These dismissals are a harbinger of what’s to come at HUD, which is now being led by newly-confirmed secretary Scott Turner, a former NFL player, Texas state legislator, housing development executive, and pastor who worked in the White House during President Donald Trump’s first term. Back then, he was in charge of overseeing so-called “opportunity zones,” a program rolled out in 2017 to give tax breaks for investors who put money into poorer neighborhoods. The results of this effort were described as “middling” by the New York Times.

Reports from NPR and the Associated Press suggest that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will lay off half of the approximately 9,600 employees of the housing agency in the coming months. Workers in three HUD offices are anticipated to bear the brunt of the layoffs: Fair Housing, where Bergstresser worked (which is unsurprising, given the war Trump has launched on DEI across the federal government); the Office of Community Planning and Development, which distributes funds to local communities to tackle homelessness, affordable housing, and disaster relief; and the Office of Policy Development and Research, which provides data on issues such as affordable housing and disaster aid that other HUD programs rely on to function.

The attack on HUD comes during a national housing affordability crisis and record homelessness. There’s a shortage of more than 7 million affordable rental homes across the country for extremely low-income people, according to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC). In 2023, the Pew Research Center reports, nearly a third of American households were facing what is referred to as being cost-burdened—a metric established by HUD that refers to households spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs. HUD data also showed there was record homelessness in the US in 2024, as I wrote in December, with projections of it worsening even before the news of the planned HUD cuts. The decision last June by the Supreme Court to essentially greenlight the criminalization of unhoused people in its City of Grants Pass v. Johnson decision is likely to present even greater challenges.