The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA, announced plans to lay off 284 employees, nearly half of its 600-person workforce. The agency said notices will go out on April 30, 2026, with the layoffs taking effect on June 30, 2026. When the cuts are complete, LAHSA will operate with roughly 320 staff.
LAHSA is the joint powers authority created by the City and County of Los Angeles in 1993 to coordinate the region's homeless response. It administers roughly $800 million in federal, state, county, and city funding each year and oversees the contracts that flow to shelter operators, outreach teams, and housing providers across LA County.
The cuts are the direct result of Los Angeles County pulling its funding out of LAHSA. In 2025, the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to redirect hundreds of millions of dollars from LAHSA into a new county-run homelessness department. The decision followed a series of audits that concluded LAHSA had failed to track how earlier homelessness dollars were spent and could not account for outcomes on a client-by-client basis.
The restructuring is happening at the same time Mayor Karen Bass's proposed city budget cuts countywide homeless spending by 17.3 percent, a reduction of roughly $165.2 million. LAHSA has said it is working with the city, the county, and labor partners to place affected employees into the new county department and other roles where possible, but the scale of the reduction is the largest in the agency's history.
This is one of the largest public-sector layoffs of 2026 so far and a signal that the homelessness funding model in the country's second-largest metro is being rebuilt from the ground up. How it is executed will shape service delivery for tens of thousands of unhoused Angelenos during the transition between agencies.