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With Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) by his side President Donald Trump speaks to the press following a House Republican meeting at the U.S. Capitol on May 20, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Getty Images, Tasos Katopodis
Could Splits Within the GOP Over Economic Policy Hurt the Trump Administration?
May 22, 2025
Republican U.S. Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri is an unusual combo of right and left politics—kind of like an elephant combined with a donkey combined with a polar bear. And, yet, his views may augur the future of the Republican Party.
Many people view the Republican and Democratic parties as ideological monoliths, run by hardcore partisans and implacably positioned against each other. But, in fact, both parties have their internal divisions, influenced by various outside organizations. In the GOP, an intra-party battle is brewing between an economic populist wing with its more pro-labor positions and a traditional libertarian wing with its pro-free market stances.
Recently, Senator Hawley made headlines by calling on the Labor Department to investigate Tyson Foods, the largest meat company in America, after allegations by a whistleblower that it illegally employs child labor. Child labor decreased in the U.S. from 2000 through 2015, but from 2015 to 2022, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws surged by 283%.
Senator Hawley has also recently cast a vote to protect consumers from bank overdraft fees, introduced a bill to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $25 per month, walked union picket lines, and publicly opposed cuts to Medicaid—all positions that one might normally assign to a Democrat rather than a Republican. He has even expressed skepticism about extending the huge corporate tax cuts from Trump’s first term, saying they amount to “taxing the poor to give to the rich.”
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What’s going on here? Is Senator Hawley the same archconservative from Missouri who was elected in 2019 at the age of 39 as the Senate’s youngest member—and, until recently, was best known for calling out “wokeness,” being “100% pro-life,” and for raising his fist in solidarity with the insurrectionists of January 6?
Increasingly within the GOP, Hawley is not alone in championing “the little guy and gal” on working-class issues. Vice President JD Vance has highlighted the plight of the white working class that he detailed in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has proposed increasing the minimum wage, and long the bane of mainstream libertarian Republicans. Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas has worked with Democrats like progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren to reduce credit card fees. Marshall has said, sounding like Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “I prioritize Main Street over Wall Street.”
Former Senator and now Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also part of this emergent GOP faction of economic populists. These Republicans tend not to be deficit hawks and are pro-tariffs. They embrace a role for private sector unions, even as Republicans invited Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to speak at its RNC presidential convention in 2024.
Traditional libertarian Republicans strike back
However, other Republicans of a more traditional “cut taxes and government” brand are pushing back. In the month-long budget battles in the House, old guard leaders like Rep. Chip Roy from Texas and the House Freedom Caucus have prioritized reducing government debt so that it’s not passed on to the nation’s children. And they are fine with cutting Medicaid and Social Security if necessary. Some deficit hawks, inspired by President Ronald Reagan, want to see budget cuts go even further.
The battle within the GOP is playing out mightily over the current Congressional budget bill. In different iterations of the bill, House Republicans have proposed to combine a $3.8 trillion tax cut with massive budget cuts to pay for it. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, people making over $1 million per year would benefit from about $90,000 in tax cuts while low- to middle-income Americans would receive only $90 to $1290 in tax cuts. Other analyses have reached similar conclusions. In fact, the total $105 billion tax cut going to the handful of households making over $1 million exceeds the total cut going to the 127 million households making under $100,000.
To pay for it, traditional Republicans have proposed slashing Medicaid, food stamps/SNAP, student loan spending, and clean energy programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the budget could cause 8.6 million Americans to lose their healthcare by the end of a decade. Will the GOP populists advocating for the little guy allow that to happen?
Younger generation of Republicans takes the lead
Besides their streaks of economic populism, a common feature of the new GOP leaders is that most of them are from a younger generation. And this intellectual shift can partly be traced to the emerging influence of a youngish, 40-something economist, Oren Cass, and his “new conservative” organization, American Compass. Cass, the author of an influential book, “The Once and Future Worker,” which seeks to stake out common ground across partisan lines, is not so wedded to the libertarian free market brand of traditional Republicans. He also has a more benign view of labor unions and government regulation to harness markets.
Among other non-traditionally conservative ideas, Cass promotes a U.S. version of German-style co-determination, in which worker representation on corporate boards of directors would provide more input and influence. In Germany, such a structure has been a win-win toward labor-management cooperation on working conditions, wages, benefits, productivity, and employer-employee communication.
