Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner sat down with Fox News Digital to discuss the agency’s biggest wins during the Trump administration’s first 100 days, and shared HUD’s top priorities for the next 100.
Some of those wins, according to Scott, include rescinding Biden and Obama-era regulations to spur innovation and creativity in the housing market. Other actions have included reforms focused on ensuring American citizens are the primary beneficiaries of HUD’s resources, and ensuring HUD’s resources can be accessed in a fair and safe manner. Looking to the future, Turner said implementing work requirements for those in HUD-funded housing programs will be a priority, among others.
“We are very focused, we’re very detailed, and we’re very deliberate about what we do here,” Turner said. “Progress and success doesn’t just happen. You have to be very intentional about it. You have to be very focused about it. One thing we did on the first day when we came in here is we said we’re going to restore the mission-minded focus of HUD… We’re called to a specific mission to serve the most vulnerable people of our country, as it pertains to housing, as it pertains to homelessness, as it pertains to disaster recovery, the development of communities, forming public-private partnerships.”
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Part of restoring that “mission-minded focus,” according to Turner, has been to tear down “burdensome regulations,” such as the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule established under the Obama administration and revived by the Biden administration.
“We took this rule down in order to restore flexibility and restore the power back to localities. Because every city, every community, is unique,” Turner said, noting that under the now-rescinded rule, bureaucrats in Washington had the power to pick “winners and losers” in local communities.
Turner also highlighted a new partnership between HUD and the Department of Homeland Security, aimed at ensuring noncitizens do not take away much-needed HUD resources from American citizens.
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“We are ensuring that American people live in HUD-funded housing,” Turner said. “Also with this partnership, it’s a data collection emphasis to understand who’s living in housing that’s funded by HUD and our FHA insurance, our FHA-backed mortgages, which is also backed by American taxpayers. We took out the non-permanent residence category out of the FHA, which the Biden administration turned a blind eye to.”
Turner also touted one of his first actions as HUD secretary, which rescinded the Obama-era equal access rule, requiring HUD-funded programs and shelters to determine eligibility based on a person’s self-identified gender. “We wanted to take this rule down to protect the women of America and ensure that when people enter into a HUD-funded facility, they are entering in after sex at birth,” Turner said of the reform.
Looking to the future, Turner said efforts aimed at helping those receiving public assistance become more self-sufficient, such as through work requirements for those in HUD-funded housing, will be a priority for the agency over the next 100 days.
“Social safety nets were never meant to be a hammock or a resting place. Social safety nets were meant to be a trampoline, if you will, a tool to project people into a life of self-sustainability and longevity, and so that’s something that we will be concentrating on going here forward these next 100 days, if you will,” Turner said. “Our heart here at HUD is not to grow the amount of people on subsidies, but it is to reduce the number of people on subsidies and help people to live a life of self sustainability, really, to change the trajectory of people’s lives.”
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“We don’t want to grow the size of government,” Turner added. “We want to shrink the size of government.”
Turner also said the agency will focus on increasing public-private partnerships to help improve housing affordability and the homelessness epidemic, noting local entities on the ground doing the actual work to affect change are pivotal to HUD completing its mission.
When asked about any pushback Turner has received over his slew of policy changes during the Trump administration’s first 100 days, the secretary said part of being a strong “servant leader” is to make hard decisions that everybody may not agree with.
“But, I consider them to be healthy decisions for our country,” Turner said. “At the end of the day, our job is one, to be stewards over taxpayer dollars, but also to be stewards over the lives of Americans as it pertains to entering in HUD-funded facilities.”
