More than 400 employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development were issued layoff notices on Friday, primarily targeting an office that pushed left-wing ideology, a department official told The Daily Wire.
The federal government has been shut down for more than two weeks, with only “essential” workers reporting for duty, as Democrats refuse to grant a temporary funding extension unless Republicans add in new funding. The Trump administration said in a court filing that some 4,000 workers across seven agencies should be laid off instead.
A HUD official said the largest office targeted by the 442 layoffs at that agency is the Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity office, which the official said became the tip of the spear for left-wing initiatives under former president Joe Biden.
The office is tasked by law with enforcing the Civil Rights Act and processing complaints from people who say they were discriminated against in housing due to disability, race, sex, national origin, and other characteristics. The office’s budget was increased by 20% under Biden and employed nearly 600 people, yet was so focused on issues like transgenderism and dubious theories about systemic racism that it failed to process complaints about more straightforward discrimination, the official said.
For example, the Biden administration became obsessed with the theory that racist home appraisers might be estimating homes owned by blacks at lower values than those owned by whites. The dubious theory is undermined by the fact that appraisers often don’t know the race of a homeowner, and the process is driven by formulas such as comparisons to similar, recently-sold homes.
Meanwhile, when a double-amputee was blocked by his homeowners association from widening his driveway to accommodate his wheelchair, the Biden administration let his complaint about disability discrimination languish for two years, until the Trump administration intervened as an example of the kind of clear-cut discrimination that the office should be laser-focused on stamping out, the official said.
Such complaints are required by law to be processed within 100 days, but the office missed that deadline more than 70% of the time, a 2024 inspector general report found.
In another case, HUD’s Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity office conducted an investigation that claimed that the city of Chicago was racist against blacks and foreigners because it helped create a recycling center in the Southeast Side. The suggestion was that it was “environmental racism” to put a polluting industry in a neighborhood with many black and brown people. Then-mayor Lori Lightfoot called it “absurd” and “dared the federal government to enforce its ruling that the city’s planning and zoning laws were discriminatory,” Block Club Chicago reported at the time. Lightfoot folded just before leaving office.
The office was poised to use similar logic to drastically change the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of Americans through a rule that held that minimum lot sizes were also discriminatory planning and zoning. That is, the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule would effectively abolish the suburbs, which are characterized by single-family homes on lots of specific sizes, by withholding huge sums of federal funding unless towns and counties allowed lots to be subdivided without restriction, and for dense housing to be built anywhere.
The logic was that it’s racist to not have apartments everywhere, because blacks like to live in apartments – even though the majority of Americans of all races live in the suburbs, and presumably choose to do so because they like that level of density, and want to keep it that way. The rule was introduced at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency and repealed by Trump, then re-introduced by Biden and repealed again by Trump, all before it was able to transform the fabric of America wholesale.
The HUD official said the Trump administration supports the office’s true mission and wants to re-focus on it, saying the Biden administration had begun focusing on factors that don’t appear in the Civil Rights Act, including transgenderism and a lack of ability to speak English.
HUD communications will now appear only in English, which does not constitute discrimination based on national origin, the official said.
Affected employees were given notice that layoffs would take effect in 60 days, commencing a byzantine process. The official declined to say whether employees would return to work until that time should the government shutdown end, but noted that the agency has been planning the layoffs for months, and that they were not ordered by the White House.
Layoffs elsewhere also focused on offices that the Trump administration believes were not aligned with administration priorities, including 1,400 at the Internal Revenue Service, as well as 466 at the Department of Education and 187 at the Department of Energy.
