Moments after Daniris Espinal walked into her new apartment in Brooklyn, she prayed. In ensuing nights, she would awaken and touch the walls for reassurance — finding in them a relief that turned to tears over her morning coffee.

Those walls were possible through a federal program that pays rent for some 60,000 families and individuals fleeing homelessness or domestic violence. Espinal was fleeing both.

But the program, Emergency Housing Vouchers, is running out of money — and quickly.

Funding is expected to be used up by the end of next year, according to a letter from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and obtained by The Associated Press. That would leave tens of thousands across the country scrambling to pay their rent.

It would be among the largest one-time losses of rental assistance in the U.S., analysts say, and the ensuing evictions could churn these people — after several years of rebuilding their lives — back onto the street or back into abusive relationships.

“To have it stop would completely upend all the progress that they’ve made,” said Sonya Acosta, policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which researches housing assistance.

“And then you multiply that by 59,000 households,” she said.

The program, launched in 2021 by then-President Joe Biden as part of the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, was allocated $5 billion to help pull people out of homelessness, domestic violence and human trafficking.

People from San Francisco to Dallas to Tallahassee, Florida, were enrolled — among them children, seniors and veterans — with the expectation that funding would last until the end of the decade.

But with the ballooning cost of rent, that $5 billion will end far faster.

Last month, HUD sent letters to groups dispersing the money, advising them to “manage your EHV program with the expectation that no additional funding from HUD will be forthcoming.”

The program’s future rests with Congress, which could decide to add money as it crafts the federal budget. But it’s a relatively expensive prospect at a time when Republicans, who control Congress, are dead set on cutting federal spending to afford tax cuts.

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, who championed the program four years ago, is pushing for another $8 billion infusion.

But the organizations lobbying Republican and Democratic lawmakers to reup the funding told the AP they aren’t optimistic. Four GOP lawmakers who oversee the budget negotiations did not respond to AP requests for comment.

“We’ve been told it’s very much going to be an uphill fight,” said Kim Johnson, the public policy manager at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Espinal and her two daughters, aged 4 and 19, are living on one of those vouchers in a three-bedroom apartment with an over $3,000 monthly rent — an amount extremely difficult to cover without the voucher.

Four years ago, Espinal fought her way out of a marriage where her husband controlled her decisions, from seeing her family and friends to leaving the apartment to go shopping.

When she spoke up, her husband said she was wrong, or in the wrong or crazy.

Isolated and in the haze of postpartum depression, she didn’t know what to believe. “Every day, little by little, I started to feel not like myself,” she said. “It felt like my mind wasn’t mine.”

When notices arrived in March 2021 seeking about $12,000 in back rent, it was a shock. Espinal had quit her job at her husband’s urging and he had promised to cover family expenses.

Police reports documenting her husband’s bursts of anger were enough for a judge to give her custody of their daughter in 2022, Espinal said.

But her future was precarious: She was alone, owed thousands of dollars in back rent and had no income to pay it or support her newborn and teenage daughters.

Financial aid to prevent evictions during the pandemic kept Espinal afloat, paying her back rent and keeping the family out of shelters. But it had an expiration date.

Around that time, the Emergency Housing Vouchers program was rolled out, targeting people in Espinal’s situation.

A “leading cause of family homelessness is domestic violence” in New York City, said Gina Cappuccitti, director of housing access and stability services at New Destiny Housing, a nonprofit that has connected 700 domestic violence survivors to the voucher program.

Espinal was one of those 700, and moved into her Brooklyn apartment in 2023.

The relief went beyond finding a secure place to live, she said. “I gained my worth, my sense of peace, and I was able to rebuild my identity.”

Now, she said, she’s putting aside money in case of the worst. Because, “that’s my fear, losing control of everything that I’ve worked so hard for.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• In today’s CEO Daily: Shawn Tully on the U.S.’s use of non-tariff barriers.
• The big story: Musk under pressure to leave DOGE as Tesla becomes tainted with politics.
• The markets: The dollar and the S&P 500 are down but Asia looks OK.
• Analyst notes from Apollo on recession, Oxford Economics on tariffs, and Goldman Sachs on stocks.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. For weeks I’ve been digging into the tariff war reverberating around the globe and affecting virtually every industry there is. To me, a major mystery of the Trump tariff crusade is this: The “Liberation Day” reciprocal duties he’s threatening are completely disconnected from what other nations are charging the U.S. on our exports. In virtually all cases, Trump’s tariffs are multiple times larger. How does he justify this giant gulf? The president claims we’re getting “ripped off” not by excessive tariffs but blatant “non-tariff barriers” (NTBs), such as quotas and technical standards that systematically block our goods from foreign markets, while we naively open America to the “cheaters” who lock us out. But the data show a different story. When I dug in, it became clear that the U.S. is utilizing many of the strategies that we’ve slammed trading partners for enforcing. Here’s what leaders should know about the policies underlying this chaotic debate:

A highly respected guide to where different countries’ trade policies stand on the spectrum from open to restrictive is the International Trade Barrier Index compiled by the Tholos Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank focusing on tax reform and policy research. For 2024, the Tholos data placed the U.S. as the 24th most protectionist economy in the world from a list of 88 countries, based on the number of restraints on trade each nation imposes. Overall, we’re about 10% above average in overall restrictions—on a roster featuring lots of bad actors.