Economic populist Republicans also have advanced a broadening of workers’ access to Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), which allow employees to become worker-owners in their business of employment and receive compensation beyond wages and benefits. First proposed by corporate and financial lawyer Louis O. Kelso in the 1970s, today 14 million U.S. worker-owners are covered by over 6000 ESOPs, almost as many workers as are members of labor unions, providing $127 billion annually for these employees.
Setting apart Cass, Hawley, and other emerging GOP leaders from their older counterparts is that they came of age not during the laissez-faire economic policies of the Reagan era but during the financial crisis of 2008. “A key driver for us,” Cass says, “is the fundamental insight that free markets aren’t delivering on the things we care about the most.” Hawley says, “Donald Trump’s election showed this: If the Republican Party is going to be a true majority party, we have to be pro-worker.”
This is the type of rhetoric and policies that used to distinguish Democrats from Republicans. But Cass says a blending of political identities is occurring that will play out over the next decade. This shift may herald a realignment in American politics in which the more educated and upper-income parts of the population will move left and large numbers of middle-class workers will move right.
Where is President Trump in all this? On the one hand, Trump also shows streaks of being an economic populist, at least rhetorically. In the past, he has promised to champion “the little guy” struggling to make ends meet. But in his policies, Trump seems to have pivoted from such campaign rhetoric to more traditional GOP policies, such as massive tax cuts that will mostly benefit the wealthy.
It remains to be seen whether all the rhetoric is just a type of “populist washing” to win votes from American workers or if the new GOP leaders have enough influence to pivot the Republican ship in a different policy direction. Which political party will speak most effectively on behalf of middle- and working-class Americans? That is what we are about to find out.
Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote, and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
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How Language and Cultural Barriers in Healthcare Plague Seattle’s Latino Community
May 22, 2025
A visit to the hospital can already be a stressful event for many. For those in the Seattle Latino community, language and cultural barriers present in the healthcare system can make the process even more daunting.
According to Leo Morales, a healthcare provider at UW Medicine’s LatinX Diabetes Clinic and co-director of the Latino Center for Health, communication difficulties are one of the most obvious barriers in healthcare for Latinos with limited English proficiency.
“There are few bilingual, bicultural healthcare providers of any kind in [Washington],” he said. “So, for the most part, people who are limited English proficient and Spanish-speaking encounter all sorts of barriers to accessing care, starting with entering into a building or trying to make a phone call to make an appointment.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Latinos and Hispanics make up 14.6% of Washington’s population and 8.2% of Seattle’s population. The agency also reported that 9% of Washington’s total population speaks Spanish at home, with 40% of this demographic speaking English less than “very well.”
While the healthcare system often tries to accommodate non-English speakers by using interpreters, Morales said he finds such solutions to be imperfect at best.
“In terms of patient interactions, it’s a much different thing to have an interaction in someone’s native language than it is through an interpreter,” he said. “It’s not uncommon, for example, as a provider, to have somebody interpret, and this interpreter will have an entire conversation with a person and then turn around and give you a yes/no answer. And it’s like, wait a minute, what happened?”
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Cultural barriers can also present a challenge in a healthcare setting for Latinos, particularly regarding food and nutrition, according to Morales.
For instance, he said those being treated for diabetes, a disease that disproportionately affects U.S. Latinos according to the Centers for Disease Control, will usually be provided nutrition education focused on foods associated with white American culture. However, some Latinos, particularly those who are first-generation, may lack familiarity with American foods or even access to those foods, depending on where they live, Morales said.
“If you go to South Seattle, for example, if you go to Burien or White Center, you’ll find Mexican markets,” he said. “Walk into a Mexican market after you’ve walked into a QFC, or Whole Foods, or Metropolitan Market, and you will understand what cultural difference is.”
Emely Diaz Barragan, a graduate student in the UW School of Public Health and intern for the Latino Center for Health, said certain cultural nuances can get lost when translating from Spanish to English.
For instance, she said the Spanish saying “la voluntad de Dios,” which roughly translates to “let God’s will be done” in English, often gets misinterpreted by those unfamiliar with the spiritual and religious values of Hispanic Latinos.
“If you say that to, for example, a white-presenting therapist with Americanized, westernized ideals, a lot of times they will take that and be like ‘Oh, they must be suicidal,’” Barragan said. “And it’s like, no. We just always say that to people that we care about.”
