In anticipation of a Republican ascension to the White House, The Heritage Foundation—a right-wing think tank pushing regressive, oppressive, often draconian ideas—released a new “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” the latest edition in a series of books meant to guide conservative policies in the federal government. This edition, part of an initiative dubbed Project 2025, proposes to radically restructure and dilute or altogether dismantle and privatize multiple federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
This “Mandate for Leadership” is the ninth edition of what The Heritage Foundation calls a “comprehensive policy guide for the next conservative U.S. president.” First published in 1980, the book is authored by dozens of right-wing thought leaders—including Ben Carson, an Ivy League-trained surgeon who served as HUD secretary during the Trump administration. In Chapter 15, Carson systematically outlines how and why the next (presumably) Trump administration should shred everything from HUD’s mission to its structure to its oversight capabilities.
The policies Carson lays out strip rights and protections from immigrants, women, elderly people, and other vulnerable, already marginalized, populations—including veterans. The plan would essentially facilitate a “complete dynamic shift from an agency tasked with ensuring that Americans are housed safely and stably,” says Noëlle Porter, director of government affairs at the National Housing Law Project, a housing law and advocacy center.
“The overhaul . . . would ensure that HUD’s mission does not improve the quality of life or build inclusive and sustainable communities free from discrimination,” Porter says. “It would entirely dedicate the office of Housing and Urban Development to tax credits and mortgage boosts and regulatory cuts for developers and owners.”
So what are the HUD administration and policy changes outlined in Chapter 15? Which ones are particularly alarming? And, most importantly, how likely is it that some, most, or even all the recommendations will be put in place?
WINNERS: DEVELOPERS. LOSERS: EVERYONE ELSE.
Project 2025 takes direct aim at HUD’s tools for creating and preserving affordable housing—specifically public housing, housing assistance vouchers, first-time homebuyer assistance, and any financial programs tailored toward homeowners who aren’t white. It instead recommends policies that would transform HUD into a profit-generating, privatized enterprise. “What they want to do is be a development arm of the federal government and a boon to private enterprise that would be incredibly harmful to tenants and the recipients of housing policy,” Porter says.
Recommendations include:
- Allowing existing public housing to be sold to private developers
- Ending Housing First policies
- Reversing Biden-era advancements in reducing racial disparities in home appraisals
- Repealing the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule
- Prohibiting special-purpose credit programs
- Overturning all Biden actions to “advance progressive ideology” through efforts relating to “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); critical race theory (CRT); black, indigenous, Pacific Islander, and other people of color (BIPOC); and environmental, social, and governance (ESG)”
The policy recommendations would end some of HUD’s most important work, Porter says. “Any research into how tenants thrive, how tenants maintain safe and stable housing, how tenants are able to move out of subsidy-based housing, how we can improve the quality of subsidized housing, how we can improve or how we can reduce landlord harassment, how we can improve outcomes for tenants who have experienced sexual violence—all of that would be eliminated.”
Additional victims of Project 2025’s slash-and-burn strategy? First-time homebuyers and the 30-year mortgage. The initiative recommends encouraging “shorter-duration mortgages” by increasing mortgage insurance premiums (which protect lenders in cases of buyer default) on loans longer than 20 years. Mortgage insurance is required for all Federal Housing Administration loans, which are typically used by lower-income borrowers.
“First-time homebuyer opportunities are about intergenerational wealth building. They often are most impactful for Black and brown families,” Porter says. “This policy has a disparate impact to low-income first-time homebuyers, especially buyers of color. And I think really, this is targeted to saying we want the white kids whose parents own their home and sent them to college to be able to buy their first home with a 20-year mortgage.”
Project 2025 explicitly discourages construction of single-family and multifamily units priced “at the low end of the market,” instead supporting “new units that will allow for greater upward mobility of rental and ownership housing stock and better target increased construction of mid-tier rental units.”
