Twenty years ago, I spent a summer working at the Legal Aid office in Charlotte. I had just finished my first year of law school, and my bosses trusted me to represent a client at a Housing Authority hearing, a transformative experience for me. It was supposed to be an unpaid internship, so I waited tables on the weekends. At the end of the summer, they scraped together a modest stipend for me. It was the sweetest paycheck I ever got. 

Legal Aid attorneys and their staffers toil day after day for their clients. They help people who can’t afford a private-sector lawyer but need to keep their homes or need protection from domestic violence. It’s a grueling job, representing poor people in a system that is stacked against them. 

The North Carolina legislature wants to make those peoples’ jobs much harder by slashing their funding in the new budget proposal. The budget, which Gov. Josh Stein just signed, also imposes harsh new restrictions on Legal Aid funding and puts Republicans in charge of a board that oversees the process. 

Lawmakers already froze the funding last year, claiming that it had become politicized. This caused a $6 million deficit at Legal Aid, which was forced to lay off attorneys and close offices in rural communities.

Legal Aid offices in North Carolina and other states have long received money from the IOLTA program, Interest on Lawyer’s Trust Accounts. This is interest that accumulates on money that lawyers temporarily hold in trust on behalf of their clients. It’s not taxpayer money, and the State Bar played a key role in distributing these funds.

This funding is crucial. Nearly half of the state’s counties are “legal deserts” when it comes to civil justice. But this new budget would divert the IOLTA money to pay public defender offices that are starved for resources, and Legal Aid would be left with any leftovers. 

North Carolina would become the only state in the country to divert IOLTA funding to public defenders. This is bad news for people who need legal help and cannot afford it. 

Under the budget’s draconian new restrictions, any Legal Aid office that manages to receive a grant can’t handle anything related to immigration or gender transitions. Legal Aid has long run a “farmworker justice” program that helps seasonal and migrant workers, such as a Mexican seasonal worker who died on a farm owned by the family of Republican state Senator Lisa Barnes. 

The funding also couldn’t go to any organization that makes “a direct suggestion to the public to contact public officials in support of or in opposition to pending or proposed legislation.” These organizations would also be prohibited from suggesting that voters contact their legislators. Republican lawmakers, entrenched in their gerrymandered districts, don’t want those pesky voters telling them what to do. 

North Carolina voters have been waiting for years for a new budget, as Republican leaders bickered among themselves over the funding. The budget garnered bipartisan support and includes some crucial items, including long-overdue raises for public employees. 

But it will also make things harder for poor people across the state who need help. Republican legislators proved that they were, once again, looking out for the interests of employers, landlords and other powerful interests in this new budget. The cuts to Legal Aid are cruel, senseless and harmful to North Carolina’s most vulnerable people.

Billy Corriher is the state courts manager for the People Parity Project and the author of “Justice for the People – The Anita Earls Story.”

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