President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration repeatedly sought to make deep cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget. Those plans never passed Congress. But many housing and anti-poverty advocates think this time will be different.
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President-elect Donald Trump has chosen former Texas state Rep. Scott Turner to serve as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Turner spent nine seasons in the NFL with teams in Washington, San Diego and Denver before being twice elected to the Texas House of Representatives, serving from 2013 to 2017.
Turner now chairs the Center for Education Opportunity at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank set up by former staffers from Trump’s first presidency.
In 2019, during his first term, Trump appointed Turner to lead a council tasked with turning around distressed communities. That included steering billions in private investment to so-called Opportunity Zones, places struggling with high unemployment and run-down housing. The effort won bipartisan praise — though critics suggested the wealthy investors getting tax breaks saw more benefit than local residents.
Trump’s first administration tried to restrict housing aid and cut HUD’s budget
The first Trump administration repeatedly proposed deep budgetcuts to HUD, but they never passed Congress. Some executive action to restrict public assistance — for housing and other benefits — was made later in the term and never finalized. But many housing and anti-poverty advocates think this time will be different.
Scott Turner, chairman of the Center for Education Opportunity at the America First Policy Institute, speaks during an event at the institute in January 2022
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“The agenda is much more organized now,” says Peggy Bailey, executive vice president for policy and program development at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “We do anticipate some pretty significant budget fights.”
For one thing, she says, there will be fewer moderate Republicans likely to push back in the next Congress. And the Trump team will enter office with an extensive agenda of policy proposals laid out in Project 2025. Trump has denied any connection to the Heritage Foundation document, but the chapter on HUD was written by his first-term HUD secretary, Ben Carson, and includes many proposals from his time leading the department.
The Project 2025 proposals include:
- Ban families with undocumented members from living in federally assisted housing. Undocumented immigrants are already barred from receiving subsidies. But a HUD analysis found the rule would have put tens of thousands of their family members who are U.S. citizens or legal residents, mostly children, at risk of eviction or homelessness.
- Eliminating a new federal fund to boost the supply of affordable housing. A footnote to this item says federally subsidized housing distorts the market by raising demand. It suggests a better approach is to encourage construction by loosening local zoning rules and streamlining regulations.
- Repealing (again) a rule meant to prevent segregation and comply with the Fair Housing Act. Carson had argued the rule demanded “unworkable requirements.”
- Ending a homelessness policy known as Housing First, which places people in subsidized housing and then helps them address drug and mental health addictions. Trump and conservative allies have said sobriety should be the first requirement, something homelessness advocates say has been tried before and failed.
- Tightening work requirements for people who receive federal housing subsidies. (The first Trump administration also tried this for recipients of food aid, but it was blocked in federal court.)
Beyond Project 2025, Bailey and others point out that congressional Republicans have continued to propose major funding cuts to HUD, along with trillions of dollars in cuts over a decade across a wide array of other social safety net programs including healthcare, food aid and assistance with heating and cooling bills.
When it comes to deep funding cuts, ‘the optics there might not be great’
If all these budget proposals were to be enacted, “you should expect large increases both in the scope of poverty and in the depth of poverty,” says Bob Greenstein, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and the founder and former president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Dr. Ben Carson, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, speaks during this summer’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
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He also sees an irony, since many of the programs target not only the poor but also modest and moderate-income people. “Among the people who would be hurt most seriously are working-class families, the very people who are now part of [Trump’s] political base,” he says.
But not everyone thinks that’s likely.
“I would be surprised if there were substantial budget cuts actually enacted,” says Kevin Corinth, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who served as an economic adviser in the Trump White House.
The presidential campaign made clear that the high cost of living is a huge issue for many Americans, he says, and “the optics there might not be great to roll things back.”
He does think the administration will be better able to push through the regulatory changes it started in its first term, restricting noncitizens in public housing and tightening enforcement of work requirements.
Corinth also supports longer-term goals that Project 2025 lays out for HUD. They include selling land owned by public housing agencies to private developers for “greater economic use.” That could mean fewer people living in traditional public housing, and more instead using federal vouchers to rent in the private market. Project 2025 also calls for shifting rental assistance to other agencies, and pushing people to become self-sufficient by setting time limits on rental subsidies.
Corinth says time limits make sense because people do not have a right to rental aid like they do with food or health care; only 1 in 4 people who qualify can actually get it. “So it’d be much more fair to families to say, ‘Look, you’re going to get this assistance but it’s only for a couple of years, get you back on your feet,'” he says.
But none of those changes are “a real solution,” says Sarah Saadian, with the National Low Income Housing Coalition. She says breaking up HUD would only shift responsibility. And most residents who can work already do, “they’re just not getting paid wages that are high enough to afford housing,” she says.
In any case, Corinth thinks the next Trump administration will have more urgent priorities than a sweeping transformation of HUD’s role. They include pushing through a major tax cuts package in its first year. If housing does then rise on the agenda, he thinks it’s more likely to focus on the private market – and addressing the massive shortage that has sent home prices and rents skyrocketing.
