“Every day is a fight to keep basic rights from being dismantled.”
Dear America,
I'm going to be honest with you: I never had an interest in working for the government at any level. I grew up with stories of my mother's pre-children career in a government science agency, sequestered in a windowless basement in the suburbs. It wasn't glamorous, but she talked with immense pride about her work in making sure other countries had clean water. There were office politics and paperwork, sure, but there was also a sense of community—each division was a family. (It was the 1980s, so my brain also fills in shoulder pads.) I could not reconcile my brilliant, colorful, chatty mother with this person who reminisced fondly about her years looking at maps and filing reports in the dark.
It definitely was not for me. Until it was.
I joined the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) by accident. Following the end of a long-term relationship, I applied on a whim to the Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program - a two-year training and leadership development program. (It was shuttered by Executive Order on February 19, 2025.) Eleven months, two essays, three personality tests, a day-long interview in DC, and two more interviews at HUD later - I was in. It's more than a decade later and I am still, inexplicably, in. I didn't end up in a windowless basement like my mother, but HUD's building is affectionately called "ten floors of basement." I assure you that the irony is not lost on me.
At HUD, I worked with housing agencies, local governments, and housing providers to help create safe, affordable housing - for everyone. I reviewed plans for homes in small Texas towns to make sure they were habitable for our seniors. I laid on the floor of a bathroom in Pennsylvania with a measuring tape to make sure someone with a walker could safely use the bathroom in their home. I created maps to show a California county how they could better reach non-English speakers. I can tell you by sight if a sidewalk curb is too steep for a stroller or wheelchair. I've read thousands of pages of public comments to make sure that cities, both big and small, answered the concerns of all people, not just the ones with the loudest voices or largest purses.
I'm telling you all these anecdotes because each little story is an example of our civil rights laws in action. My childhood impression of the government was not wrong; government work is neither glitzy nor exhilarating, and even by those standards, HUD is particularly prosaic. I envisioned my career measuring way fewer toilets. But that's the work. We fight, scratch, and claw for progress to make people's lives a tiny bit better.
And for most of my career, the people I worked with and for felt the same. Lots of housing providers ended up on the phone with me because they did not understand all the laws and rules that we enforce. These laws exist because our country's promise of opportunity and equality fell short. You deserve access to that promise, regardless of your sex or gender or skin color or disability or accent or if you have kids or who you pray to. I found that the vast majority of people were eager to do fair housing once we talked through what it means in practice.
(Now, that's not everyone; I have been threatened by at least one public official over this work. I've also been serenaded with a banjo by the owner of a large housing complex. The jury is out on which was worse.)
Unfortunately, a lot has changed in the last year and a half. FHEO was never a large office, but we lost nearly 60% of our already small staff to a combination of widespread government layoffs and fear deliberately sown by our political leadership. Longstanding guides published to help the public understand their rights on topics like service animals, senior housing, and disaster recovery disappeared (literally) overnight, derided as burdensome and restrictive. Several nonprofit grants for tenant advocacy were cancelled simply because their websites talked about 'sexual orientation.' As staff, who we are allowed to talk to varies week to week: some days we can talk to our office lawyers and other HUD programs, some days we can't. We certainly can't send a letter to a housing provider without the oversight of a political appointee who has worked in the government for a total of six months. Every day is a fight to keep basic rights from being dismantled. We've had bad times before, but never so many days where people cry under their desks during fifteen-minute breaks. (If you have also been there, my heart goes out to you. This isn't how the world should be.)
America, I said I would be honest with you. HUD and the federal government are not perfect and have never been. Plenty of our programs could use an update for the 20th century (yes, that's the one I meant to say), many regulations are burdensome and restrictive, and our policies are slow to navigate and even slower to revise. I tell you this not to downplay the work we do, but to emphasize how deeply important it is despite this. It's much harder to look at a flawed system and try and fix it than to break something and yell about how it doesn't work. Our administration and our political leadership reveal how narrowly they define success every time they insist that our programs must be eliminated because they don't work. Our Assistant Secretary's claims that human rights exceed constitutional authority are an attempt to ignore the history that made these protections necessary. Our civil rights laws were not created by accident. They were responses to real discrimination experienced by real people. Pretending those inequities never existed does not make them disappear. While I might only have a decade in fair housing, we have centuries of history that proves this fantasy false.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was made possible by the work of the Civil Rights Movement and passed seven days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. FHEO only exists because of our government's long, racist history and the recognition that it's our duty to do better. Our goal in fair housing is to work ourselves out of a job, and we can only complete the work together.
Dear America, I talk to you about my government service and my mother's as I sit pregnant with my own child. My hopes for our country and my kid are intertwined. Every parent wants their child to live in a better world than the one they have. I'm lucky to work at something worth doing, and I want them to see that better world.
Maybe they'll also see that beauty from a windowless basement.
Sincerely,
A Fair Housing Believer
