Reported Article Federal Policy

How Fast Could the Trump Administration Make HUD, Fair Housing Changes?

The incoming administration’s plans could include taking apart the agency and withdrawing the AFFH rule. What specific changes have been hinted at and how easily might they be accomplished?

An exterior shot of HUD's office in Washington, D.C. Photo by Flickr user F Delventhal, CC BY 2.0

When it comes to President-elect Donald Trump’s policy stances on HUD, there are a lot of unknowns. Housing advocates aren’t exactly sure what to expect, but they’re looking to the president-elect’s rhetoric, what his previous administration did, and a conservative initiative dubbed Project 2025 to speculate about what may come.

During Trump’s first four years in office, his administration was repeatedly thwarted from making drastic changes to the agency’s policies and budget, like slashing HUD funding by nearly 20 percent and decimating the public housing capital fund. Project 2025 sketches out an even more extreme future, including a proposal to dismantle the agency. But there are checks on the executive branch’s power to make those changes.

HUD’s Future as an Agency

Ben Carson, who served as HUD secretary during Trump’s first term, penned a section in Project 2025’s policy guidebook, which raised alarm bells with this incendiary proposal: addressing the agency’s “mission creep” by transferring HUD’s responsibilities away from the agency to other agencies, state governments, and localities. Some programs should be consolidated, Carson wrote, others done away with completely.

Sarah Saadian, senior vice president of public policy and field organizing at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, says that moving programs to different agencies would require approval from Congress. “And for Congress to do that, they would need 60 votes in the Senate, which means Democrats would have to agree to it,” says Saadian, making it a difficult proposal to accomplish.

Carson also calls for staffing changes at HUD, directing the administration to choose political appointees to head HUD’s individual offices, and put “motivated and aligned leadership” in place through Senior Executive Service transfers. He also calls for a new HUD task force dedicated to eliminating Biden-era measures that promote what it calls “progressive ideology.”

Funding for Housing

Trump’s agenda for public housing and voucher programs could mainly consist of defunding them.

During Trump’s first four years in office, the administration repeatedly proposed budgets that slashed HUD funding by almost 20 percent year-over-year. The proposals even did away with some programs entirely, completely defunding the National Housing Trust Fund, the Community Development Block Grant Program, the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, and more.

The proposals cut funds for the housing choice voucher program, which in Trump’s first year in office would have put the housing of more than 250,000 families at risk. Trump also made repeated efforts to eliminate the Public Housing Capital Fund program, which covers public housing repairs and redevelopment. Congress didn’t approve the cuts.

Cutting that funding in the coming years would be a step in the wrong direction—the backlog of maintenance and repair needs on the nation’s public housing stock has been estimated at $70 billion. The Public Housing Emergency Response Act would have provided those funds, but it’s been sitting in limbo for years.

In Project 2025’s policy guide, Carson also suggests selling off the public housing stock. However, Susan Popkin, a public housing policy expert and an Institute fellow at the Urban Institute, says that the administration “can’t just do that. HUD doesn’t own the public housing. Individual housing authorities do. . . So it seems to me that whoever wrote that wasn’t familiar with the actual situation on the ground.”

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Instead, Popkin says, the new administration might increase the number of public housing properties it converts to project-based Section 8 under the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, better known as RAD, dependent on Congress’s approval. “That’s our best hope for actually preserving the deeply subsidized housing stock at this moment,” says Popkin, “unless Congress allocates more funds for tenant-based vouchers and to preserve the actual stock.” In Trump’s past budget proposals, he proposed to do away with the cap on the number of units that could be converted under RAD.

Aside from Congress’s role in intervening in budget cuts, Saadian of the National Low Income Housing Coalition says preventing these changes will require pushback from the people affected. “A lot of it will depend on really strong advocacy from people across the country who are weighing in with their members of Congress and really explaining to them how these deep cuts will harm them and their families and their neighbors and their communities,” she says. “We have a really significant threat ahead, and we are going to be mobilizing all of our partners and members to push back on that.”

Work Requirements and Term Limits

After a 2018 executive order that directed agencies to increase the use of work requirements, HUD passed a new rule in 2020 increasing the number of public housing agencies that can impose work requirements on residents.

Project 2025 predictably calls to add work requirements and term limits for recipients of housing assistance.

Saadian says that “those changes would also have to be approved by Congress, and would need 60 votes in the Senate, which means that we would really focus on encouraging Democrats and moderate Republicans to push back on that. Last time, when they proposed it, Congress rejected those proposals and didn’t move forward with them, so we would do everything we can to make sure that happens this time if they propose those sorts of harmful cuts to housing benefits.”

Popkin says that “if the housing authorities have ‘moving to work’ status,” they can already add work requirements, but, “They mostly aren’t.”

Urban Institute studied work requirements and found that as of 2015, they weren’t widely implemented—only nine housing authorities had them. Public housing has a large population of older adults and disabled people—for whom the requirements don’t make much sense. “But that doesn’t mean [the next administration] won’t try,” Popkin says.

Fair Housing

Fair housing is in danger under a new Trump administration. Matthew Murphy, executive director of the Furman Center, told Curbed in November that fair housing would likely be the focus of “some of the biggest changes” under Trump, with localities unlikely to face reporting requirements under the new administration. Doug Ryan, vice president of housing policy at Grounded Solutions Network, agrees.

“About the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, they’ll pause that, to say it mildly,” says Ryan. “They’ll ramp down enforcement of Fair Housing Act violations, Equal Credit Opportunity Act violations and things like that.” 

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, or AFFH, is a statutory requirement of the Fair Housing Act. It means that recipients of HUD funding (and any other federal funding that might affect fair housing, such as infrastructure development) must take an extra step beyond nondiscrimination: they must actively work to reverse the results of past discriminatory housing practices and promote housing equality. However, without guidelines, it’s challenging to pin down what that means in practice. In 2015, the Obama administration provided some through a new AFFH rule. What followed was a back-and-forth: The Trump administration paused enforcement in 2018 and removed the rule in 2020, but when Biden was inaugurated the next year, the administration reintroduced an interim AFFH rule, pending the creation of a final one. A proposed final AFFH rule was announced in 2023.

The Biden administration never finalized that rule however—possibly due to concern it would impact the standing president’s chances at reelection. Now, it’s effectively too late. If the rule is issued before Biden leaves office, it will be subject to the Congressional Review Act, meaning it could be struck down. If that happens, future presidents couldn’t reintroduce the rule or anything “substantially similar.” You can find out more about that risk in this Shelterforce article.

Project 2025 directs the new administration to repeal Biden’s AFFH rulemaking, along with “any other uses of special-purpose credit authorities to further equity.”

Saadian says that fair housing and civil rights issues could be “top of their target list again” next year.

“While President Biden didn’t finalize a new rule, we could see other harms being done to fair housing,” says Saadian. “You could see them just fail to bring any enforcement actions or undermine other interpretations of law that are used to uphold people’s civil rights,” like the disparate impact rule, she says. “You definitely will see an attempt to undermine any of the work that the Biden administration did around advancing racial equity through diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.” Any such policies that were issued via executive order could be easily reversed, through separate executive orders from the incoming administration.

There’s precedent. During Trump’s presidency, the administration worked to weaken and take away fair housing protections, says Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance.

“We also know the rollback of important regulations under the Fair Housing Act was coupled with weakening of enforcement efforts at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in the Department of Justice, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was undermined.” The result, Bailey says, was increased housing discrimination and inequality. “So the rollback disproportionately harmed communities of color, women, people with disabilities, and families with children, LGBTQ [people], and others.”

Screening Technology

One of the risks fair housing faces: lack of protection against discriminatory screening technology.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released recommendations for housing providers about how to better comply with the Fair Housing Act when screening applicants for rental housing. Over the years it’s become more commonplace for housing providers in the U.S. to use automated screening technology to decide whether an applicant is suitable for a rental, but the practice has shortcomings. Reports have shown that low-income households and households of color are often denied housing because of a report that may be inaccurate, or overbroad, or have other issues. While HUD’s guidance is not legally enforceable, housing advocates say it is a step in the right direction in terms of protecting tenants from the potentially discriminatory effects of screening technology.