These kinds of barriers can lead to frustration, confusion, lower quality care, and negative health outcomes for Latinos. For example, a study found that 29% of Spanish-speaking patients reported that their medical problems were not addressed after a doctor’s appointment, compared to 10% of English-speaking patients.
Ricardo Moreno Garcia, a graduate student in the UW Department of Global Health, recalled his family’s own experiences with healthcare barriers following their move from Mexico to the Tri-Cities area in Washington about nine years ago.
Garcia’s father had an illness in his gallbladder that required surgery. However, he and his family were kicked out of the hospital because they didn’t speak any English. A month later, Garcia’s father collapsed, and he was rushed to the emergency room.
By this point, Garcia, who was 15 years old at the time, had learned some English and was able to act as a translator. Even so, Garcia had a very low-level understanding of English, making it difficult to translate the more complex medical terms.
While his father’s surgery ultimately went well, Garcia said he left the experience feeling many new emotions.
“I was feeling anxious, I was feeling depressed, I was feeling sad, angry, and even, to a point, I was feeling used,” Garcia said. “I was feeling that I was useless because I wasn’t able to help my family. I wasn’t able to help my dad because we didn’t know how to speak English in that moment, and that happened and is still happening right now.”
Morales said that Seattle, as a large urban city, has more resources to reduce these barriers than underserved rural areas, where these issues are more prominent. Even so, he said many Seattle Latinos still fall through the cracks.
While circumstances may differ among each individual Latino, Latino immigrants are generally the ones who encounter language and cultural barriers in healthcare the most, according to Morales. However, recent actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration may only reinforce such barriers for this already vulnerable demographic.
There are concerns that Trump’s executive order designating English as the official language of the United States could reduce multilingual resources in sectors such as healthcare.
“What’s been a guiding principle for healthcare organizations is they need to provide language access of the language that their patients speak,” Morales said. “That’s always been the expectation. I don’t know how making English officially the language of the country changes that expectation, and that would be my concern there.”
Morales said he is also concerned that pre-existing financial barriers combined with the increased threat of deportation will further discourage Latino immigrants from visiting the doctor’s.
Nevertheless, there are organizations within Seattle working to reduce the language and cultural barriers faced by Latinos in healthcare.
The LatinX Diabetes Clinic, a subdivision of the UW Diabetes Institute Clinic, provides linguistically and culturally accessible care for Spanish-speaking Latino patients with diabetes. Additionally, the Latino Center for Health partners with community-based organizations to bring healthcare to hard-to-reach Latino populations in both rural and urban settings in Washington.
Still, Garcia said the push to address these kinds of healthcare barriers should primarily be coming from the local and state governments.
“People in charge of clinics and hospitals should make this change,” he said. “But who will make them do that change will be the senators, will be people with higher power, like the local government [and] Washington government.”
Morales said the issue of language and cultural barriers in healthcare is complicated, but the solution often gets reduced to simply providing more interpreters. Because of this, he said, a human element to this problem is often overlooked.
“I think you can lose the humanity of people when they’re ill, when any of us are ill,” Morales said. “The inability to access care for fear, or, even when people are accessing care, just not getting the kind of care that they should get because [they’re] running into barriers or not understanding how to navigate the system [means] people die sooner because of it … These are individuals, peoples, families, and they are in the fabric of our society. If you look around anywhere, you will see immigrants doing the work that needs to be done and doing it well.”
Cassie Diamond is a junior at the University of Washington double majoring in Journalism and Public Interest Communication and Political Science. She is passionate about telling stories that spread awareness about pressing issues and is interested in political and environmental topics.
Cassie is a student in Hugo Balta's solutions journalism class at UW. Balta, an accredited solutions journalism trainer with the Solutions Journalism Network, is the Fulcrum's executive editor. The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists.
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Kennell Staten filed a discrimination complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development after he was denied housing. His complaint was rejected.
Bryan Birks for ProPublica
How the Trump Administration Is Weakening the Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws
May 22, 2025
Kennell Staten saw Walker Courts as his best path out of homelessness, he said. The complex had some of the only subsidized apartments he knew of in his adopted hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, so he applied to live there again and again. But while other people seemed to sail through the leasing process, his applications went nowhere. Staten thought he knew why: He is gay. The property manager had made her feelings about that clear to him, he said. “She said I was too flamboyant,” he remembered, “that it’s a whole bunch of older people staying there and they would feel uncomfortable seeing me coming outside with a dress or skirt on.”
