A federal judge on Wednesday blocked a plan by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to overhaul funding for fair housing programs, ordering the agency to distribute funds using the framework it used the previous year.

The order comes as the result of a lawsuit filed in July by the Massachusetts Fair Housing Center and the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), which had sought a temporary restraining order and declaratory and injunctive relief.

The HUD plan “would have radically altered” the 39-year-old Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP), housing advocates say, potentially defunding more than 100 private, community-based nonprofit fair housing enforcement organizations. Collectively, those organizations handle about 75% of housing discrimination complaints filed in the U.S.

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“I find the Department’s reasons for the FHOI NOFO are pretextual,” Judge Myong Joun of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote in a memorandum of decision.

The judge also rejected HUD’s explanation that the plan would modernize and strengthen the FHIP program, writing that the rationale “belies credulity” because the proposal contained only five awards and excluded organizations with annual budgets below $5 million — a threshold that “excludes nearly all existing nonprofit fair housing organizations.”

Lisa Rice, NFHA’s president and CEO, said HUD’s plan would have shut out the organizations fighting housing discrimination.

“HUD tried to shut the doors of the front-line groups who fight housing injustice, and today a federal court emphatically said ‘no,’” Rice said.

“This ruling means the people who answer that call are still going to be there to answer it and serve people desperately seeking protection from unlawful housing discrimination,” she added.

Vineeth Hemavathi, executive director of the Massachusetts Fair Housing Center, noted that the organization opened in 1989 with one of the first fair housing grants awarded through the program.

“We’ve never stopped advancing fair housing. HUD’s plan would have ended that,” Hemavathi said. “Today’s ruling means the people who need us in the state still have somewhere to turn.”

When the lawsuit was filed, HUD Deputy Secretary Andrew Hughes told Scotsman Guide that “activist opposition will not deter the Department,” and that “under President Trump and Secretary Turner’s leadership, the free lunch for activists has ended.”

HUD had not responded to Scotsman Guide’s request for comment as of publication time.