A small number of current and former employees of the Department of Housing and Urban Development 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," states one letter, posted on DearAmericaletters.org. "Worse, they're picking and choosing which protected classes count."
"I pray for justice for every person unfairly denied a safe place to live," states another.
A third, signed by "a tired HUD employee," states, "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 one of them, Paul Osadebe, who helped launch the site and spoke to NPR in his personal capacity, and as a union steward with the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 476.
"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 Trump administration changes priorities for fair housing
The 1968 Fair Housing Act is a landmark civil rights law that bans housing discrimination based on race, national origin, religion, gender, family status or disability. By law, HUD is required to investigate all cases that come its way, and if it finds discrimination, it must pursue legal action or a settlement.
But in a recent video message to mark Fair Housing Month, HUD Secretary Scott Turner 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. "They followed the broken compass of DEI instead of the plain intent of the law."
The Trump administration aims "to restore sanity to enforcement," he said.
Among other things, Turner cited HUD's proposal to end liability for unintentional discrimination, known as disparate impact, which advocates say can address hidden discrimination in things like hiring, education and housing. Turner also noted that HUD is investigating Boston, Minneapolis and Washington state over housing plans that aim to address historical racial discrimination, suggesting the policies may be biased against white people.
Last year, internal memos said the agency aimed to reduce compliance burdens, not add to them, and laid out "priorities and practices that must be eliminated." They included cases over gender identity and environmental justice and race-based cases that focused on protecting a group of people instead of one individual.
HUD also is pressuring states to comply with its shift in priorities, saying it will 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 over the change, alleging it's arbitrary and unconstitutional.
"They've turned [civil rights law] on its head," said Sara Pratt, a longtime civil rights attorney who helped lead HUD's fair housing office until 2015. States have long been allowed to have their own stronger enforcement laws, she said, but now the federal government is telling them "you can only do what we say."
HUD employees say the new policies create harm
Osadebe and those who posted anonymous letters on the new website bristle at the administration's frequent attacks suggesting they are lazy and inefficient. They lament the mass firings, forced resignations and reassignments that decimated their ranks, adding to the challenge of simply doing their job.
But mostly, they are upset that many whose rights are being violated may no longer get justice. That list can include homeless people, families with disabled children and victims of domestic violence.
NPR spoke with one letter writer who said they did not want their name made public out of fear of losing their job. They noted that executive orders about DEI and general ideology are very broad, but HUD attorneys have not been allowed to offer legal interpretation, as usually happens. And this leads to investigators being cautious, they said, perhaps deciding "we no longer consider sex as a protected class to include LGBTQ people."
Osadebe said HUD also has contradicted the law by directing employees to speak only English with clients, after a Trump executive order making it the country's official language.
"Imagine that you are a U.S. citizen in Puerto Rico — you speak only Spanish," Osadebe said. "That's absurd."
But, he added, it's hard to push back 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 hopes that the anonymous HUD employee letters will encourage Congress to do its job and that federal workers in other agencies to also speak up.
"We're all experiencing the same things," he said.
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