So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court rulingthat declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.
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Then Donald Trump became president once more. Two days after filing his complaint, Staten received a letter informing him that HUD did not view allegations like his as subject to federal law — a stark departure from its position just a month prior. The news gutted him. “I went through pure hell just to get turned away,” Staten said. (The property manager disputed Staten’s account and said he was rejected for fighting on the property, which Staten denied. The property owner declined to comment.)
Staten’s complaint is one of hundreds impacted by a major retreat in the federal government’s decadeslong fight against housing discrimination and segregation, according to interviews with 10 HUD officials. Those federal staffers, along with state officials, attorneys and advocates across the country, described a dismantling of federal fair housing enforcement, which has been slowed, constrained or halted at every step. The investigative process has been hobbled. The agency is withholding discrimination charges that HUD officials say should already have been issued.
Those accused of housing discrimination appear newly emboldened not to cooperate with the agency. And at least 115 federal fair housing cases have been halted or closed entirely since Trump took office, with hundreds more cases in jeopardy, HUD officials estimate.
These changes raise questions about the future of one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement, which advocates see as urgently needed today amid a historic housing shortage and rising complaints about housing discrimination.
“It’ll give free rein to companies, to states, to governments to take advantage of people, to refuse to respect their rights, without fear of response from the government. They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. “The civil rights laws that people marched for and fought for and died for, that Congress passed and at least sensibly expects to be enforced, that’s just not happening right now. It’s not happening. And people are really being harmed by it.”
Asked to comment on the findings in this story, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in a statement: “HUD is committed to rooting out discrimination and upholding the Fair Housing Act. ProPublica continues to cherry pick examples to further an activist narrative rather than report the facts.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

For many victims of housing discrimination, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity has long been the best path to winning justice. Recent investigations by the office and its state and local partners have led to millions of dollars in relief for victims and reforms from landlords, mortgage lenders and local governments.
When a California city began requiring property owners to evict tenants if the county sheriff’s department said they had engaged in criminal activity — regardless of whether they were convicted — it was a HUD investigation that led to a nearly $1 million settlement and a repeal of the ordinance. (The city did not admit liability.) The agency also secured a $300,000 settlement for a mother, daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend in Oklahoma who were allegedly harassed and assaulted by neighbors because the boyfriend was Black, to which the landlord responded by trying to evict the mother. (A representative for the property ownership company said company leadership has changed since the allegations.)
Such victories may be rare in the next four years.
“We are being gutted right now,” said one agency official, who, like others, requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “And it feels like it’s not even the beginning.”
The Fair Housing Office’s staff of roughly 550 full-time employees is set to fall by more than a third through the administration’s federal worker buyout program, according to a HUD meeting recording obtained by ProPublica. Internal projections that have circulated widely among HUD staffers suggest far deeper cuts could follow.Those accused of housing discrimination seem to have taken notice. HUD officials described an increase in defendants ignoring correspondence from investigators or even copying Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in their communication with HUD, seemingly in hopes the cost-cutting department will take their side.
“For them to face a consequence, they will need to be brought through a litigation process, which requires expenditure of litigation from the department, and they know that we don’t have those resources anymore,” one HUD official said. “They also feel emboldened that this administration will not consider the things that they are doing to be illegal.”
Some defendants have been more explicit about this. In one case, a midwestern city — which had allegedly allowed local politicians to block affordable housing in white neighborhoods — asked HUD officials if the agency still had the backing to pursue the case if the city walked away from the negotiating table, one official said. In another case, a public housing authority, also in the Midwest, rescinded a six-figure settlement it had offered two days prior, citing Trump’s newly issued executive order attacking “disparate-impact liability.” The housing authority had allegedly favored white applicants and denied applicants with even modest criminal records. HUD spent years building the case; it crumbled in 48 hours. (HUD officials shared details on these and other cases on the condition that ProPublica not name the parties or locations, as the deliberations are private.)
Without the support of agency leadership, HUD is in a weaker negotiating position, dimming the prospects of major settlements or reforms. In another case involving a public housing authority, this one on the East Coast, HUD is considering settling for no monetary penalty — although it would not have accepted less than $1 million under the prior administration, officials said. HUD found the housing authority excluded disabled applicants and that some of its buildings had tenants who were disproportionately white (which the authority has denied).
