The Department of Housing and Urban Development removed information about gender in a database used by homeless shelters who receive funding from HUD’s Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs, shelter operators told NOTUS.
Three operators said that as of this week they are no longer able to access the information through the database, known as Sage. It’s been standard for them to use the database to submit data about the communities they serve as part of their funding requirements.
When users attempt to reach Sage, one shelter operator who receives HUD funding told NOTUS, they instead just see a message reading: “Per Presidential Executive Order, HUD is addressing the directives related to Gender Identity. All current and archived gender data submitted in [Annual Performance Reports] and [Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Reports] is no longer available in Sage.”
A spokesperson for the Housing and Urban Development Department did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
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The removal of data, which shelters described as a major shift, comes in the context of the Trump administration pursuing policies targeted at transgender people, including at HUD. Last week, Secretary Scott Turner’s first major policy announcement was a directive to stop enforcement of the 2016 Equal Access Rule, which would limit transgender people’s access to shelters that rely on federal government funding.
“We know that individuals identifying as transgender or nonbinary are susceptible to higher rates of violence and potential harm, and this data helps inform how we deploy resources to prevent this life-threatening harm,” said Annie Hyrila, director of development and communications at the Atlanta-based Partners for HOME, after she said they discovered her organization had lost access to the dashboard that contains the information.
Three HUD-funded facilities told NOTUS the Sage datasets organized by gender went offline on Wednesday.
Sage is used by Continuum of Care facilities and the thousands of housing providers who receive federal block grants to keep track of the populations they serve.
Alexandra Curd, a policy attorney at Lambda Legal, said the data within Sage is essential for housing providers to understand how marginalized communities are accessing services.
“The people who are being targeted and will be hurt most by this [are] clearly trans, gender nonconforming and gender-expansive people,” Curd told NOTUS.
Brian Postlewait, chief operating officer of the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, questioned the point of the change and what it could mean for what will follow.
“It alone will not make any immediate impact on serving people,” he said. “But what’s next? What good does this serve? Ultimately, it’s important to know why we have homelessness in this country.”
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Amelia Benavides-Colón is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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