Another way Project 2025 could harm lower-income buyers is with its direction that Congress “prioritize any and all legislative support for the single-family home.” Project 2025 advocates for maintaining single-family zoning while resisting efforts to expand multifamily zoning. But that mandate also harms developers by stifling multifamily development, and it also contradicts Project 2025’s recommendation to encourage local land use and zoning decisions. Porter says these conflicting directives illustrate how Project 2025 is “wrong-headed.”
“For one, single-family houses aren’t what’s being built right now. So we’re really going to have a problem with how American communities develop if they want to maintain single-family zoning across the country,” she says. “There’s a lot that we’ve learned, especially during the pandemic, about what the federal government can do to stimulate additional growth, and there are a lot of ways in which superseding federal law is beneficial to individuals across the country who are being priced out of the markets in which they work, their children go to school, their health care is provided, and their families live. So I think they’re just wrong, but it’s certainly not the most pernicious of all the threats within the piece.”
PROJECT 2025 VS. RENTERS
If lower-income homebuyers take some blows from Carson’s conservative America in Chapter 15, renters—particularly immigrants, people of color, and women—get pummeled. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the Section 8 program’s proration system, which allows undocumented heads of household to receive benefits on behalf of eligible minor children. It would also enact time limits and work requirements on Section 8 recipients, which data shows don’t have the desired effect, Porter says.
“Work requirements don’t work—the data, the evidence, the studies are there. They are simply budget cuts. They are government overreach, which ensures that they can serve fewer citizens,” she says. Overwhelmingly, recipients of HUD subsidies who are able to work are already doing so.
What they’re saying here is that the government should take vouchers from poor Black women and give them to married couples.”
Noëlle Porter, National Housing Law Project
Also buried in the complex wording and abundant footnotes are veiled (and not-so-veiled) provisions rooted in The Heritage Foundation’s puritanical, anti-gay stance, calling for the next administration to “reduce implicit penalties for increasing household incomes over eligibility terms . . . and reweight waiting-list prioritization for two-parent households.”
That last bit left Porter aghast.
“What they’re saying here is that the government should take vouchers from poor Black women and give them to married couples,” she says, adding, “and because the rest of Project 2025 defines marriage as between one man and one woman, this would ensure that federal subsidies would be prioritized for heterosexually married, heteronormatively married, couples.”
Activists at City Life Vida Urbana (CLVU), a Boston-based tenants’ rights organization, have spent the months since Project 2025 was made public educating themselves on the detrimental effects enacting its policy changes would have on their constituents.
“None of what is in Project 2025 will make housing higher quality,” says Gabriela Cartagena, the organization’s co-director of communications. “It will just bring more degradation of housing, less regulation for the necessary repairs to have a dignified home, and less chance that housing will be more accessible for working class renters.”
CLVU works with a lot of “non-traditional” families, specifically with single mothers of color, but also people with disabilities and other marginalized groups, Cartagena says. “Those are the people who are most at risk from the eliminated regulations Project 2025 is trying to implement, and those are the people who are going to face the brunt” of disinvestment, neglect, and privatization.
“A good number of the community members we work with at City Life are immigrants, and many of them are undocumented. There’s an undocumented mother with her citizen daughter I know and they’re able to live in the house they’re in now because of a Section 8 voucher,” she says. “So seeing the immigrant and undocumented community under attack with them trying to eliminate Section 8 access to mixed-status families—we need to protect access for mixed-status and immigrant families.”
HUD’s MISSION: CANCELED
Carson ends Chapter 15 by ending HUD, as it were. He calls on Congress to redirect the bulk of HUD functions to “states and localities with any remaining federal functions consolidated to other federal agencies.” That means, for example, moving administration of “Indian housing programs” to the Department of the Interior and moving other aid programs to a “redesignated Housing and Home Finance Agency.” This demolition is ostensibly meant to “safeguard taxpayers against the mission creep” of HUD programs.