When settlement negotiations collapse, HUD regularly issues “charges of discrimination,” akin to filing a lawsuit. Four months into Joe Biden’s presidency, the agency had charged at least eight cases and announced major steps in another four. In the second Trump presidency, HUD has not filed a single charge of housing discrimination, officials said.
It’s not for a lack of credible complaints, HUD officials say. There are dozens stuck in limbo at the agency’s Office of General Counsel, HUD officials estimated, including several where officials had conducted lengthy investigations and determined a civil rights law had been violated. One such complaint involves a New York woman who said she was sexually harassed for years by a maintenance worker in her building. The worker allegedly grabbed her breasts and told her that to receive repairs she would have to call him after hours — allegations that HUD officials found to be credible. But Trump appointees have not allowed them to file a charge, officials said.
Lovett, the HUD spokesperson, said that “the Department is preparing multiple charges that will be issued within the next week against individuals who we believe violated the Fair Housing Act.” She did not respond to a request for details about those charges.
Many of the cases halted by HUD involve claims of housing discrimination because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Those appear to have been undermined by Trump’s “defending women” executive order, issued on his first day in office, which eliminated executive branch recognition of transgender people. Another executive order declaring English the country’s official language has paralyzed cases involving the requirement that housing providers who receive federal funds try to reach people with limited English proficiency. Other cases now in peril involve environmental justice, like disputes over the construction of pollution-emitting factories in poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. Race-based discrimination cases could be next on the chopping block, given the administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, some HUD officials fear.
Previously there were many channels through which the public could file housing discrimination complaints to HUD. In March, the agency shut down all but one of them (with limited exceptions), citing staffing reductions. Now complaint hotlines and inboxes go unmonitored, with answering machines informing callers: “The number you reached is no longer in use.”
Investigations have been thwarted. Staffers can no longer travel to look for witnesses, as staff credit cards now have $1 spending limits. Agency attorneys must seek approval from a Trump appointee for basic tasks, such as issuing subpoenas, taking depositions, assisting with settlement discussions and even merely speaking to other attorneys in and outside government. As that approval seems to rarely come, investigations languish, HUD officials said. Even routine settlements now require approval from a political appointee, exacerbating the case backlog and delaying relief for victims, officials said.
The dysfunction has at times taken more mundane forms. For around two weeks in March, the Fair Housing Office’s work slowed to a crawl after DOGE canceled, without notice, a contract that had enabled staffers to quickly send certified mail to people involved in cases, according to officials and federal contracting data. It was a crucial resource — the office mails tens of thousands of documents each year, and regulations require some correspondence to be certified. Without the contract, staff had to spend their days stuffing envelopes themselves. The contract was worth only around $220,000. In recent years, HUD’s annual discretionary budget has topped $70 billion.
Compliance reviews and discretionary investigations have also been affected. Typically that involves examining the policies and practices of developers, public housing authorities and other recipients of HUD funding to ensure that they abide by civil rights laws. Officials said such efforts have all but ceased, including an investigation into a housing authority that appeared to have a disproportionately low number of Latino tenants and applicants compared to the surrounding area. Larger, systemic investigations are similarly on ice.
The apparent retreat in fair housing enforcement extends beyond HUD. At the Department of Justice, which prosecutes many fair housing cases, staffers received a draft of the housing section’s new mission statement, which omitted any mention of the Fair Housing Act. (The DOJ declined to comment.) At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump appointee Russ Vought has sought to vacate a settlement with a company called Townstone Financial, which CFPB alleged had effectively discouraged African Americans from applying for mortgages. The agency is now proposing to return the settlement funds to the company. “CFPB abused its power, used radical ‘equity’ arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them,” Vought has said to explain the decision. (CFPB did not respond to a request for comment. Townstone’s CEO said that he welcomed the move to vacate the settlement and that the prior allegations were meritless.)
The federal government’s fair housing efforts are supported by a broad ecosystem of local nonprofits. They, too, have been destabilized. In February, HUD and DOGE canceled 78 grants to local fair housing organizations, saying each one “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” The funding represented a minuscule fraction of HUD’s budget but was essential to grant recipients. That includes groups like Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Greater Cincinnati, which was forced to pause investigations into racist mortgage lending practices and apartment buildings that may flout accessibility laws, according to Executive Director Elisabeth Risch. Four of the organizations filed a class-action lawsuit, arguing HUD and DOGE had no authority to withhold funding approved by Congress. The litigation is ongoing.
