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.
“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.
It was a Herculean task. Turner’s challenge out of the gate was “to restore the mission-minded focus of HUD over the Biden administration,” he explained. “They lost focus of the vision, and they didn’t keep the main thing the main thing, and that’s to serve the most vulnerable population of our country, as it pertains to housing affordability, as it pertains to homelessness, disaster recovery, streamlining processes, and being efficient and effective.”
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. Turner acknowledged working with the federal government is not always easy for Americans, so to help, HUD establishes public-private partnerships including with faith-based organizations.
“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. Almost 20 million illegal aliens live in the U.S., Breitbart News’ John Binder reports.
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.
“The Biden administration prioritized illegal aliens over American citizens. Well, we’re reversed. We’re putting a stop to that,” Turner proclaimed. “HUD-funded housing, which is taxpayer dollars, is only for American citizens.”
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.
“Who’s living in HUD-funded housing? Are people that are living there, are they legal? Are they not? We’ve got about 24,000 ineligible — as we know — people living in HUD-funded housing. And so signing this MOU will help us to ensure that we’re being good stewards over taxpayer dollars and [housing] is going toward American citizens.”
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.
“The Biden administration turned a blind eye and allowed the non-permanent residents to secure FHA mortgages. So we took that category out of FHA to make sure again, and I reiterate our priority, and our only priority is American citizens.”
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.
“We want people to be able to rebuild their families, to rebuild their homes, to rebuild their communities and their businesses,” Turner told Breitbart News. He and Trump “went to California, LA, we visited the Palisades and Altadena, which were ravaged and devastated by the fires. We personally met with families, pastors of churches that were lost, educators of schools that were lost, business owners and families that lost their homes. And the biggest thing is they want to rebuild. They want to restore. They want to revitalize. But the burdensome regulations and the bureaucracy and the red tape in California is crippling and hindering that process.”
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.”
He continued, “the resiliency of the people in both California and Asheville was very encouraging to me. But leadership has to understand that we need to make it better and easier for people to rebuild.”
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.
“The movement and the progress that we’ve made, we still have a lot of work to do, but I think the American people know that from the President on, that we care, and there’s not one blade of grass growing under our feet at HUD or under any other Cabinet member in this government, because we understand the seriousness of the times and the mission that we have,” he said.
Turner said Trump has assembled “a very unique cabinet, tremendous personalities” who “number one, they care about America, they care about the assignments that they have. And I think one of the most unique things is that everyone on the cabinet, we genuinely care and love each other, and we work interagency-wise, we work very well together.”
He cited his work with the Department of Interior and Secretary Doug Burgum to identify underutilized federal lands for building affordable housing, a Trump directive which is another example of cross-agency cooperation.
“It encourages me that we’re on the right track, and the President did a tremendous job in putting a team together such as this,” Turner beamed.
Trump’s leadership style makes it all possible.
“He’s an encourager. He’s a great listener, and he’s a great encourager,” he said. “He empowers you to do the job and carry out the assignment that he appointed you for, and he trusts you to do it, and he’s always there to support you if you need something, but he allows you to do the job.”
The establishment media doesn’t often portray this side of Trump, unable to differentiate the true Trump from his persona on The Apprentice.
“If you’re doing something that he doesn’t agree with, or something that he thinks you can do better, he’s also there for you,” Turner explained. “He’ll say, ‘Well, you might want to look at it like this,’ or, ‘How can we do this a different way,’ or ‘How can I help you do this?’ And I think those are the things that you don’t see in the media.”
Despite the direction — or misdirection — from the prior administrations, Turner has the team in place he needs at HUD to advance the America First agenda.
“The one thing that I’m most proud of is the team that we have, and the heart of the team. And I want America to know this, the people that work at HUD have a heart for this country. They care about the people of America, and they are diligently striving and working in excellence every single day.”
Turner certainly cares, and he wants Americans to know that HUD is working for their interests.
“Every American is impacted by HUD, because housing is not political,” he said. “Housing impacts all 350 million Americans, one way or another. Homelessness and poverty impact every American, either directly or indirectly. Disaster recovery impacts all Americans.”
He added, “we’re serious about being good stewards over taxpayer dollars, because we know how hard American people work, and we’re serious about helping people in America, helping the trajectory of their lives change and for them to fulfill their God-given potential.”
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye
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