It’s been almost a year since President Trump began his second term. His administration’s changes in policies and funding have led to big changes in Charlotte in housing, health care, food security, and education. Reporter Jim Morrill took stock of the changes as part of the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative. He joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry.
Marshall Terry: Let’s start with that first one, housing. What are the policy changes and what’s at stake in Charlotte?
Jim Morrill: The big change is that the federal government essentially ended a program called Housing First. That's based on the notion that housing should be a prerequisite for people dealing with addictions and mental illness and not just a reward for overcoming them.
Advocates like Karen Pelletier of Mecklenburg County government say the Housing First program has a long track record of success in getting people off the streets and into stable homes. The model that they use is getting people into homes and then providing wraparound services in terms of addiction treatment or mental health counseling, whatever else they need.
The new policy, by contrast, would enact work requirements and require treatment for addiction and mental health counseling before people can get housing, or at least long-term housing. This is a big change. Pelletier told me that there are more than 500 people in Mecklenburg County alone who currently live in housing under the Housing First programs.
Nationwide, of course, there are a lot more. There's almost a couple 100,000, I think. She said she's afraid, and other advocates are afraid, that this would put people back on the streets.
Terry: On to health care now. How is it being affected? And how does the General Assembly's failure to pass a state budget for North Carolina factor in?
Morrill: There's a lot of ways that it's being affected. I talked to Raynard Washington, the county's public health director. He's lost more than a dozen employees to budget cuts and program changes, and that includes several disease investigation specialists who specialize in HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. Some of those jobs were restored, but the interruption in the jobs led to delays and some investigations not going forward.
One leader of an LGBTQ group told me that they're poised to see the numbers of HIV cases increase in a way they haven't seen in years.
Another way is the growing vaccine skepticism from people like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Raynard Washington said he's seen evidence of this. For example, the number of pertussis cases, or whooping cough, has jumped from around two a year to around 70 in the past year. Whooping cough and pertussis can be dealt with with a childhood immunization that people apparently aren't getting.
Then, of course, there's Medicaid, and that affects a lot of people in Mecklenburg. One out of three Mecklenburg County residents, over 400,000, receive Medicaid benefits. County officials say as many as 31,000 of them could lose benefits under the new federal work requirements. That could grow to more than 80,000 Medicaid beneficiaries who lose benefits if North Carolina's General Assembly doesn't do something about the Medicaid expansion program. That's problematic, especially since the state doesn't have a budget right now and there's been no movement that I've seen of legislators trying to take steps to protect the program.
Then, of course, there's just the healthcare programs for people who are covered under Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act. In Mecklenburg County, that's more than 135,000 people, and those people could see premiums double or triple or whatever when the tax subsidies expire at the end of this month. There's a lot of people who could be affected.
Terry: And food security? We all saw the turmoil around SNAP benefits recently. What’s happening there?
Morrill: In Mecklenburg County, again, there's a lot of people who depend on SNAP benefits, 137,000 SNAP recipients in Mecklenburg County.
The problems with this here go even deeper than the shutdown. Nourish Up, which is a food pantry here that helps a lot of people, they’ve seen a 50% drop in help from the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which is a federal program. Another federal program that would have provided $11 million to food banks around the state has ended.
This year, Congress added work requirements to the SNAP program and shifted some cost to the states and counties. Officials say the work requirements alone could result in 17,000 Mecklenburg County residents who lose benefits under the SNAP programs. That's a lot of people.
Terry: Finally, what effects are these changes having on education in Charlotte?
Morrill: Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools lost almost $7 million in grants to support teacher development and recruitment this year because they were perceived to foster DEI. DEI is something that the school has to deal with in a way because the board chair of CMS told me that they have to deal with diversity in a district where 146 languages are spoken. So diversity is something that you can't ignore.
Stephanie Sneed, the board chairman, told me that her more immediate concerns are the well-being of the 44,000 Hispanic students in CMS.
She said that when federal agents were in town for “Operation Charlotte's Web,” which you remember caused a lot of turmoil in November, some kids came to school with handwritten notes attached to their book bags that said ‘I'm a citizen.’ So she's worried about those people, too.
Terry: What’s the mood among non-profit and education leaders going into 2026?
Morrill: They're clearly worried, and some expect they haven't seen the worst yet, the cuts will continue, and that things will kind of build upon themselves and not get a whole lot better. At the same time, there's a kind of resilience in the nonprofit community. As one nonprofit leader at United Way told me, ‘we're a tough bunch and an optimistic bunch, or we wouldn't be doing this.’ I think you're going to see them plowing ahead the best they can with what resources they can muster.
