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TRUMP APPOINTEES ROLL BACK ENFORCEMENT OF FAIR HOUSING LAWS  
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Debra Kamin
September 22, 2025
The New York Times
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_ Interviews and internal documents show that signature civil rights
protections in housing are being dismissed as ideologically driven and
D.E.I. in disguise. _

Whistleblowers within HUD’s Office of Fair Housing say it has
become increasingly difficult to do their jobs.Credit...,
Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

 

In one email, a Trump appointee at the Department of Housing and Urban
Development described decades of housing discrimination cases as
“artificial, arbitrary and unnecessary.”

In another, a career supervisor in the department’s Office of Fair
Housing and Equal Opportunity objected to lawyers being reassigned to
other offices; the supervisor was fired six days later for
insubordination.

In a third, the office’s director of enforcement warned that Trump
appointees were using gag orders and intimidation to block
discrimination cases from moving forward. The urgent message was sent
to a U.S. senator, who is referring it to the department’s acting
inspector general for investigation.

[Donald Trump stands on the left, with his hand on the back of Scott
Turner, who is standing in front of a podium and microphone. ]

President Trump stands with Scott Turner, his HUD secretary, who has
publicly said “D.E.I. is dead” within the
department.Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

The emails are among dozens of pages of internal communications, memos
and other documents reviewed by The New York Times that show efforts
by the Trump administration to limit enforcement of the Fair Housing
Act, the landmark civil rights law that has prohibited discrimination
in housing for nearly six decades.

In interviews, half a dozen current and former employees of HUD’s
fair housing office said that the Trump political appointees had made
it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs, which involve
investigating and prosecuting landlords, real estate agents, lenders
and others who discriminate based on race, religion, gender, family
status or disability.

Several lawyers said they had been blocked from communicating with
clients without approval from a Trump appointee, and had been barred
from citing some past housing civil rights cases when researching
legal precedent for possible new prosecutions.

One internal memo from a top Trump appointee in the office said that
archival documents that were “contrary to administration policy”
would be removed or replaced, and that “tenuous theories of
discrimination” would no longer be pursued.

“If you’re not enforcing the Fair Housing Act, then it’s just
another dead law,” said one of the career lawyers in the office,
Palmer Heenan, who has been told without explanation that he will be
reassigned next month.

 

Some of the internal documents framed the changes as efficiency
measures, and the resulting cuts to the office have been drastic. When
the so-called Department of Government Efficiency initiated its
cost-cutting spree, federal offices lost, on average, about 10 percent
of their employees. Within the Office of Fair Housing, the reduction
was 65 percent. There were 31 employees in January; once mandatory
transfers go through next month, there will be 11.

[A portrait of Palmer Heenan, who is wearing a suit and a yellow tie
with light blue stripes. ]

Palmer Heenan, a fair housing lawyer at HUD, has been told without
explanation that he will be reassigned next month.Credit...Eric Lee
for The New York Times

Kasey Lovett, a spokeswoman for HUD, said in a statement that it was
“patently false” to suggest the department was looking to blunt
enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. The Office of Fair Housing and
Equal Opportunity, she said, “is using its authority to uphold the
law, protect the vulnerable, and ensure meaningful access to
housing.”

Ms. Lovett also said that the new administration had inherited a
“deeply inefficient case system,” and accused the Biden
administration of allowing cases to “languish.”

Since President Trump took office, the department has handled over
4,100 cases, according to the statement, which is on par with previous
years, accounting for cases that carry over from one year to another.
Ms. Lovett did not address, however, how many of the cases had been
investigated or had resulted in legal action.

Lawyers in the office contend that cases often take longer than
expected because of complexity and insufficient resources. Before the
cuts, the office had 22 lawyers working on fair housing cases,
fielding around 2,000 new complaints a year. Local fair housing
nonprofits receive around 32,000 additional inquiries each year.

By Oct. 5, when the latest rounds of reductions will take place, there
will be six of those lawyers remaining, according to several staff
members who have received notices of reassignment.

“I never thought I would be in this position,” said Paul Osadebe,
another fair housing lawyer. “We have people who are trying to
destroy a baseline that people relied on.”

