Will Trump, Project 2025 kill HUD?

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

Now that Donald Trump is once again the president-elect of the United States, and with several former Trump administration officials having contributed to the policy playbook, the likelihood has increased that the document could serve as guidance in the second Trump administration.

One consistent, overarching element that persists across much of the 922 pages of the Project 2025 playbook is the desire to do away with career officials inside federal agencies and replace them with political appointees. This is highlighted in the playbook’s section dedicated to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), although there could be some legal and institutional roadblocks to getting this done immediately.

But it should be a top priority for HUD, according to the document, driven by the desire to bring people aboard who are “motivated and aligned” with the aims 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 persistent implementation of corrosive progressive ideologies across the department’s programs.”

This would include identification and removal of any non-citizens who are participating in federally-assisted housing, including “all mixed-status families.”

The document also calls for an increase in the Federal Housing Administration‘s mortgage insurance premium (MIP) for all loans with terms longer than 20-year terms, while maintaining MIP levels for refinances and purchase loans with shorter terms. Shorter-duration mortgages, it states, can best encourage “wealth-building homeownership opportunities.”

The document also takes aim at various longtime HUD policies extending back to the time 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 nation 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 argues for the establishment of a task force that would seek to counter policies determined to be rooted in opposing ideologies. It calls for officials to review “all subregulatory guidance that has been instituted outside of 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 restored by the Biden team.

There are also a series of proposals aimed at “restrict[ing] program eligibility when admission would threaten the protection of the life and health of individuals and fail to encourage upward mobility and economic advancement through household self-sufficiency,” along with 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 “once again to its own special risk insurance fund,” and a revision of loan limit determinations and “statutory flexibility for shorter-term products that amortize principal earlier and faster.”

Housing advocates who spoke with HousingWire prior to the election cast some doubt on whether the document’s priorities would be pursued. But this was also during a time when polls seemingly indicated a closer presidential race than it ended up being. The president-elect and his allies aimed to distance themselves from Project 2025 during the campaign.

But now that the dust has settled and Trump is set to take office in January, some of his allies — including former White House adviser Steve Bannon — are indicating that it could have more sway over policy priorities than either Trump, his campaign or the Republican Party publicly indicated during the run-up to the election.