HUD Secretary Turner Vows More Cuts Focused On Red Tape, Local Control
Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner is approaching the United States housing crisis with a playbook.
Turner, 53, was an NFL player for nine years and said he has spent his first two months in President Donald Trump’s cabinet reviewing every aspect of his agency's $70B budget, comparing it to a Monday film session after a football game.
“Right now, I'm watching film of the last few years at HUD, and there's improvements that need to be made,” Turner said Thursday at the Urban Land Institute's 2025 Miami Symposium. “It is not at the standard of excellence that I expected it to be.”
Turner is reportedly looking to lay off 50% of HUD's employees and identify programs where spending can be reduced. He said one of his top priorities is “taking inventory of every program at HUD.”
“I believe that for the posterity of our nation, for the posterity of our agency, that we will not grow HUD, but we will help people to get off of subsidies by serving them properly and to begin to live lives that are self-sustaining for longevity for them and their families,” he said.
Already, HUD has canceled millions of dollars worth of contracts with nonprofits that support low-cost housing development and paused funding for a $1B program that allowed landlords to make energy-efficient repairs to affordable housing properties.
In his conversation with Alfonso Costa Jr., who was deputy chief of staff at HUD in Trump's first term and is now chief operating officer of Boca Raton-based developer Falcone Group, Turner pointed to his rollback of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule.
The regulation required that federal funds be used to proactively advance fair housing and limit discrimination, framing it as an example of returning control to local governments.
“I tore it down to restore power and flexibility and control,” he said.
AFFH has seesawed across administrations — it was introduced by then-President Barack Obama in 2015, scrapped by Trump in 2020, revived by the Biden administration in 2021 and repealed again in February by Turner.
“The government is a great facilitator, if you will,” he said. “But the real solutions are coming from the private sector, from the faith-based, from the nonprofit. And so when you take down regulations that increase supply and decrease costs, that's how we're going to build more affordable housing and workforce housing in our country.”
He said his other properties are extending the opportunity zone program and finding ways to repurpose federal land for housing.
Turner served as the executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council from 2019 to 2021, which helped implement the opportunity zone program that expires at the end of this year. He said it's a core aspect of the administration's economic development agenda.
“I am excited, and obviously I can't get ahead of Congress,” Turner said. “I can encourage them, but I do think that the continuation and the extension of opportunity zones will be a tremendous platform and vehicle.”
HUD and the Department of the Interior are also working together to leverage federal land for new housing development. Turner said there are 500 million acres the government controls that could be leveraged for new homes, not including national parks and forests, which he said would be protected.
“The dialogue has begun to talk about how we can streamline the process for land swaps inside of states and localities to build underutilized federal lands for housing around our country,” Turner said.
The U.S. needs about 7 million units of all stripes of housing in multifamily and single-family, and Turner said that the gap won't be closed without radical new ideas.
“We want to think outside of the box,” Turner said. “As we all know, we have a president that thinks outside of the box, and leaders in the administration that think outside of the box, we can't keep running the same plays and getting the same results and expect anything to change.”
