Committee. Here is how he described it in his own remarks:

"The housing title of this bill addresses affordability concerns and ensures a responsible safety net for our most vulnerable citizens—the elderly, disabled, our veterans, and the working poor."

Now here is what's in it.

What the bill does

The committee advanced the bill on a party-line vote on June 4, 2026. According to the committee's ranking Democrats, Womack's bill:

Cuts Homeless Assistance Grants by $256 million — the exact program that funds the kind of shelter he toured. Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro said the cut rolls "back aid for the more than 745,000 people experiencing homelessness, and preventing tens of thousands of people from moving off the street into stable homes."
Cuts public housing by $1.3 billion, which DeLauro said "will cause cuts to rent and utility payments for some 2,700 housing agencies across the country and put hundreds of thousands of low-income households at risk of eviction."
Cuts fair housing enforcement by 64%. Ranking Member James Clyburn said the bill "walks away from enforcement of longstanding civil rights laws that protect housing choice."
Cuts housing counseling assistance in half — the program that helps families buy a first home.
Eliminates funding for lead-based paint hazards in nearly 700,000 low-income housing units already deemed at risk, and eliminates eviction prevention grants.

Overall the bill comes in at $92.2 billion — $10.7 billion below the previous year, a number Womack states plainly in his own remarks. Counting housing revenues, transportation and housing programs together take a cut of nearly $8.8 billion, or 8 percent.

The $875 million he did find

Womack's bill isn't short of money for everything. It's short of money for housing.

In the same speech, the chairman announced $875 million to prepare for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, on top of $94 million the year before. He announced $732 million for shipbuilding and maritime programs, including $165 million for the Merchant Marine Academy. He announced $4 billion for FAA facilities and equipment.

The Olympics line alone is more than three times the size of the homeless assistance cut.

None of those are crazy things to fund. That's not the point. The point is that a chairman with $92.2 billion to allocate decided that a $256 million cut to homelessness aid was necessary, and $875 million for the Olympics was not optional. Those were choices, and he made both of them.

How he describes the cut

Here's the part worth reading twice. This is Womack in his June 3 remarks, on the homelessness money:

"The package provides $4.2 billion for homeless assistance grants, including $3.8 billion for the Continuum of Care program—reaffirming this subcommittee's bipartisan agreement to ensure certainty for local providers while returning competition to the program."

Notice what's missing. He gives you the total. He does not tell you it's $256 million less than last year. "Reaffirming this subcommittee's bipartisan agreement" and "ensuring certainty for local providers" is how you describe a cut when you don't want to say the word.

He does the same thing with rental assistance, calling $58 billion for Section 8 and related programs "a fiscally responsible level." And he closes by saying the whole bill "implements the fiscal discipline and regulatory relief that the American people demand."

Nobody in Mulberry demanded this.

Then he showed up for the photo

Eight weeks after presenting that bill, Womack was in the River Valley touring an emergency shelter for kids with nowhere to sleep and telling a reporter that teen homelessness is a growing problem in Arkansas.

He's right that it's growing. He is also the single member of Congress most directly responsible for how much federal money goes to fixing it — and he just moved that number down.

This is a specific kind of dishonesty, and it isn't unique to him. We've written about Steve Hilton's plan to address homelessness by making it illegal to be outside, and about Bill Hagerty's bill to evict 37,000 American kids from public housing by calling their families a loophole. The through-line is the same: express concern in public, cut the program in committee.

What else Womack has been busy cutting

The housing bill isn't an outlier. It's the pattern.

Womack voted for Trump's budget bill, which will leave 28,000 more people in his district without health insurance. In January 2026 he was one of all four Arkansas Republicans who voted against extending the health care subsidies that keep premiums down. He stood by while DOGE cut more than $1.7 million in grants out of his own district, money that had been going to the University of Arkansas and to local nonprofits. And he was one of the Republicans who took food assistance away from 4.5 million people.

A teenager sleeping in a car in Crawford County is downstream of every one of those votes.

The bottom line

Steve Womack has been in Congress since 2011. He hasn't held an in-person town hall in seven years — now he does telephone town halls with pre-screened questions instead.

So when he shows up in Mulberry to tour a shelter and tell a reporter that teen homelessness is a "growing issue," there's nobody in the room to ask him the obvious question:

You wrote the budget. Why did you cut it?