“A person fired or denied a place to live because their clothes, hair, or choice of partner don’t match traditional sex-based norms is clearly unjust.”
Dear America,
On “Liberation Day” we postponed our home renovation indefinitely. The sputtering appliances and living space that no longer worked for our family would have to get us through a while longer – some “golden age,” I thought, as I hit send on the email breaking the news to the designer and architect. The DOGE assault on civil servants meant justifying my employment to the richest man in the world on a weekly basis after he had illegally fired hundreds of dedicated colleagues, most of whom had recently joined the agency and were eager to innovate and contribute. Hundreds more had resigned voluntarily rather than continue working for leaders whose openly stated goal was to fire and traumatize them. The resulting anxiety already had me questioning the wisdom of a major investment. Now tariffs on materials and deportation-induced labor shortages threatened to spike the costs by who-knows-how-much? Spending our savings felt irresponsible. The renovation would have to wait.
I drew comfort in how fortunate my family was to have stable housing in a safe, healthy neighborhood. My colleagues and I aim to provide those conditions for everyone, but the work, always challenging, was becoming harder every day. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, charged with civil rights enforcement, investigates complaints of housing discrimination and requires that federal housing programs take active steps to undo the lasting damage caused by hundreds of years of legal segregation and oppression. But how do you stop national origin discrimination when the entire MAGA political project is built on it?
Legal US residents no longer qualify for HUD-insured loans, spouses and parents of US citizens in HUD housing may be evicted and deported, and non-English speakers cannot access HUD’s website to learn their rights or file discrimination complaints in their native language. What was sold to the American people as a campaign against illegal immigration and violent crime has revealed itself in practice as a nativist project of ethnic cleansing, and HUD’s leaders are eagerly embracing their role, though their rhetoric still seeks to obscure their true aims.
These same leaders claim that civil rights laws permit state and local governments to concentrate toxic industrial waste in Black neighborhoods or to steer federal disaster recovery dollars almost exclusively to White homeowners, while also arguing that any effort to close racial homeownership gaps are “intentional” discrimination against Whites. They undermined complaint investigation and resolution, the bedrock of HUD’s enforcement work, stalling and micromanaging for months every proposed fair housing complaint settlement in the country. This delayed hundreds of people facing discrimination from obtaining relief and added to a backlog that has grown dramatically while staffing decreased by over 40 percent. Most chillingly, they have made clear that they view HUD not as an executive agency with a Constitutional duty to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” but as a weapon to punish the President’s domestic political enemies, launching an investigation into Minneapolis 2040, one of the most ambitious fair housing planning efforts in the nation (and one that is already boosting construction and lowering costs) while childishly insulting the local leader who championed it.
Other core civil rights protections have been rolled back, reversing decades of progress. The Fair Housing Act and other civil rights laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, and over many years courts slowly moved toward the obvious conclusion that this protection includes sexual orientation and gender identity. A person fired or denied a place to live because their clothes, hair, or choice of partner don’t match traditional sex-based norms is clearly unjust, but the hard-fought protections against such denials that HUD investigators were enforcing have vanished in the Orwellian campaign against “gender ideology.”
Now, instead of protecting the freedom of expression that allows anyone to dress as they choose, the federal government is in the business of requiring and verifying that your biological gender at birth matches the way you present yourself publicly. Like mass deportation and the aggressive attacks against legal US residents, this profound intrusion on freedom and liberty was smuggled into the American consciousness through a disingenuous pretense, in this case fairness in sports. Once smoldering, unhinged presidential fabrications about immigrants eating pets or teachers secretly changing the gender of students at school are accelerants igniting hatred and fear to undermine Constitutional protections and reverse legal precedent built over almost 60 years.
All of these horrors are accompanied by a torrent of lies, threats, and illegal acts meant to intimidate, confuse, and scare us into submission. Secretary Turner claims, without evidence or a single specific example, that illegal immigrants were benefitting from federally-backed loans. He inflates the scale of potential fraud in HUD programs by a factor of ten, unchallenged, in Congressional testimony. He denigrates career staff as having enjoyed a “four-year vacation” under the previous administration, and incoherently rails against federal regulation while simultaneously cutting HUD’s leverage to discourage local land use restrictions – the true culprit underlying both skyrocketing housing costs and our history of racial exclusion.
When asked about testing, the HUD-funded initiative that sends pairs of applicants with differing races, ethnicities, family compositions, or disability status to rent or buy homes, the Secretary turns to an advisor behind him for help, unaware of the most basic details and terms in the Department he purportedly runs. His ignorance is telling given that research consistently reveals pervasive discrimination against non-white and disabled households and families with children, yet combatting these violations of law is not only unlisted among HUD’s priorities, it was also written out of the agency’s mission.
Through all of this, more than 300 career civil servants remain, showing up to work every day and doing their best to enforce laws passed by our elected representatives. The attacks continue: quotas for lower performance ratings, reduced job security, draconian in-office policies, and a rushed, illegal Headquarters move are all transparent attempts to demoralize and subdue the dedicated staff who take seriously their oath to the Constitution and their obligations to the American people. In the face of this onslaught their courage to stand up for civil rights is an inspiration and a reminder of the privilege of public service.
Slowly but unmistakably, their quiet resolve under such extreme duress is bearing fruit. The reality of our unfinished work as a society remains, as do some federal courts willing to recognize fact and evidence over assertion-by-decree, AI-generated incitement, and based memes. So settlements move forward, charges are once again filed, and the work to build a country free of discrimination with equal opportunity for all, endures. One day sooner or later, the renovation will begin.
—A civil servant
