Boarded doors and windows on Feb. 15, 2023, in Baltimore, where Black residents have alleged that redevelopment policies perpetuate racial discrimination. Julio Cortez/AP
A small group of current and former Department of Housing and Urban Development employees launched a website Thursday to accuse the Trump administration of blocking enforcement of federal fair housing laws. They chose to remain anonymous out of concern they’d be fired for speaking out.
“This administration has ground fair housing enforcement to a halt,” reads one letter posted on DearAmericaletters.org. “Worse, they’re picking and choosing which protected classes count.” Another says, “I pray for justice for every person unfairly denied a safe place to live.” A third, signed by “a tired HUD employee,” says, “Months later, I still think about the people impacted by the work I was forced to abandon.”
Last fall, two HUD civil rights lawyers were fired after going to Congress with concerns that the agency was unlawfully restricting fair housing enforcement. More than six months later, “it’s still happening,” says Paul Osadebe, one of the site’s organizers and a union steward with the American Federation of Government Employees Local 476, speaking in his personal capacity. “We’re not being allowed to help the people that we’re supposed to be serving,” he said. “If it’s something to do with race, if it’s anything to do with gender, you’re just not allowed to touch that anymore.”
NPR has requested comment from HUD about the accusations by agency employees.
The 1968 Fair Housing Act bans housing discrimination based on race, national origin, religion, gender, family status or disability. By law, HUD is required to investigate complaints and, when it finds discrimination, pursue legal action or a settlement.
But HUD Secretary Scott Turner, in a video marking Fair Housing Month, said the law had been twisted to serve “radical ideologies” focused on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). “The Biden administration weaponized the Fair Housing Act to target Americans. They assumed too many Americans were racists until proven innocent,” he said, adding the administration aims “to restore sanity to enforcement.”
Turner pointed to HUD’s proposal to end liability for unintentional discrimination, known as disparate impact, and to investigations of Boston, Minneapolis and Washington state over housing plans intended to address historical racial discrimination, suggesting such policies could be biased against white people.
Internal memos last year said the agency aimed to reduce compliance burdens and listed “priorities and practices that must be eliminated,” including cases involving gender identity, environmental justice and certain race-based cases that focused on protecting groups rather than individuals. HUD also told states it would not reimburse them for discrimination cases based on sexual orientation, gender identity, criminal record, use of a housing voucher or English-language proficiency. Fifteen blue states and the District of Columbia are suing HUD, alleging the change is arbitrary and unconstitutional.
“They’ve turned [civil rights law] on its head,” said Sara Pratt, a longtime civil rights attorney who led HUD’s fair housing office until 2015. States can have stronger enforcement laws, she said, but now the federal government is telling them “you can only do what we say.”
Osadebe and authors of the anonymous letters bristle at frequent attacks suggesting HUD staff are lazy or inefficient. They lament mass firings, forced resignations and reassignments that have reduced staff and made it harder to do the work.
Mostly, they worry that many whose rights are being violated may no longer get justice — including homeless people, families with disabled children and domestic violence victims.
NPR spoke with one letter writer who refused to be named for fear of losing their job. They said recent executive orders on DEI and broader ideology are very broad, but HUD attorneys have not been allowed to offer legal interpretation as they normally would. That has made investigators cautious, the writer said, perhaps leading to decisions such as “we no longer consider sex as a protected class to include LGBTQ people.”
Osadebe also said HUD has directed employees to speak only English with clients following a Trump executive order designating English as the official language. “Imagine that you are a U.S. citizen in Puerto Rico — you speak only Spanish,” he said. “That’s absurd.”
He added that pushing back is difficult in “an atmosphere of repression, a sense that anyone who speaks out and tells the truth will be silenced, attacked, their job will be taken away from them.”
Osadebe said he hopes the anonymous HUD employee letters will encourage Congress to act and prompt federal workers in other agencies to speak up. “We’re all experiencing the same things,” he said.