It could be argued that HUD after a revamp as outlined in Project 2025 would be perpetrating its own “mission creep.” Marne Marotta, a managing director at law firm Arnold and Porter, which specializes in legislative and public policy, points out one puzzling and, she says, misguided change outlined in Chapter 15. Carson calls for the future HUD secretary to be added as a member of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), an interagency committee that’s tasked with reviewing certain purchases, including property transactions, made by non-Americans that could pose a security threat.
“What they’re trying to say is that HUD should be reviewing these transactions from a housing affordability perspective,” she says. “But CFIUS looks at those transactions from a national security perspective, so they’re going to have concerns with any foreign entity buying up a lot of housing stock. And I don’t think it makes sense to put HUD in that review process at all.”
IT MATTERS WHO’S IN CONTROL
The stakes are high with Project 2025, for several reasons. Porter sees Schedule F reform—Project 2025’s call to remove all career staff from federal agencies—as one of the most “deeply, deeply concerning” proposals, especially considering HUD is currently staffed at only about 75 percent of what it should be, the National Housing Law Project estimates. Losing more staff would further kneecap the agency.
“We have folks who are dedicated to filling out paperwork, administering grants, signing lease approvals, going through the fair housing complaints that come from survivors of domestic violence who are having their rights violated—all of those are career professionals who are experts in how to administer the functionality of HUD,” Porter says. “There are thousands of them, and to say that political appointees who do not have the interests of individual tenants, who probably have vested interest in development and ownership, would do a better job of ensuring that tenants have safe and stable housing is just entirely disconcerting.”
Despite the warning bells Project 2025’s mere existence sets off, the outlook isn’t all bad. For one, its most radical changes hinge on Donald Trump taking back the White House. Despite attempts to distance himself from Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” officials from the first Trump administration authored 25 of the book’s 30 chapters. And since the policy recommendations take aim at federal agencies, if Trump loses in November, many of the major tenets of Project 2025 lose their only path to fulfillment.
If Republicans control both the House and Senate under a Harris administration, it would be difficult to secure the two-thirds majority to overturn a presidential veto to anything Congress tries to push through. But Marotta warns that even with a Democrat in the White House, HUD funding could be at risk and/or changes to mortgage insurance might make it through “if there’s a big funding package—which, that’s kind of how we do funding nowadays.” In that case, if a funding cut for HUD was part of a larger budget package that had majority support, it could be overshadowed and allowed to move forward in exchange for other concessions Democrats really wanted. “But Republicans would have to control the Senate and Democrats would have to have not a very strong hold on the House to make that happen,” she says.
Also worth noting: Were Trump reelected, he couldn’t just fire everyone who’s made a career at HUD. “There are workplace protections. It’s not so simple as saying, ‘We don’t need you anymore; you’re fired.’ It’s harder than that to make structural changes in the government,” Marotta says. But Trump could take some steps that “would be highly disruptive.”
“A Trump administration may not be able to restructure HUD completely and say they’re going to get rid of all the career people, but they could say, ‘We’re going to move HUD from wherever it is right now, somewhere in D.C., to Nebraska,’” Marotta says. “Now, all of a sudden if you’re a career employee and you don’t want to move to Nebraska, then you’re probably going to quit and find another job. So doing that could get to the same goal.”
Many of the goals laid out in Project 2025 are new, but many are not. CLVU’s Cartagena sees the initiative as “part of a historic, decades-long project reaching through many administrations that is attacking working people from many racial and cultural backgrounds.” CLVU and Cartagena, like many other activists and organizations, call Project 2025 an “attack on democracy” from the right.
“What really matters is how we’re responding to this attack on democracy,” she says. “And this should really push us normal people to really think about what type of democracy we want to embrace, and what is the type of democracy we want to envision and build towards?”
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Stop spreading this propaganda. Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025.
Trump is mentioned 312 times, 25 out of 30 chapters were written by members of HIS administration, both editors are from his administration. These HUD policies were written by Ben Carson, who served in his administration and is now campaigning with him. Sorry to burst your bubble but it’s the republican playbook and Trump’s name is all over it. It IS Trump’s Project2025.
PS- They have a find feature in adobe to make it easier… https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf