The already diminished Department of Housing and Urban Development office that enforces fair housing laws was slashed again in recent layoffs, and housing policy experts warn the cuts could make it next to impossible for the office to fulfill its mission of combating housing discrimination.
“HUD is actively undermining its own ability to enforce fair housing laws,” said Kim Johnson, senior director of policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “And it’s not a coincidence that the administration is doing this. It is like a continuation of a lot of things that we know the administration has prioritized.”
The latest layoffs at HUD were concentrated at the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, where 170 people were issued reduction-in-force notices, at least 149 of them within regional offices.
Those layoffs are currently on hold as a case over their legality goes through the courts. But if the Trump administration is ultimately allowed to make these cuts, the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity “will have lost about two-thirds of its personnel,” said Sasha Samberg-Champion, special civil rights counsel at the National Fair Housing Alliance and a former deputy general counsel for HUD.
Diminishing the regional offices would seriously hinder the office’s work, experts say. These latest cuts are part of a broader effort at HUD to limit its fair housing enforcement efforts, from shrinking its staff to narrowing its priorities.
“I think a lot of cases are going to slow down,” Samberg-Champion said. “They’re going to grind to a halt, and we’ve already seen that they’re going to look for reasons to close cases without really doing anything meaningful, because they just don’t have the manpower anymore.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a statement to NOTUS on Monday that the RIFs are a part of the department’s “ongoing efforts to realign its activities with its core statutory mission. It is HUD’s priority to serve the American people effectively.”
The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity started the year with about 600 employees, Samberg-Champion said. Since then, a voluntary retirement program resulted in about half of the office staff departing. Congressional Democrats warned about the cuts in a March letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner, stating there were plans to terminate “77% of staff within the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.”
“Let us be very clear, your enforcement of fair housing and civil rights laws and implementing regulations is not discretionary—it is a legal obligation,” wrote the lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Maxine Waters of California.
The downsizing has already changed the process for filing fair housing complaints. Instead of being able to file a complaint to a field office, the complaints go to a central office.
Regional offices give people the opportunity to talk with someone who is on the ground and familiar with their community — someone available to speak directly with a landlord, bank or any party involved in the conflict with a deeper understanding of the local circumstances, Sasha-Samberg said
The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is also changing how it considers cases. A Sept. 16 memo from the then-principal deputy assistant secretary of the office, John Gibbs, directed staff to deprioritize disparate impact cases, which it defines as “ideological” and “inconsistent with the law” and focus only on “intentional segregation.”
Disparate impact cases often involve housing policies or practices that appear neutral but result in unequal treatment of groups protected under the Fair Housing Act — such as Black and Latino renters, families with children and people with disabilities.
The memo also framed past enforcement by the office as regulatory overreach, pointing to cases around appraisal bias, land-use control, background checks and protections for undocumented tenants as examples of “radical policies.”
“It’s one thing to sort of shift your priorities, from doing things that you don’t like doing. … this time they’re not doing that, they’re just shutting everything down,” Samberg-Champion said.
Johnson of the National Low Income Housing Coalition said the changes are part of the administration’s broader dismantling of “anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or anything that attempts to reconcile the discriminatory policies of the past.”
“It’s really severely limiting any of the kind of accountability measures that HUD has to enforcing things like the Fair Housing Act,” Johnson said.
Lawmakers have taken notice. A Sept. 30 letter from Warren and Waters to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs requested Turner to testify before Congress and respond to allegations of HUD’s failure to “enforce fair housing and civil rights laws.”
“The alleged efforts by HUD leadership to dismantle decades of progress are shameful, betray the American public, and represent a profound abuse of taxpayer dollars,” the letter stated, concluding with: “Failure to act leaves millions of Americans at risk of rampant discrimination in housing and mortgage lending.”