Donald Trump’s Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner just ended an Obama-era initiative that created years of disastrous and expensive regulation to demand racial quotas across neighborhoods far from Washington, D.C.
The federal government really shouldn’t be involved in housing at all, but Secretary Turner is doing the next best thing by cutting as much wasteful spending and regulation as he can. Killing the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule is his latest win — or rather, our latest win. It is incredible what can be done when government officials start to act as if they really are our employees rather than our oligarchs.
Turner posted on X Feb. 26 about the end of the woke, harmful program. “I have directed HUD to terminate the Biden-era AFFH Rule. Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing was nothing more than a ‘zoning tax.’ It increased home costs & decreased the supply of affordable homes. We're giving power back to local communities, not Washington bureaucrats,” he declared. Turner subsequently shared a video clip of him signing the documentation ending AFFH.
We’re tearing up the Obama-Biden “Zoning Tax” and saving America’s suburbs. pic.twitter.com/AkGgiQkvwm
— Scott Turner (@SecretaryTurner) February 27, 2025
Related: Trump Admin’s Crusade Against DEI Continues
Back in 2020, during Donald Trump’s first term, The Heritage Foundation criticized the Trump administration for not terminating AFFH altogether, explaining how thoroughly catastrophic it was. It seems Trump and his appointees learned their lesson and are applying it this time around.
One of the experts Heritage quoted at the time was Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who called AFFH “a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood—imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education.”
AFFH’s reach is so widespread because so many communities have become far too dependent on such HUD programs as Community Development Block Grants. If a local town or city wants federal housing funding, then it would have to comply with AFFH. The mandate’s egregiousness was magnified by its use of the dubious legal theory known as “disparate impact.”
This doctrine is used to tar policies and general practices that are entirely and wholly race-neutral as discriminatory, even if there is no proof of any discriminatory intent whatsoever. If said policies somehow have a disproportionate impact on categories of Americans deemed protected by the federal government, they are defined as discriminatory and thus illegal.
HUD under Ben Carson in 2020 did end up rolling back AFFH. Now, under Turner, the rule is hopefully permanently dead.
$4 Million in diversity, equity, and inclusion contracts were just cancelled at HUD.
— Scott Turner (@SecretaryTurner) February 20, 2025
DEI IS DEAD AT HUD! pic.twitter.com/If9ElwdhUg
I previously reported on Turner’s HUD axing $4 million in DEI contracts, but that was actually part of a larger DOGE-driven review that resulted in $260 million worth of contracts cut and $1.9 billion in “misplaced” funds identified. We can only hope more trimming will follow.
There’s good news to celebrate every day of the Trump presidency, and that certainly includes Turner ending AFFH.
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