Many states do not have their own substantial fair housing laws, leaving little recourse for housing discrimination victims in large swaths of the country if HUD’s retreat continues. “In the state of Missouri, HUD was it for housing protections,” said Kalila Jackson, an attorney in St. Louis. “It’s a terrifying situation.”
Fighting housing discrimination was once seen as so imperative that President Lyndon Johnson described the Fair Housing Act as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. “With this bill, the voice of justice speaks again,” he said when signing the legislation. “It proclaims that fair housing for all — all human beings who live in this country — is now a part of the American way of life. “
But advocates and HUD officials say that ambition never became a reality. “The fair housing laws were never fully implemented,” said Erin Kemple, a vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance. “If you look at segregation throughout the country, it is still very high in most places.” And the Fair Housing Office has been chronically understaffed and underfunded by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The office has long struggled to clear its docket.
In recent years, segregation has been on the rise by some measures. One study found that most major metropolitan areas were more segregated in 2019 than they had been in 1990. Another found that the Black homeownership rate is lower now than it was at the passage of the Fair Housing Act. And more housing discrimination complaints were filed in 2023 than in any other year since the National Fair Housing Alliance began tracking the figures three decades ago.
Some advocates fear that a four-year federal retreat from the issue could send the country sliding back toward the pre-civil rights era, when landlords and mortgage lenders could freely reject applicants because of their race, and when federal agencies, local governments and real estate brokers could maintain policies that perpetuated extreme levels of segregation.
HUD officials interviewed by ProPublica echoed those concerns, foreseeing a growing national underclass of poor renters suffering discrimination with little hope of redress. They can always file lawsuits, but, for those at the bottom of the housing market, costly litigation is hardly an option.
Even if today’s policies are undone by future administrations, there will be at least four years in which it may become easier for local zoning boards to block affordable housing, for mortgage lenders to retreat from nonwhite neighborhoods, and for developers to flout accessibility requirements in new buildings, HUD officials fear. The consequences of those changes could stretch far into the future. “Housing cycles are long,” one HUD official said. “This decimation will set us back for another several decades.”
April is Fair Housing Month, when HUD usually announces high-profile cases and holds events celebrating the Fair Housing Act. This April came and went without fanfare. HUD Secretary Scott Turner did release a two-minute video, in which he vowed to “uphold the Fair Housing Act so every American has the opportunity to achieve the American dream of homeownership.” He added: “A more fair and free housing market is truly part of President Trump’s golden age of America.”
Beyond that, Turner has had little to say about housing discrimination or segregation, beyond weakening a measure known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. HUD even eliminated the Fair Housing Office’s old website. The URL now redirects to HUD’s homepage, which features a photo of a suburban cul-de-sac with a heavenly sunset behind it and a quote from Turner, a former NFL player and Baptist pastor.
“God blessed us with this great nation,” it reads. “Together, we can increase self-sufficiency and empower Americans to climb the economic ladder toward a brighter future.”
How the Trump Administration Is Weakening the Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws was originally published by ProPublica and is republished.
Jesse Coburn covers housing and transportation, including the companies working in those fields and the regulators overseeing them.
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What’s Democratic About Giving Tax Dollars to Private Schools?
May 21, 2025
Listen by clicking HERE.
Episode Summary
Public schools are essential for democracy—and they’re under attack. But the very policies being championed as their salvation may have a catastrophic impact on American education for generations. Public education advocate and historian Diane Ravitch unpacks how school choice policies like vouchers and charter schools are dangerous for democracy.
Diane Ravitch is a former assistant secretary in the United States Department of Education. She is the author of several books on the history and policy of American public schools. Her memoir, about her life as a leading public education reformer, will be published this fall. It’s called An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Almost Everything.
Alex Lovit is a senior program officer and historian at the Kettering Foundation. He hosts and executive produces the Kettering Foundation podcast The Context.
The Context is a podcast from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, about the history, trends, and ideas shaping democracy in the United States and around the world. Every episode, host Alex Lovit, a senior program officer and historian with the foundation, interviews someone who has seen it all—scholars, politicians, journalists, and public servants.
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