Since the Nixon era, Congress has funded free legal aid for those with low incomes. 

In 1974, it created a nonprofit, the Legal Services Corporation, to channel federal funding to local legal aid nonprofits. There, attorneys and paralegals help veterans apply for disability, domestic violence survivors secure child custody and renters stave off wrongful evictions.

Now, the White House is urging Congress to shut down the program, alarming those who believe it is necessary for justice to be accessible to people of all income levels. The president’s proposed budget says sunsetting the program is “part of the Administration’s plans to move the Nation towards fiscal responsibility and to redefine the proper role of the Federal Government.” 

Such a move would drastically impact every Texas county, which is covered by either Lone Star Legal Aid, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid and Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas. The federal funding covers almost half of these organizations’ budgets, and experts suggest the cuts would limit essential services to hundreds of thousands of Texans. 

Leaders in the legal aid community fear that rural areas would be hit hardest, since the first offices to close would likely be in less populated regions. Studies over the years also suggest that when people don’t receive legal aid, they may face additional economic hardships, such as an increased need for healthcare.

Currently, the budget for fiscal year 2026 is being finalized in Congress, and preliminary discussions in the House and Senate appear divided over the fate of legal aid. 

Neither chamber has gone as far as the White House proposed. While the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to keep funding for the Legal Services Corporation essentially flat, the House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee has proposed slashing it by nearly half, to $300 million from $560 million. 

The budget will have to move through several more votes and rounds of negotiation before it is approved.

Nathan Hecht, a Republican who served as a Texas Supreme Court justice for over three decades and chief justice for 11 years until early 2025, called legal aid “essential to the rule of law.”

“You can’t have a pay-to-play justice system,” he said. “You promise justice to people, and when they get to the courthouse door, you slam it in their face because they don’t have enough to buy a ticket? The concept of justice is that it’s equal to everyone.”

What is legal aid?

Take, for instance, the example of Houstonian Arletha Joseph. She believed the Houston Housing Authority made a mistake when it terminated her housing subsidy, making her unable to afford an apartment. The agency denied her a hearing, so her only avenue to address the situation was the courts.

But it wasn’t as though she could pay a lawyer. A stroke in 2020 had left her unable to continue working at the Burlington Coat Factory, court records show; she was homeless before receiving a housing voucher. 

But a search for resources led her to Lone Star Legal Aid, which serves households earning less than 125% the poverty line for free. A lawyer helped her sue, and the authority settled without admitting guilt, restoring her voucher and stability. 

In 2023, legal aid organizations closed 60,000 cases for low-income Texans, according to the Legal Services Corporation. Since many of those cases involve families, those cases benefited even more people — 41,000 veterans, 12,000 seniors and 20,000 domestic violence survivors, along with their children. 

And Hecht explained that legal aid goes beyond the courts. People often need help with basic legal issues like applying for benefits. He recalled a Korean War vet who had a mobile home on two lots. The vet called the county and asked if he could get a homestead exemption on the lots. He was told he could have the exemption on one lot, but not the other. 

But when someone recommended calling legal aid, the lawyer knew he was entitled to an exemption to both and knew how to explain it to the county.

“It took the lawyer 15 minutes to talk to him and 15 minutes to talk to the county,” Hecht said. “And they got him the exemption.” 

Historically bipartisan cause

Before legal aid became a government function, certain communities, such as New York City’s German Immigrants’ Society starting in 1876, would pool together to provide legal services to those in need. Such organizations had limited resources and only covered limited areas, and during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, legal aid became a prong of the newly established Office of Economic Opportunity. 

In that program, legal aid lawyers took on high-profile cases involving government agencies and major businesses, and helped create changes in federal housing legislation and legislation protecting farm workers. But those legal battles drew a political backlash, and the Office of Economic Opportunity was not a priority for the next president. In 1974, Congress created the Legal Services Corporation. As a nonprofit, it was insulated from the White House, and Congress could decide what types of advocacy legal aid organizations could do. 

Since then, legislative battles have erupted over the types of cases that legal aid organizations can represent. For example, when the Legal Services Corporation was created, legal aid organizations were not allowed to represent clients over school desegregation or being selected for the draft. Today, they’re also not allowed to file class action lawsuits or to provide information on how to organize politically.

The program currently channels more than $45 million to legal aid in Texas every year. Ronald S. Flagg, chief executive of the Legal Services Corporation, said that 40% of the funding for Lone Star Legal Aid, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid and Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas comes from the federal program, with other money coming from state, local and philanthropic sources.

“Any organization, if you lose 40% of your revenue, that’s going to have a dramatic impact on your operations,” Flagg said. 

The Legal Services Corporation has put together a calculator estimating how many people would be impacted by different-sized cuts to the program’s budget. If the proposed $300 million budget is passed, it projects that 224,000 fewer people in Texas would be helped every year.

“Let me put that in context,” he said. “Legal aid organizations today including those in Texas (already) turn away roughly half of the eligible people that make it to their door.” To meet the current need for legal aid, the budget would have to increase significantly.

U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat, went to law school to become a legal aid lawyer because her time as a social worker revealed how much hardship was created by a lack of legal representation. 

“People being kicked out of nursing homes because they didn’t know they had the right to appeal,” she said. “Going through (domestic violence) and economic hardships because they didn’t have a lawyer to get that divorce and get that protective order.” 

As the house determines the future of legal aid, she said she supported funding legal aid because “people need access to the courts.”

“I have asked Congressional appropriators to protect funding for the Legal Services Corporation and to protect funding for programs that people across our community rely on,” said U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a democrat, in an emailed statement.

Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, republicans, did not respond to requests for comment. 

The chief executive of Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas, Maria Thomas-Jones, said her organization would face “hard decisions” if the Legal Services Corporation lost funding. “One of the things to look at is where we have staff and where we can no longer afford to keep staff.” 

“Rural communities would be hit the quickest and the hardest,” said Hannah Allison, director of strategic initiatives at Texas RioGrand Legal Aid. 

She said the impact would not only be felt by the people they serve directly but also by the greater community. Her nonprofit receives calls from people who suspect something is wrong but aren’t sure of what to do, such as veterans who have lost their benefits and elderly victims of financial fraud. If the problem is not sorted out by legal aid, people can become homeless, end up needing more health or mental health resources or lean more heavily on other public resources.

“Legal aid is part of the infrastructure of all these social services,” Allison said. “If that cog is taken out, you see that everywhere.”

View this article in the Houston Chronicle.