Representative Maxine Waters of California and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts say they are banding together to fight the Trump administration’s recent cuts that they say will leave Americans unprotected from housing discrimination.
On Monday, the two Democrats delivered a letter to Housing and Urban Development secretary Scott Turner that said cutbacks to fair housing initiatives will “embolden housing discrimination” and put “people’s lives at risk.” The letter has 108 signatures, all from Democrats in Congress.
The action comes on the heels of lawsuits filed last week against HUD and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency by four local fair housing organizations that are hoping to make their case class action. Under the DOGE cost-cutting plan, at least 66 local fair housing groups — whose purpose is to enforce the landmark Fair Housing Act that prohibits discrimination in real estate — face the sudden rescission of $30 million in grants.
Mr. Turner has also forecast that he will slash staff by 50 percent at the agency and by 77 percent at its Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which enforces the Fair Housing Act at the federal level.
“Soon there’ll be no enforcement,” Ms. Waters said in an interview. “We really are going to go backward.”
Ms. Warren said that if housing discrimination is left unchecked, it will freeze more Americans out of a volatile housing market, adding that seniors, people with disabilities, Blacks and Latinos are most at risk of losing their homes in the volatile market.
“We should attack housing discrimination head-on, in all its forms, but we should also attack the underlying cause, which is the severe housing shortage,” she said in an interview.
When people are desperate for affordable housing, she added, they are at greater risk of being discriminated against because housing providers have the upper hand. “The tight supply of housing is part of the reason that landlords have so much power,” she said.
The Fair Housing Act is otherwise supported by several hundred civil servants and nonprofit employees who field phone calls, offer education and coordinate legal guidance for some 33,000 Americans each year who reach out with claims: A landlord removed the ramp for their wheelchair, and now they can’t access their apartment. Or a home appraisal came back low, and the owners worry it’s because they are Black.
In cases like these, fair housing organizations are the frontline defense to ensuring that Americans’ rights are protected. Without grass-roots groups keeping watch on those who seek to discriminate, the law becomes “a toothless tiger,” said Lisa Rice, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance. Referring to the Trump administration, she said, “They don’t want the law enforced.”
The White House and the HUD both did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Ms. Rice’s remarks.
Last month, DOGE and HUD launched a joint task force that they said would eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in government spending. In a news release announcing the task force on Feb. 13, Mr. Turner said that under his leadership, the department would be “detailed and deliberate about every dollar spent” to “better serve the American people.”
But local fair housing groups say the cuts will make it difficult, if not impossible, to serve anyone. The groups that filed the lawsuit are in Massachusetts, Idaho, Texas and Ohio, but their worries speak to their peers across the country, Ms. Rice said. Many of the nonprofits say they are now frantically searching for private donors to stay afloat.
“There aren’t a lot of other funding options for us in Indiana,” said Amy Nelson, executive director of the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana, the only fair housing organization in the state. “We just don’t have alternatives.”
Ms. Nelson said the canceled grant had funded data-driven investigations and outreach, including data used in a class-action lawsuit against a rental company that showed that Black women were disproportionately having their rental applications rejected at a local housing complex.
Caroline Peattie, the executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, said her organization had used the grants to build an expansive fair housing testing operation that allowed the group to pinpoint when landlords might be discriminating against renters.
“I am very concerned about the long-term sustainability of our organization,” she said.
Both Ms. Peattie and Ms. Nelson said that their organizations are currently leaning on cash reserves. But in other places, fair housing work has already been frozen. Declarations filed alongside last week’s lawsuit offer details of the effect of the cuts.
In Idaho, where the Intermountain Fair Housing Council is the only such organization in the state, 10 of the state’s 44 counties will be cut from its service area, leaving some of the most rural and remote residents without any eviction prevention or fair housing services. In South Texas, where many clients of the San Antonio Fair Housing Council suffer from physical and mental disabilities, 85 percent of the organization’s budget has disappeared with the loss of its grant. It has had to abandon several cases, including a female client who reached out to report sexual harassment by a maintenance worker at her apartment.
Ms. Rice, from the National Fair Housing Alliance, said the grant termination is illegal because the grants had been allotted by Congress, and Congress has not authorized DOGE to direct another agency’s operations.
“This is a constitutional crisis,” Ms. Rice said. “They’re thumbing their nose at the law.”
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