Trump’s HUD Cuts Are Gutting Protections Against Housing Discrimination

This story was published in collaboration with Shelterforce, the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of affordable housing, community development and housing justice.

Since 1968, when the passage of the Fair Housing Act banned discrimination in renting, mortgage lending and home sales, the bulk of enforcement duties have been outsourced to private organizations, mostly nonprofits. Private organizations processed 75% of Fair Housing complaints in 2023, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance.

But those agencies are facing an existential threat after many of them received a Feb. 27 letter from HUD, notifying them that at the direction of the president and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), their Fair Housing grants were being canceled, “because it no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities,” according to one letter viewed by Next City/Shelterforce.

A total of 78 of these Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP) grants were cut across 66 organizations on Feb. 27, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance. That amounts to more than half of all grants under that program across the country, and affects more than 60% of the organizations involved.

These grants help with the investigation of discrimination complaints, educating the public about fair housing law, and “testing,” a process whereby applicants of different races or other protected classes are hired to inquire about housing listings to test for discrimination.

Affected fair housing organizations are saying that without grant funds, they will have to drastically cut back on enforcement. This means the country’s enforcement mechanism for discrimination complaints will be greatly diminished and in some places essentially dismantled.

Jay Young, executive director of the Southwest Fair Housing Council, believes the dramatic cuts are an attempt to hobble the idea of fair housing altogether. “There is an intent here to really cripple civil rights,” Young says.

And according to Rasheedah Phillips, director of housing at PolicyLink, the effect of these cuts is a serious weakening of the Fair Housing Act.

“Saying these folks should be protected from the impacts of housing discrimination is not enough. You need the actual enforcement. And that’s what these agencies do,” Phillips says.

The grants have already been appropriated by Congress, and therefore restricting or canceling grants legally requires an act of Congress. Multiple court orders have required that the Trump administration disburse grants it tried to cancel, because the funds have already been appropriated.

Four fair housing nonprofits filed a class action lawsuit on March 13 against HUD, DOGE, and Scott Turner over the grant fund cancellations. The plaintiffs—Massachusetts Fair Housing Center, Intermountain Fair Housing Council, San Antonio Fair Housing Council, and Housing Research and Advocacy Center—collectively saw over $600,000 in grants canceled. The lawsuit argues that the federal government canceled the grants “arbitrarily and without notice, reason or sensible explanation.”

The four agencies suing the government represent tens of thousands of people across the country and they say canceling grants will have wide-ranging impacts. For instance, they say in the suit that canceling grants will mean “leaving elderly people who cannot navigate the steps into their apartments with no one to call,” “forcing people facing eviction to stand up in court alone,” and “sending families illegally excluded from housing into homelessness.” The lawsuit also contends that DOGE does not have the authority to direct HUD to cancel grants.

Grants cancelled with no rhyme or reason

HUD’s operations are divided into 10 geographic regions across the country.

People at nonprofits and regional HUD offices who spoke with Next City/Shelterforce say they can’t explain why some grants were canceled and not others, saying that the grant cancellations appeared to be arbitrary and intended to meet an arbitrary quota rather than focusing on programming that conflicts with the administration’s objectives, as the HUD email stated.

Some questioned whether any grant for fair housing enforcement could meet the criteria of excluding “diversity, equity and inclusion” from its work, since the Civil Rights Act and Fair Housing Act are intrinsically about racial inclusion and non-discrimination of protected categories.

The cancellation letters do not mention “DEI,” “wokeness” or other dog whistles for race and sexual identity used by the Trump administration. But a tweet by HUD Secretary Scott Turner does explicitly use those terms when it comes to the administration’s homelessness grants.

“The Fair Housing Act itself uses a lot of this language,” Young says. “When you’re writing a grant and a statement of work, you can’t not use the language.”

Crippling fair housing enforcement

The cancellation of these grants will have immediate implications for housing enforcement. The nonprofit Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) of Greater Cincinnati told Next City/Shelterforce that a grant it received worth $510,000 over the next 15 months was canceled by the Trump administration. The organization says it is in year two of the three-year grant, which represents 30% of its annual funding. The organization now says it will have to reduce fair housing counseling and reduce investigations of illegal housing discrimination.

“It threw everything into chaos,” HOME’s executive director Elisabeth Risch says. In addition to turning down some new clients, Risch says HOME won’t be able to continue investigating fair lending in home loans. The organization recently released a report that found Black borrowers were more likely to be denied a loan than white borrowers, regardless of income. The organization now has to cancel planned further investigations into fair lending and investigations into racial disparities in criminal background checks.

The Fair Housing Act originally focused on discrimination regarding race, color, religion, national origin, family status and sex. Disability was added as a protected category to the Fair Housing Act in 1988, and today, more than half of all fair housing complaints are related to disability. (Phillips says part of the reason for that is because it has gotten more difficult to prove racial discrimination in housing under the law.)

Many individual disability complaints are related to a lack of “reasonable accommodations” in housing under the ADA, which can include easier access for wheelchair users, grab bars in bathrooms, accommodating support animals or working with disability payments. Proactive enforcement often uncovers entire buildings not built to the basic accessibility standards the 1988 amendments require. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 sets even higher accessibility standards for housing receiving federal money.

Risch says HOME’s call volumes had only been growing prior to the grant cancellation. Many of their clients are people who receive Social Security disability income payments. Because the timing of the payments often doesn’t line up with when rent is due, clients sometimes need to pay their rent late. HOME has successfully intervened and convinced landlords to accept payments late as a reasonable accommodation for the person’s disability.

