The Department of Housing and Urban Development reportedly suffered under President Biden. Secretary Scott Turner is working overtime to reform it and help American citizens.

From Breitbart. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Scott Turner is “serious about making housing affordable” for all Americans — and his mission started with reorienting a department that lost its way under President Joe Biden.

View Comments (4)

This content is supported by your donations.
Give today.

“The President from Day One said, ‘we want to make housing affordable again,’” Turner told Breitbart News in a lengthy interview from his office at HUD’s Washington headquarters Wednesday on President Donald Trump’s one hundredth day in office.

Turner described his work transforming the agency into an organization that put Americans first — one that provides Americans a path off government assistance and towards self-sustainability — and explained HUD’s significant if under-appreciated role in President Donald Trump’s America First agenda. …

Biden’s administration had dumped resources into the agency but grossly mismanaged them, as the administration’s own numbers show. “HUD, in spite of having record funding, we saw homelessness go up 18% in our country — over 770,000 people homeless on one single night in January of 2024,” Turner told Breitbart News.

To begin the transformation, Turner determined what he had to work with.

“When we came in, we said we’re going to take inventory of every program at HUD and make sure that we’re being good stewards of American taxpayer dollars,” he said.

Essential to that stewardship is a mindset that the programs HUD offers Americans should not be available in perpetuity.

“We’re community development with a very unique mission, and part of the mission that we have is to not grow government subsidies, the amount of people on government subsidies,” Turner said. “We want to get people off of government subsidies.”

HUD plays a major role across the federal government to provide housing to struggling Americans but also to reduce homelessness, particularly for the nation’s veterans. …

“When you talk about homelessness, the government is not the solution to housing. It’s not the solution to homelessness. It’s a great convener, a great facilitator,” he said. “Public-funded housing, it was never meant to be a permanent solution.”

President Lyndon Johnson created HUD as part of his Great Society programs to eliminate poverty, but the agency has too often been wielded counterproductively. Turner said that too often since LBJ’s creation and expansion of welfare programs, “perverse incentives have crippled our nation, including being on public housing for 20, 30 years.”

“We understand that there’s going to have to be times people need vouchers, they need assistance, but our goal is for people not to be in public housing forever and use it as a hammock or a resting place, but to use public housing as really a trampoline, as a trajectory, to live sustainable lives.”

The influx of migrants under President Biden was an undeniable driver of the decrease in availability of affordable housing. …

The increased demand for housing and resulting painful increase in housing costs affects all Americans, and HUD is working across the Trump administration to alleviate the crisis. …

Under the Biden administration, HUD had no measures to ensure it provided housing to American citizens. Turner is installing those safeguards, working with Secretary Kristi Noem to sign a data-sharing memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Department of Homeland Security. …

Turner has also worked to ensure Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans only go to American citizens, not illegal aliens, by removing the “permanent resident category” from loan offerings. …

Disaster relief through its Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery program is another critical HUD function — and another area where the Biden administration dropped the ball.

The Biden administration’s bungled recovery efforts after storms in the Southeast became an issue in the 2024 election, and horrific wildfires in California hit just days before Trump was sworn in. California’s own leadership was often in the way of dealing with those fires and subsequent recovery efforts. …

In addition to facilitating federal assistance, Turner told California’s Democrat leaders that their people “want to rebuild, but it’s very difficult for them to do so. And so I encouraged the leaders to look at your regulations, look at the bureaucracy, and tear it down to help families to rebuild.”

Turner and Trump traveled to hurricane-ravaged Asheville, North Carolina as well.

“Fire devastation is one thing, but when you see water devastation, it’s another thing, especially in the mountains of North Carolina where entire properties were lost, property lines shifted, rivers gone,” he said. “But the same problem there is regulations.” …

Under Turner, HUD stepped up.

“We allocated an additional $2.5 million there in those areas that were impacted by hurricanes,” he said. “We also did an additional 90-day extension on FHA, on the moratoriums, to make sure families were not foreclosed on, to give them more time, to give them more flexibility, to give them more leeway, so that they can plan and strategize.”

Turner said one of the most serious but ultimately rewarding responsibilities of being a secretary is that “you get to meet people right where they are, and help them and support them in a time of need.” That shared mindset across the Trump cabinet is key to the administration’s 100-day success. …

Share your prayers for Secretary Turner and his department below.

(Excerpt from Breitbart. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Scott Turner, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160959013)