Will Trump, Project 2025 Destroy HUD?

Project 2025 refers to a series of proposals published by a conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation that would reform many federal agencies and systems to better align with conservative ideology.

Now that Donald Trump is once again the president-elect of the United States, and several former Trump administration officials have contributed to the policy playbook, it has become more likely that the document could serve as guidance in the second Trump administration.

One consistent, overarching element that runs through much of the 922 pages of the Project 2025 playbook is the desire to abolish career civil servants within federal agencies and replace them with political appointees. This is emphasized in the part of the script dedicated to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), although there may be some legal and institutional hurdles to getting this done immediately.

But it should be a top priority for HUD, according to the document, driven by a desire to bring on board people who are “motivated and aligned” with the goals of a new conservative administration.

The HUD section of Project 2025, written by Ben Carson, the HUD secretary during the first Trump administration, calls for a “reset” of the department. This includes “a broad reversal of the Biden administration’s continued implementation of corrosive progressive ideologies in the department’s programs.”

This includes the identification and removal of all noncitizens participating in federally assisted housing, including “all mixed-status families.”

The document also calls for an increase in Federal Housing Administration‘s mortgage insurance premium (MIP) for all loans with terms over twenty years, while MIP levels are maintained for refinances and purchase loans with shorter terms. Shorter-term mortgages, the report says, can best encourage “home-building opportunities.”

The document also focuses on several legacy HUD policies dating back to the days of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs. It calls for new political leadership at HUD to “reexamine the federal government’s role in housing markets across the country and consider whether it is time for a ‘reform, reinvention, and renewal’ that transfers department functions to separate federal agencies, states and localities. .”

It also calls for the creation of a task force that would try to counter policies determined to be rooted in opposing ideologies. It calls on officials to review “all sub-regulatory guidelines established outside the Administrative Procedure Act (APA),” and for a repeal of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation. The first Trump administration rescinded that rule before it was reinstated by the Biden team.

There is also a series of proposals aimed at “restricting”.[ing] eligibility for the program where admission would jeopardize the protection of the lives and health of individuals and would fail to encourage upward mobility and economic progress through household self-sufficiency,” along with the suspension of “all external research and evaluation grants in the Office of Policy Development and Research.”

The document calls for moving the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program “back into its own dedicated risk insurance fund” and a review of the loan limit determination and “legal flexibility for shorter-term products that pay principal sooner and write off faster.”

Housing advocates who spoke to them HousingWire cast some doubt ahead of the elections as to whether the document’s priorities would be pursued. But this was also at a time when polls seemed to indicate a closer presidential race than it ultimately was. The president-elect and his allies intended to distance itself from Project 2025 during the campaign.

But now that the dust has settled and Trump will take power in January, some of his allies, including former ones, will also take power White House advisor Steve Bannon – indicate that it could have more influence on policy priorities than Trump, his campaign or the Republican Party have publicly indicated in the run-up to the election.