More concerning than the vacant desks, the current and former
employees said, were the hundreds of cases that had been halted or
dropped.

The shift began during President Trump’s first week in office, they
said, when he issued a series of executive orders targeting diversity,
equity, and inclusion programs in both the public and private sectors.

That same week, fair housing employees received a stop-work order via
email from HUD leadership, ordering them to “cease and desist all
work activities associated with environmental justice, diversity,
equity, and inclusion.”

In short, the staff members said, much of the office’s fair housing
work was being characterized as an offshoot of D.E.I. Documents
reviewed by The Times show that the work was repeatedly referred to as
“not a priority of the administration.”

Data from the first seven months of the Trump administration show the
nearly instant results of the changes.

In each of the last five years, the fair housing office typically
collected between $4 million and $8 million in legal settlements for
Americans who accused housing providers of discrimination. From
January to July, however, the office approved less than $200,000, said
Jacy Gaige, until recently its director of enforcement.

Charges of discrimination are also sharply down. When investigators
find evidence of a crime, they issue a formal document that requires
the accused to appear before a judge. On an average year, HUD issues
35 charges; since the beginning of the Trump administration, there
have been four, according to lawyers in the office.

‘Tenuous Theories of Discrimination’

The slowdown can be traced, at least in part, to new procedures that
stripped career officials of the authority to approve settlements or
issue charges, said Ms. Gaige, a career employee for the past 13
years.

Instead, only a small number of Trump appointees now have that
authority. While every new administration brings political appointees
to top roles, not one has monopolized the work flow so thoroughly,
including the first Trump administration, Ms. Gaige said.

“With one email, the entire process was shut down,” she said.
“It essentially stopped the settlement process, which is time
sensitive because complainants and respondents come to an agreement
about what they want to do to resolve a case. And often that is driven
by specific deadlines that are occurring in people’s lives.”

[A portrait of Jacy Gaige outside a gray building. She is wearing a
light brown top with navy blue horizontal stripes. ]

Jacy Gaige was the director of enforcement in HUD’s fair housing
office until she quit in July. Before she did, she wrote to Senator
Elizabeth Warren, raising an alarm about changes inside the
office.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times

In addition, hundreds of pending fair housing cases were frozen, and
some settlements revoked, even when accusations of discrimination had
been substantiated, according to the interviews and the internal
communications.

In one instance, a large homeowner’s association in Texas was found
to have banned the use of housing vouchers by Black residents. That
case had been referred to the Justice Department, but the referral was
abruptly withdrawn by the new Trump appointees.

“The sudden abandonment of the case was a pretty significant
about-face,” said Rebecca Livengood, a lawyer with Relman Colfax in
Washington, D.C., who represented the housing authority that had sued
the homeowner’s association. “There’s every reason to think that
in another administration, what were, at that point, sustained
allegations of widespread racial discrimination would have been
pursued.”

Fair housing cases have historically covered a broad range of civil
rights violations.

They have involved landlords refusing to rent to single mothers with
children, or people of a certain religion. They have combated
discrimination against disabled veterans who needed to live with a
service animal. They have targeted real estate agents who did not want
to show Black buyers homes in white neighborhoods. And in recent
years, they have protected survivors of domestic violence from being
denied housing assistance when attempting to escape a stalker or
abuser.

Last week, John Gibbs, the Trump-appointed principal deputy assistant
secretary for fair housing, sent two memos detailing how “future
enforcement efforts will proceed.”

In previous administrations, he wrote, fair housing offices
“leveraged the Fair Housing Act” against mortgage providers,
appraisers and others “in an ideological matter,” but that would
now change.

Cases involving “tenuous theories of discrimination” would “no
longer be prioritized,” he wrote.

The types of cases identified by Mr. Gibbs had been central to the
office’s work.

They included appraisal bias, which typically involves white
appraisers undervaluing homes owned by Black families; zoning
restrictions used to block housing that might be occupied by Black and
Latino families; and gender or gender expression cases, including new
housing protections added under the Biden administration.