In some cases, the organization helps tenants escalate complaints to the Ohio Civil Rights Commission or to HUD. Organizations like HOME act as a filter for discrimination complaints, intervening before the courts or before HUD by communicating with landlords and often getting reasonable accommodations added before an eviction filing happens.

Without organizations like hers, Risch says, “you don’t have somewhere to turn when you know that there’s been injustice.”

Other canceled grants went to support women at risk of eviction as a result of domestic violence. According to the lawsuit, the Massachusetts Fair Housing Center had recently prevented the eviction of a woman after her abuser was arrested.

The center says it has 50 other clients in similar circumstances and receives calls about five similar cases a week. The lawsuit says that as a result of the grant loss, the center has already turned down representation for at least one woman evicted from her subsidized housing because of domestic violence. She is now facing homelessness.

Slashing funds for public housing law awareness, too

Fair Housing nonprofits are also alarmed by the cancellation of federal grants intended to educate the public on housing law.

Young, with the Southwest Fair Housing Council, says a grant for public education worth $125,000 and set to expire in June has been canceled. Young estimates it’s about 10% to 15% of the organization’s total budget. The organization has applied for and received this grant every year at least for the past 15 years he’s been with the organization and likely longer. It typically uses the money to do 100 to 150 trainings and workshops a year.

“Not being able to educate people about their fair housing rights makes it easier and more likely that discrimination is going to happen with impunity,” Young says.

These funds already did not meet the need before the cuts, according to Phillips at PolicyLink. Phillips says when they worked as a tenant lawyer, it was common for both landlords and tenants to not know what rights were being violated, because fair housing agencies did not have enough staff to do public outreach and education.

“These organizations don’t just serve tenants and homeowners,” Phillips says. “They also serve the housing providers, the realtors, the folks who are making these transactions.”

What will happen in the next funding round?

In addition to the already-awarded grants, staff at fair housing organizations are concerned about the next round of grants, which were to be awarded sometime between February and April this year. The money for the competitive grant awards, which organizations applied for in November, was appropriated by Congress in 2024, but it is up to the current administration to decide how it is awarded. The Biden administration announced last year’s grants on April 1 to coincide with Fair Housing Month. But now there’s concern that those grants may be delayed, even indefinitely, or that programs for specific racial minorities or LGBT people won’t be funded.

David Levy is the programs specialist for the Fair Housing Council of Orange County in California. Levy says that while his organization is fortunate not to have lost its grant funding, hearing from other organizations about grant cancellations has led him to worry about the grants he had expected to be awarded this spring.

The organization has a three-year grant for fair housing enforcement that ends in June. The Fair Housing Council of Orange County has received this $425,000-a-year grant continually since 2002, and it accounts for about 60% of the organization’s funding.

“We’re very much concerned that it’s all stalled out and that the applications may not ever get processed,” he says.

Most discrimination complaints the Fair Housing Council of Orange County investigates are from people with disabilities and the county’s large Vietnamese community. The organization gets about 140 intakes a year, about 85 of which turn out to be viable, and 50 of which end up as open cases with the organization. Of those, about eight a year end up with a complaint filed with the state’s civil rights department.

Without funding, the complaints will either not be filed at all or the state civil rights department will be inundated as people turn to them directly, without the vetting, diversion and resolutions facilitated by the Fair Housing Council.

Fair housing agencies were already stretched thin

Practitioners and clients both say fair housing agencies were already stretched thin before the current crisis, with many agencies unable to process all the discrimination complaints coming to them.

“It’s already really difficult for a person to file a complaint for housing discrimination … Depending on where you live, there may not be these kinds of organizations even around, and so you may have to travel far and wide to file a complaint,” Phillips says.

In Philadelphia, where Phillips worked as a tenant lawyer, it could take years for some complaints to be investigated, despite a strong fair housing sector. They recalled a mass eviction of an apartment building where people had intersecting disabilities.

“Many of them were elder, and we were able to file age, disability, race and source of income discrimination complaints as a result of those mass evictions,” Phillips says. “They were eventually resolved and dealt with, but it was three years later, and at that point, several of the people within that housing complex were homeless or had eviction records that prevented their ability to access habitable housing into the far future.”

HUD, too, was routinely in violation of its own rules because of short-staffing, even before the current crisis. Once a fair housing complaint is filed, HUD is required to address it within 100 days. According to Levy, HUD routinely sends out letters to complainants saying it’s unable to meet the 100-day deadline. With impending staff cuts, and the cuts to nonprofits, Levy says, HUD’s enforcement is “going to be even less effective.”

Trump was a defendant, along with his father, in a 1973 federal lawsuit for allegedly excluding Black applicants from housing, which was one of the early signature cases of the Fair Housing Act. Given that, Levy does not think it’s a coincidence that he is now overseeing the dismantling of that enforcement. “He remembers things and he carries grudges,” Levy says.

Phillips says that one of the flaws of Fair Housing law is that most enforcement is reactive, or requires complaint-based advocacy from tenants and organizations. It could take months, or years if litigation is involved, for landlords to face repercussions.

Similarly, the administration may be openly violating the letter and the spirit of fair housing law — among other laws — by restricting grant funds. “They want to test the bounds of what’s legal,” Phillips says. But even if Congress or the courts are able to rein in the executive branch, it may be too late for many people who have suffered discrimination in the meantime.