NTBs come in a wide variety of forms. They encompass such practices as quotas, technical standards, and packaging, labeling, licensing, and safety requirements. In a 2024 study, the St. Louis Federal Reserve reported that across 15 manufacturing sectors, NTBs covered well over two-thirds of the imports of components, commodities, and finished products. 

The U.S. is an avid user of a protectionist tool called the “tariff-rate quota.” Despite its name, the TRQ is really a non-tariff barrier because it doesn’t actually impose duties. TRQs typically allow products or commodities to enter the country duty-free to a certain level, and once the imports hit that bogey, trigger prohibitively high tariffs, effectively halting the flows of rival products and commodities from abroad, and enforcing a fixed quota to shield domestic producers. A top example: the sugar market, where, by law, the USDA rules restrict production to keep minimum prices generally higher than on the international markets. “The U.S. government is the leader of a nationwide sugar cartel,” a Cato Institute study declared.You can read the full story about how NTBs work and which industries are the most protected here. — Shawn Tully

More news below.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth created another Signal messaging chat that included his wife and brother where he shared similar details of a March military airstrike against Yemen’s Houthi militants that were sent in another chain with top Trump administration leaders, The New York Times reported.

A person familiar with the contents and those who received the messages, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, confirmed the second chat to The Associated Press.

The second chat on Signal — which is a commercially available app not authorized to be used to communicate sensitive or classified national defense information — included 13 people, the person said. They also confirmed the chat was dubbed “Defense ‘ Team Huddle.”

The New York Times reported that the group included Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, who is a former Fox News producer, and his brother Phil Hegseth, who was hired at the Pentagon as a Department of Homeland Security liaison and senior adviser. Both have traveled with the defense secretary and attended high-level meetings.

The White House late Sunday dismissed the report as a “non-story,” suggesting that disgruntled former Pentagon employees were spreading false claims.

“No matter how many times the legacy media tries to resurrect the same non-story, they can’t change the fact that no classified information was shared,” said Anna Kelly, White House deputy press secretary. “Recently-fired ‘leakers’ are continuing to misrepresent the truth to soothe their shattered egos and undermine the President’s agenda, but the administration will continue to hold them accountable.”

The revelation of the additional chat group brought fresh criticism against Hegseth and President Donald Trump’s wider administration after it has failed to take action so far against the top national security officials who discussed plans for the military strike in Signal.

“The details keep coming out. We keep learning how Pete Hegseth put lives at risk. But Trump is still too weak to fire him,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X. “Pete Hegseth must be fired.”

The first chat, set up by national security adviser Mike Waltz, included a number of Cabinet members and came to light because Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was added to the group.

The contents of that chat, which The Atlantic published, shows that Hegseth listed weapons systems and a timeline for the attack on Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen last month.

The National Security Council and a Pentagon spokesperson did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment about the additional chat group.

Hegseth has previously contended that no classified information or war plans were shared in the chat with the journalist.

The Times reported Sunday that the second chat had the same warplane launch times that the first chat included. Multiple former and current officials have said sharing those operational details before a strike would have certainly been classified and their release could have put pilots in danger.

Hegseth’s use of Signal and the sharing of such plans are under investigation by the Defense Department’s acting inspector general. It came at the request of the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee — Republican Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi and ranking Democratic member Jack Reed of Rhode Island.

Reed urged the IG late Sunday to probe the reported second Signal chat as well, saying that Hegseth “must immediately explain why he reportedly texted classified information that could endanger American servicemembers’ lives.”

“I have grave concerns about Secretary Hegseth’s ability to maintain the trust and confidence of U.S. servicemembers and the Commander-in-Chief,” he added.

The new revelations come amid further turmoil at the Pentagon. Four officials in Hegseth’s inner circle departed last week as the Pentagon conducts a widespread investigation for information leaks.

Dan Caldwell, a Hegseth aide; Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg; and Darin Selnick, Hegseth’s deputy chief of staff, were escorted out of the Pentagon.

While the three initially had been placed on leave pending the investigation, a joint statement shared by Caldwell on X on Saturday said the three “still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with.”

Caldwell was the staff member designated as Hegseth’s point person in the Signal chat with Trump Cabinet members.

Former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot also announced he was resigning last week, unrelated to the leaks. The Pentagon said, however, that Ullyot was asked to resign.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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