Jamestown officials are expressing their concern with President Donald Trump’s deep cuts to the Community Development Block Grant and HOME programs.

The city is scheduled to receive a little more than $1.4 million from the programs in 2025.

“These funding sources are absolutely essential to our work in Jamestown,” said Crystal Surdyk, city development director. “Without HOME and CDBG, we lose the ability to directly invest in our neighborhoods, assist residents and their families, and support community-driven revitalization. This is not just a budget decision–this is a decision that affects real people, real families, and the future of cities like ours.”

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and Senate minority leader, said Thursday during a news conference that Trump’s budget cuts more than $4.2 billion previously budgeted for the CDBG and HOME programs by eliminating the programs altogether.

“Trump’s budget proposal is an all-out assault on hardworking Upstate New York families and seniors and the programs our communities rely on most – from totally eliminating funding to help our seniors keep the heat on during cold winters, to slashing funding to fight the opioid crisis, to cutting funding for rural air service in the North Country, to decimating the CDBG and HOME grant programs that deliver tens of millions of dollars every year for cities from Buffalo to Rochester to Albany to reduce housing costs and create local jobs. The chaos and cruelty of these cuts to incredibly effective, popular and essential federal programs show no one is safe from government by chainsaw,” Schumer said. “Donald Trump’s budget is dead on arrival in the Senate, and all NY House Republicans should stand up and be vocal against these cuts, which are so damaging to Upstate NY, and get them reversed and removed from this misguided budget proposal.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has proposed ending the CDBG program. Back in 2017, Trump’s first budget proposal called for abolishing the four-decade-old program, saying it’s not well targeted to poor areas and hasn’t demonstrated results. Critics have long said the block grant program is fraught with wasteful spending and has strayed from its original purpose of providing housing assistance and economic development in poor communities. Audits conducted by HUD’s Office of Inspector General turned up problems in at least a dozen communities in 2016 that were awarded CDBG money. Among the concerns: millions of dollars not being used appropriately and weak accounting and procurement procedures.

That was the lead-up to Trump’s decision to eliminate the programs then as well as foreign aid programs aimed at offsetting more spending for the military and border security. A number of Republican lawmakers opposed cutting the programs and they remained largely untouched until now.

The block grant program was created in 1974 under President Gerald Ford. CDBG projects are required to meet certain criteria — chief among them that they are targeted to lower-income areas. But local officials have flexibility about how and where to use the money.