Legal aid groups’ federal funds at risk
Legal aid organizations across California are bracing for what could be a devastating financial blow following the release of the Trump administration’s draft budget last week.
Alongside its call to halt government spending to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the proposed budget would also eliminate funding to the Legal Services Corp., an independent government agency that sends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to groups providing crucial legal services to low-income Americans.
Nationwide, many legal aid groups rely on grants from the agency to make up significant portions of their budgets each year. Without them, some fear that they’ll have to significantly scale back their operations as they search for other sources of funding. In 2016, Legal Services received $385 million from Congress, 90 percent of which went directly to fund legal aid organizations.
“Right now, a lot of our energy is spent on generating new funds that may offset a loss in federal funds,” said Alex Gulotta, executive director of Bay Area Legal Aid, commonly known as BayLegal, which serves around 60,000 people in the region each year.
The $4.1 million that BayLegal received from Legal Services last year made up more than 31 percent of the organization’s $12.9 million overall budget.
“We’re hoping we can raise money to offset some cuts, but obviously if we were to lose the entire $4 million ... that would be devastating for Bay Area Legal Aid and for the entire access-to-justice infrastructure in the Bay Area,” he said.
Beyond their work in courtrooms, legal aid groups also serve as essential hubs of
information and training for attorneys in private practice that volunteer to take on cases pro bono. A corporate attorney, for example, may have little experience handling landlord-tenant or immigration matters, so legal aid organizations help get them up to speed on the key issues in the case they’ll be handling.
“They basically organize the whole effort. It just wouldn’t happen at all without them,” said Morgan Gilhuly, a San Francisco attorney and managing partner at Barg Coffin Lewis & Trapp. Gilhuly was one of dozens of law firm leaders across the country who sent a letter imploring Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to preserve Legal Services’ funding.
“I can’t think of a lawyer who doesn’t think it’s an essential organization,” Gilhuly said. “It’s inconceivable that we wouldn’t want to fund it.”
California Rural Legal Assistance in Oakland, which provides services to impoverished populations statewide, has already begun to scale back some of its operations in an effort to minimize the impact of cuts to Legal Services, should they become reality.
In addition to layoffs, José Padilla, the organization’s executive director, said that the group has closed its office in Santa Barbara. He hopes to be able to serve Santa Barbara clients from an office in Oxnard, nearly an hour’s drive away.
Legal Services funding makes up between 55 and 60 percent of Rural Legal Assistance’s roughly $13 million budget each year, Padilla said. Eliminating funding for Legal Services would leave his organization “particularly vulnerable,” he said.
“We’re more dependent on the federal dollars, because we can’t access the same types of (funding) resources in rural places as my colleagues in urban spaces,” Padilla said.
Across the state, Legal Services supplied nearly $43.6 million to 11 different legal aid organizations last year. Funding from the federal agency helped resolve 81,966 cases in California in 2015, the most recent year for which the organization has released case data. Legal Services reports that 47 percent of those cases were housing-related.
State funding would not go far to close that gap. The Equal Access Fund, the primary vehicle for state legal aid, distributes about $10 million a year to organizations in California. Last year, the Legislature approved a onetime $5 million increase to the fund.
Salena Copeland, the executive director of the Legal Aid Association of California, said that she and other advocacy organizations are pushing to raise the fund to $30 million next year. That proposal has been taken up once in a state Senate budget subcommittee, Copeland said.
Not everyone is convinced that federal funds should be used to support legal services for low-income individuals.
The Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative policy think tank, released a “blueprint” for a balanced budget in late February that also suggested eliminating funding for Legal Services, saying that “it is not a duty of the federal government to provide (legal) defense in these types of cases.”
“Many state and local governments already provide funding for indigent legal defense and are better equipped to address the needs of those in their communities who rely on these free services,” the Heritage Foundation wrote.
Legal Services President James Sandman, however, remains stridently optimistic that his agency will survive what is expected to be a bruising political battle over the federal budget in the coming weeks.
“Every year for 42 years, Congress has funded us, and I don’t see that changing,” Sandman said. “People understand the importance of providing access to legal assistance to people who can’t afford a lawyer.” Sandman added that he believes his agency enjoys bipartisan support, and cited the fact that Legal Service’s funding has gone up by $10 million a year for the last three years as evidence of that.
“In the budget environment we’ve lived in, to be getting increases like that is a sign of support for our mission,” he said.
The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment.
In the meantime, Gulotta of BayLegal said his team will continue assessing how to keep the money flowing should the tap of funds from Legal Services get cut off.
“You don’t want to take drastic action until you’re sure you have to,” he said. “But it wouldn’t hurt if people decided that now is a good time to send us money.”