HUD Employees Face Staffing Reductions of 50%

The Trump administration is preparing to downsize the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development workforce by 50% as part of its broad initiative to reduce the size of the federal government, according to published reports. Antonio Gaines, president of HUD Council 222 of the American Federation of Government Employees, told Yahoo Finance that certain HUD divisions may see deep reductions in staff, although the Federal Housing Administration is not expected to be affected. 

Specifically, offices that police housing and employment discrimination are expected to be reduced by 75%, Gaines told Yahoo Finance. Other departments that face the deepest reductions include the Office of Policy Development and Research, which maintains data about the U.S. housing market, and the Office of Community Planning and Development, which offers affordable housing programs and homelessness assistance and provides disaster recovery. 

As of this past Friday, HUD had not formally announced any staffing reductions and the timing of possible layoffs was not clear, NPR reported. 

Gaines told NPR he’d learned of the cuts from HUD officials who wished to remain anonymous.  “We expect more cuts to come,” Gaines told Yahoo Finance, saying he was worried about how the cuts and buyouts could affect services including housing vouchers and grants to rural hospitals. “It’s pretty devastating. There could be huge disruptions in services to American citizens.” 

Housing Secretary Scott Turner said he had launched his own DOGE task force to review spending in the department. “We are no longer in a business-as-usual posture and the DOGE task force will play a critical role in helping to identify and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse and ultimately better serve the American people,” Turner said in a statement.

Gaines told NPR his understanding was that any programs not required by congressional statute are especially vulnerable. He noted that the chapter about HUD in Project 2025, written by Trump’s first HUD secretary, Ben Carson, calls for transferring some of the department’s functions to other federal agencies, states or cities. 

However, one program enacted by Congress appears headed for the chopping block: the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program, created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. To date it has awarded more than $1 billion to private companies to help them upgrade apartment buildings for HUD-subsidized tenants, making them more energy efficient. The Trump administration plans to terminate it, a HUD staffer told NPR.

“Record high housing costs are putting the squeeze on families in every part of this country,” former HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, who now heads Enterprise Community Partners, told NPR. He said arbitrary cuts to staff and funding “will only serve to destabilize our housing system and drive up costs for both renters and owners.”