But will the Trump administration ignore or withdraw HUD’s guidance? It’s highly possible.

The question was raised during a recent webinar hosted by PolicyLink, a national group that focuses on policies that affect low-income communities. During the webinar, several speakers addressed the future of the guidance and how to make tenant screening practices more equitable and less discriminatory.

Ariel Nelson, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said the guidance is at risk once Trump takes office in January 2025. Nelson says housing advocates should be urging states to step up in anticipation of the change in guard. “States could incorporate the HUD guidance into their own antidiscrimination/fair housing laws and also bring enforcement actions to hold housing providers and tenant screening companies liable and stop bad practices,” Nelson added.

Rasheedah Phillips, director of housing at PolicyLink, said the best-case scenario may be that the Trump administration ignores the guidance instead of repealing it. “If it’s still in place we can fight for enforcement,” Phillips said.

Housing for Mixed-Status Families

Project 2025’s policy guide is disparaging of HUD programs generally, which it says spread the idea that subsidized housing is a “basic life need.” Instead, it claims that these essential programs cause intergenerational poverty, constitute a threat to “traditional” families, and prevent recipients from working and improving their finances. For his part, President-elect Trump has (erroneously) pinned blame for the housing crisis on immigrants, even suggesting that deportation amounts to housing policy by decreasing demand.

During Trump’s first term in office, the administration proposed barring housing assistance for families if one person in their household was ineligible for aid due to their immigration status. The proposed change, known as the mixed-status family rule, was later withdrawn. It’s also, arguably, a fair housing violation.

“There was an enormous amount of outcry when they proposed that the first time. Thousands and thousands of people submitted public comments in opposition to that proposal, and ultimately, they didn’t move forward,” Saadian says. The proposal would have taken housing away from 25,000 families, including 55,000 children, leaving them at risk of homelessness.

It’s years down the road to get even a finalized rule . . . assuming they don’t just gut the administrative state altogether.”

Shamus Roller, National Housing Law Project

In Project 2025’s policy guide, Carson has called on the incoming Republican administration to again propose a ban on all mixed-status families from living in federal housing. That, coupled with Trump’s comments earlier this month about deporting families with mixed immigration status from the country all together, signals that it’s likely this rule could be proposed once again.

Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project, expects the next administration to propose a new rule shortly after Trump retakes office. But evicting all mixed-status families from HUD housing requires regulatory action. It’s not something that can be done with a stroke of a pen.

It’s “years down the road to get even a finalized rule . . . assuming they don’t just gut the administrative state altogether,” Roller says.

The rulemaking process takes quite a bit of time. The Trump administration would have to propose a new rule, after which there’s a comment period. Then HUD would have to respond, and then the proposed rule would have to be vetted by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and the Office of Management and Budget—along with other steps. There will also be plenty of advocacy campaigns to fight against the proposed rule, and if it is eventually finalized, Roller says the National Housing Law Project and other groups would fight it in court.

“That can really drag out that process, especially around a rule like mixed-status families, which I think so clearly violates the Fair Housing Act,” Roller says.

But just announcing a proposed rule change could have detrimental effects on families. Some families who are currently living with an ineligible immigrant might believe they must move out of HUD housing immediately. “Part of our job will be to tell families . . . don’t move. [This] is just a proposed rule . . . don’t give up your housing,” says Roller. “We’re going to fight this thing out.”

This is something that happened during Trump’s first term in office with the administration’s proposed public charge rule, which would have prevented a person from obtaining a green card if they accepted certain public benefits. Roller says the National Housing Law Project saw immigrants who were eligible for housing vouchers give up them up for fear they would not be able to get a green card in the future.

“This kind of tells you some of the dynamic around the Trump administration. There’s a lot of focus on people who are undocumented,” says Roller. “The [incoming administration is] also interested in penalizing people who are in the country legally, and the public charge [rule] is kind of the perfect example of that.”

Roller says the National Housing Law Project is hiring additional litigators in preparation for what’s to come in 2025, and they’ll be training legal aid attorneys and folks on the ground, so they understand what’s happening and the rights folks have.

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