The memos also described previous approaches to redlining and reverse
redlining as “legally unsound.” The two racist practices involve
denying mortgages to minorities and those in minority neighborhoods,
and other predatory and discriminatory lending practices. A full
review of the organization’s guidance on those subjects, he added,
was ongoing.

‘In Mortal Danger’

The staff reassignments and cuts have been particularly hard felt in
the handling of housing complaints under the Violence Against Women
Act, a 1994 law designed to protect women from stalking, assault and
domestic violence that was updated in 2022 to include new housing
protections for the growing number of survivors of domestic violence.

About 500 women a year reach out to HUD to request help under the law,
but only two of the six lawyers remaining in the fair housing office
have experience with the law, according to interviews with the
lawyers.

[A portrait of Paul Osadebe, wearing a suit with a white button-down
shirt and two union pins. ]

Paul Osadebe, a lawyer in HUD’s fair housing office, began
organizing his coworkers to come forward. “We took an oath to the
constitution,” he said.Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

“These are life and death requests,” said Mr. Osadebe, one of the
lawyers being transferred next month. “These women are legitimately
in mortal danger, and often without the government stepping in,
nothing will be done.”

Mr. Osadebe said he and his fellow lawyers were told in January that
they could not communicate directly with the people who filed
complaints, making it virtually impossible to do their jobs. “They
cut us out of the process,” he said.

Mr. Osadebe is an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network, a
group of workers and their supporters who are working across the
federal government to push back against the Trump administration
changes.

“This is a deliberate plan, and it’s about shutting down fair
housing,” he said.

‘Dire Consequences’

Ms. Gaige took a different protest route. She quit in July, but only
after firing off an email to Senator Elizabeth Warren, the ranking
Democrat on the Senate committee responsible for overseeing HUD.

The nation’s fair housing laws were no longer being enforced, she
wrote. Someone needed to intervene.

Others in the office sounded the alarm as well.

Erik Heins, a lawyer in charge of enforcement, wrote two emails to
HUD’s Office of General Counsel in June, outlining the serious
repercussions of the staffing reassignments to other offices.

[Erik Heins, in a blue sweater, pink collared shirt and khaki slacks,
stands on a driveway in front of a brick wall.]

Erik Heins was a lawyer in charge of enforcement at HUD’s office of
fair housing. In June, he wrote emails raising an alarm over staff
cuts, and was fired six days later. Credit...Eric Lee for The New
York Times

“It was very clear pretty quickly that this was not about solving a
need in those offices,” Mr. Heins said in an interview. “My staff
was being retaliated against for being civil rights practitioners, and
losing a dozen civil rights attorneys would cripple HUD’s ability to
enforce its civil rights protections.”

Six days after sending those emails, he was informed by Amy Brown,
HUD’s deputy general counsel for housing programs, that he had
engaged in “unacceptable conduct.” He was fired the same day.

“As a manager, you are expected to be professional and trustworthy
in your conduct to support the Agency’s goals and mission,” Ms.
Brown wrote.

In other emails about the cuts and reassignments, HUD managers told
lawyers who raised concerns that they “appreciate your feedback,”
but were committed to having a “full-time staff reassigned who are
fully committed to the workload, goals and objectives of that
office.”

Those not wanting to be “voluntarily reassigned” were told that
they would be “subject to removal,” according to memos reviewed by
The Times.

Early this month, four current staff members of the fair housing
office also reached out to Ms. Warren and provided her with documents
they had compiled backing up their allegations.

On Monday, according to a spokesman for Ms. Warren, the senator sent
a request
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Brian Harrison, HUD’s acting inspector general, to open an
investigation into the office. The allegations, she wrote, “suggest
that HUD is no longer enforcing Fair Housing and Civil Rights Laws —
with dire consequences.”

Mr. Osadebe, who like some of the lawyers describes himself as a
whistle-blower, said he knows his job may be on the line for speaking
up.

“We took an oath to defend the constitution,” he said. “These
are the moments we took that oath for.”

_Debra Kamin [[link removed]] reports on real
estate for The Times, covering what it means to buy, sell and own a
home in America today._

* Fair Housing Act
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* Department of Housing and Urban Development
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* Housing discrimination
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* government sabotage
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