The chaos by design of the most recent Trump administration’s first one hundred days hasn’t spared any part of government. Here are some of the biggest ways layoffs, agency dismantling and overreaching executive orders have impacted the US housing system.
Firings at HUD and fair housing rollbacks
As part of DOGE’s assault on the federal workforce, there have been careless layoffs at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—the federal agency dedicated to addressing housing, homelessness, community development, and long-term disaster recovery. In previous blogposts, I’ve highlighted the importance of HUD and its role in advancing affordable, climate resilient housing.
More HUD layoffs and regional office closures are anticipated in the coming weeks and will impact the agency’s ability to manage programs like Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage underwriting and Community Development Block Grants that cities, counties, and states rely on to support affordable housing, economic development programming, and disaster recovery.
President Trump’s recent executive order (EO) on “restoring equality” is a stepping stone to Project 2025’s goal of repealing the Fair Housing Act. The order contradicts a 2015 Supreme Court ruling and calls for federal agencies to ignore the disparate impact standard—a key legal principle for the civil rights movement that has helped fight discrimination in housing and employment in cases that may at first appear neutral but have a practically significant impact on people based on their race, sex, disability, or other protected trait.
In a country where discrimination has touched millions of lives and shaped cities, climate risk, and disaster recovery, this EO is an ominous rejection of basic historical facts with serious consequences for our future. As the Alliance for Housing Justice notes, this EO is an unconstitutional “greenlight to discriminate at scale—putting people’s homes and lives at risk.”
Taking housing out of federal homelessness strategy
The US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) is a small federal agency dedicated to preventing and ending homelessness through coordination across federal departments. In September 2024, USICH released the first ever federal homelessness prevention framework rooted in public health principles and the Housing First model.
In March 2025, President Trump, via DOGE, effectively dismantled USICH. At a time of record homelessness and economic uncertainty, President Trump’s dismantling of USICH clears the way for his strategy to address homelessness through development of privately operated tent cities.
Hanging community development financial institutions out to dry
Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) are an important part of America’s under-resourced affordable housing ecosystem. In a nutshell, CDFIs are lenders that provide both investment capital and technical support for communities and projects that the mainstream financial system can’t or won’t serve. CDFIs help finance affordable housing construction and preservation, community development, and climate solutions. Tariffs levied by the Trump administration have further complicated the financing of housing construction and are anticipated to add 9,200 dollars to the average price of a newly constructed home.
On March 25th, President Trump ordered the dismantling of the CDFI Fund, a department created in 1994 through bipartisan legislation by stripping back its activity to only what was statutorily required. This mirrors the administration’s strategy with other agencies. Through one of its largest programs, the New Market Tax Credit, the CDFI fund has allocated 81 billion dollars. While the New Market Tax Credit is not without its criticisms, the program is important in that it represents a “direct effort to reverse the impacts of past discriminatory legal frameworks.” Attacks on the CDFI Fund should be understood as part of the administration’s fealty to corporate interests—and the push to sell public lands for real estate development as a false solution to the housing crisis.
What to expect next?
In the next 100 days and beyond, as we enter a Danger Season of climate-fueled extreme weather that destroys homes and wreaks havoc on household finances, the harmful impacts of all the cuts we’ve seen to date will become ever clearer. We should also expect more dangerous executive orders and for the Trump administration to continue to ignore court rulings that don’t serve its political agenda. We should also expect to see the continued politicization of disaster response, including making aid harder to access.
Congress must push back against these and other egregious actions and should not rubber stamp a budget that puts housing justice and shared prosperity further out of reach.
No matter what the next hundred days and beyond bring, the housing crisis isn’t going anywhere. While chaos reigns on the federal level, cities and states must forge ahead to build and preserve meaningfully affordable and climate resilient housing on the ground and advance housing rights.