Since 2012, more than 500 federal loans — at a total value of almost $300 million – have been issued for the purchase of homes in rural Maine.

Last week we reported that an unusual wave of foreclosure notices have been filed by the federal government in quick succession, affecting low- and very low-income Mainers who purchased their homes in eligible rural areas with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Section 502 program.

What does it look like to be confronting foreclosure? From our reporting:

“One couple who bought a house in Gray in 2007 for $113,680 defaulted in 2016. They now owe more than $228,000, which grows by about $16 every day. Another woman who bought her home in Searsport in 1994 for $67,000 defaulted 17 years later. She now owes more than $200,000, an amount increasing by about $12 a day.”

As it stands, the government is attempting to recover about $7 million in loans and interest in Maine. By their nature, Section 502 loans offer very limited assistance options to borrowers and also allow recovery of money owed via Social Security payments and tax refunds.

An administration official said that the blame for the “backlog of delinquent loans” lay at the feet of the Biden administration’s decision to extend COVID-era foreclosure moratoriums. Local lawyers and advisers say that many of the Maine defaults now being acted on are years older.

Exactly how we got here — a timeline that almost certainly involved rank mismanagement by at least two administrations — is less important than what it means to Maine and affected Mainers to be here today.

The point we’d like to make isn’t about repayment (part of the 502 program deal and, indeed, part of a contract) or consequences for failing to pay (part of the very same contract), it’s about the broad-brush, hasty actions of a federal government that does not have social cohesion high on its list of priorities and does not care to make decisions in context.

Maine’s housing crisis is so acute and so entrenched that if this pursuit of loan repayments results in a spate of rural evictions, there likely will be nowhere for those Mainers to go. That’s without getting into the damage, civic and economic, that would be done to their small local communities, many of them already emptying out, their futures in question.

Against such a challenging backdrop and many unruly years of USDA management — including under the pall of the pandemic — to work on open communication, prevention and assistance would seem to be the more humane and responsible course of action.

The ambitious cost-saving efforts of this second Trump administration should be weighed against other costs. Already, we have been met with plenty of evidence that they are not weighed in this way. It’s reasonable that such an approach should worry us all.