For 57 years, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud) has used a landmark civil rights law to bring lawsuits against discriminatory lenders, landlords and realtors, with the goal of fighting residential segregation.
That work has largely ground to a halt since Donald Trump returned to the White House, two attorneys in the department’s anti-discrimination division said in interviews, as well as a whistleblower report sent to Congress and a lawsuit filed this week.
The president’s appointees at Hud believe bringing anti-discrimination cases is “not a priority”, said the whistleblowers, who work in Hud’s Office of Fair Housing (OFH). Managers also informed the group that OFH, which brings cases against parties accused of discriminating against tenants and homebuyers, must be downsized because it had become an “optics problem”.
“There’s really just a complete stymying of fair housing, and that’s, I think, what inspired us to take this risk,” Palmer Heenan, who has been informed he will be reassigned out of the office early next month, told the Guardian.
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The allegations, which were first reported by the New York Times, are the latest sign of how the Trump administration is planning to transform the enforcement of civil rights laws in the US, many of which stem from the struggle against Jim Crow and other racist practices in the 1960s. At the justice department, prosecutors have shifted their focus towards prosecuting non-citizen voters and discrimination against white people, while recently ending cases on voter suppression, pay discrimination and environmental justice.
Hud is responsible for enforcing the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which was meant to end discrimination faced by homebuyers on the basis of race, religion, national origin, sex or disability, with OFH tasked with bringing cases.
Trump’s appointees have hobbled that work by thinning its ranks through firings and reassignments, intervening in cases and imposing an unprecedented gag order on attorneys, the OFH whistleblowers wrote.
The office lost seven of its 31 employees to Trump’s campaign of firing, layoffs and retirements of federal workers, and many of the remaining staff has been told they will be reassigned, which would leave only 11 employees in the office.
Another Hud office, the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which works with OFH in investigating housing discrimination claims and has branch offices nationwide, has been targeted for a 77% cut in staffing. The layoffs in that office have fallen particularly hard on cases involving discrimination against domestic violence victims, with a branch dedicated to investigating those now shuttered. Hud has also moved to oust employees working on such cases at OFH, so that only two line attorneys will be left to prosecute hundreds of cases, the whistleblowers said, adding that one supervisor who spoke out against the downsizing of OFH was suspended and later fired.
“It’s all about dismantling the capacity to protect people’s rights, and why they’re doing that, I can’t really say, but that is what’s happening, and it’s something that can’t be allowed to happen in silence,” said Paul Osadebe, who has also been targeted for reassignment from OFH.
On Monday, Osadebe, Heenan and three other OFH attorneys sued Hud secretary Scott Turner, asking a court to block their reassignments.
Shortly after Trump took office, his appointees informed OFH that they would need their permission to communicate with parties in civil rights complaints as well as with other federal agencies. Such permission has rarely been granted, and the gag order dramatically slowed work on settlements and litigation as well as caused some cases to stagnate entirely, the attorneys said.
Political appointees have intervened to drop some cases entirely, including one brought in January against a Texas homeowner’s association whose members were accused of using racial slurs, physical threats and the presence of a neo-Nazi group to keep Black renters out. Another dismissed case concerned a lender in Texas who charges Hispanic mortgage borrowers higher rates, Heenan said.
In other instances, the appointees have dismissed settlements in housing cases, or altered terms that the parties agreed to so that they provide “less money, less help”, Osadebe said.
A Hud spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Heenan, Osadebe and two anonymous colleagues sent the whistleblower report in August to Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate committee on banking, housing, and urban affairs. On Monday, the senator said she had asked Hud’s inspector general for an investigation.
“If you’re a mom protecting your kids from living with an abusive father, or if you’re getting denied a mortgage because of the color of your skin, you have civil rights protection under US law, but the Trump administration has been systematically destroying these federal protections for renters and homeowners,” Warren said.
The two attorneys remain employed by Hud, and said they have received no response or retaliation from the department for speaking out.
“The reason that we went on a out on a limb like this is that we were called to by the oath that we took,” said Osadebe, who is organizer of Federal Unionists Network, which has brought together unionized employees and their allies to oppose the Trump administration’s assault on the civil service.
“People took a lot bigger risks to get these laws and protections that we enforce. People marched and bled and died for these protections, so we can’t let them go away on our watch.”
By gutting enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, progress made towards reversing housing discrimination will be undone, the whistleblowers said. Banks could charge higher mortgage rates for homebuyers in neighborhoods where people are predominantly of a certain race or national origin. Local governments could refuse to allow the construction of affordable housing in certain areas, while a developer could ignore requests to build accommodations for disabled residents.
Only a small number of private attorneys handle residential discrimination, Heenan said, and Hud recently slashed funding to state level agencies that deal with housing cases.
“At the same time as our office is being gutted and we’re being prevented from doing this work, there are actions that are being taken that will also make it harder for those same organizations to do anything,” Heenan said. “So, it’s a multi-pronged assault.”
