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Trump names former Texas state Rep. Scott Turner to lead Housing and Urban Development
President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration repeatedly sought to make deep cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget. Those plans never passed Congress. But many housing and anti-poverty advocates think this time will be different.
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Alastair Pike/AFP/Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen former Texas state Rep. Scott Turner to serve as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Turner spent nine seasons in the NFL with teams in Washington, San Diego and Denver before being twice elected to the Texas House of Representatives, serving from 2013 to 2017.
Turner now chairs the Center for Education Opportunity at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank set up by former staffers from Trump’s first presidency.
In a statement, Trump said during his first term, Turner was the first executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, “helping to lead an Unprecedented Effort that Transformed our Country’s most distressed communities.”
“Those efforts, working together with former HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, were maximized by Scott’s guidance in overseeing 16 Federal Agencies which implemented more than 200 policy actions furthering Economic Development,” the statement read. “Under Scott’s leadership, Opportunity Zones received over $50 Billion Dollars in Private Investment!”
Trump’s first administration tried to restrict housing aid and cut HUD’s budget
The first Trump administration repeatedly proposed deep budgetcuts to HUD, but they never passed Congress. Some executive action to restrict public assistance — for housing and other benefits — was made later in the term and never finalized. But many housing and anti-poverty advocates think this time will be different.
Scott Turner, chairman of the Center for Education Opportunity at the America First Policy Institute, speaks during an event at the institute in January 2022
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Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
“The agenda is much more organized now,” says Peggy Bailey, executive vice president for policy and program development at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “We do anticipate some pretty significant budget fights.”
For one thing, she says, there will be fewer moderate Republicans likely to push back in the next Congress. And the Trump team will enter office with an extensive agenda of policy proposals laid out in Project 2025. Trump has denied any connection to the Heritage Foundation document, but the chapter on HUD was written by his first-term HUD Secretary, Carson, and includes many proposals from his time leading the department.
The Project 2025 proposals include:
- Ban families with undocumented members from living in federally assisted housing. Undocumented immigrants are already barred from receiving subsidies. But a HUD analysis found the rule would have put tens of thousands of their family members who are U.S. citizens or legal residents, mostly children, at risk of eviction or homelessness.
- Eliminating a new federal fund to boost the supply of affordable housing. A footnote to this item says federally subsidized housing distorts the market by raising demand. It suggests a better approach is to encourage construction by loosening local zoning rules and streamlining regulations.
- Repealing (again) a rule meant to prevent segregation and comply with the Fair Housing Act. Carson had argued the rule demanded “unworkable requirements.”
- Ending a homelessness policy known as Housing First, which places people in subsidized housing and then helps them address drug and mental health addictions. Trump and conservative allies have said sobriety should be the first requirement, something homelessness advocates say has been tried before and failed.
- Tightening work requirements for people who receive federal housing subsidies. (The first Trump administration also tried this for recipients of food aid, but it was blocked in federal court.)
Beyond Project 2025, Bailey and others point out that congressional Republicans have continued to propose major funding cuts to HUD, along with trillions of dollars in cuts over a decade across a wide array of other social safety net programs including healthcare, food aid and assistance with heating and cooling bills.
When it comes to deep funding cuts, ‘the optics there might not be great’
If all these budget proposals were to be enacted, “you should expect large increases both in the scope of poverty and in the depth of poverty,” says Bob Greenstein, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and the founder and former president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Dr. Ben Carson, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, speaks during this summer’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
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Paul Sancya/AP
He also sees an irony, since many of the programs target not only the poor but also modest and moderate-income people. “Among the people who would be hurt most seriously are working-class families, the very people who are now part of [Trump’s] political base,” he says.
But not everyone thinks that’s likely.
“I would be surprised if there were substantial budget cuts actually enacted,” says Kevin Corinth, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who served as an economic adviser in the Trump White House.
The presidential campaign made clear that the high cost of living is a huge issue for many Americans, he says, and “the optics there might not be great to roll things back.”
He does think the administration will be better able to push through the regulatory changes it started in its first term, restricting noncitizens in public housing and tightening enforcement of work requirements.
Corinth also supports longer-term goals that Project 2025 lays out for HUD. They include selling land owned by public housing agencies to private developers for “greater economic use.” That could mean fewer people living in traditional public housing, and more instead using federal vouchers to rent in the private market. Project 2025 also calls for shifting rental assistance to other agencies, and pushing people to become self-sufficient by setting time limits on rental subsidies.
Corinth says time limits make sense because people do not have a right to rental aid like they do with food or health care; only 1 in 4 people who qualify can actually get it. “So it’d be much more fair to families to say, ‘Look, you’re going to get this assistance but it’s only for a couple of years, get you back on your feet,’” he says.
But none of those changes are “a real solution,” says Sarah Saadian, with the National Low Income Housing Coalition. She says breaking up HUD would only shift responsibility. And most residents who can work already do, “they’re just not getting paid wages that are high enough to afford housing,” she says.
In any case, Corinth thinks the next Trump administration will have more urgent priorities than a sweeping transformation of HUD’s role. They include pushing through a major tax cuts package in its first year. If housing does then rise on the agenda, he thinks it’s more likely to focus on the private market – and addressing the massive shortage that has sent home prices and rents skyrocketing.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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