Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

15. Department of Housing and Urban Development · Minor · Day one

Assign all delegated HUD powers to political appointees immediately

Not started

508 15. Department of Housing and Urban Development

“HUD political leadership should immediately assign all delegated powers to politically appointed PDAS, DAS, and other office leadership positions; change any current career leadership positions into political and non-career appointment positions; and use Senior Executive Service (SES) transfers to install motivated and aligned leadership.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    HUD published no delegation or redelegation of authority in the Federal Register between 2025-01-20 and this pass, which is where a reassignment of the Department's delegated powers would appear and where HUD has historically published them. Nor is there any Departmental order or announcement of a wholesale reassignment. HUD did fill most of its Senate-confirmed offices with political appointees (#1402, `partial`), but filling a post is not reassigning the delegations that sit under it, and the office the Mandate would most obviously reach — Policy Development and Research — is still run by a career General Deputy Assistant Secretary. Re-measured on 2026-09-06 with a control: a Federal Register full-text search restricted to the Department returns one document for "Delegation of Authority" (the 2026-05-29 Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance, which merely uses the phrase) and one for "Redelegation" (the 2026-06-12 noise rule), against zero for a nonsense term, so the search is filtering and the negative is real. HUDCLIPS was enumerated the same day and has no departmental-directives or delegation-orders category at all — its document classes are handbooks, notices, mortgagee and other letters, guidebooks, forms, legal opinions, acts and waivers — so there is no HUD-side index in which a delegation order could be hiding either. Cluster negative search in `docs/research/ch-15.md`.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The Mandate’s sentence carries three separate asks; the other two are #1405 (convert career leadership posts to political and non-career appointments) and #1406 (use SES transfers). All three are not started and share one negative search.
  • A Federal Register search for “Delegation of Authority” in HUD’s documents published on or after 2025-01-20: one hit, the “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance” proposed rule (2026-05-29, FR 2026-10817), which is a grants-administration rewrite and not a delegation instrument.
  • The Congress-side counterpart of this passage is #1403, also not started.
  • Checked 2026-09-06. We looked for HUD’s Departmental Directives and delegation orders in HUDCLIPS. The HUDCLIPS home page (hud.gov/hudclips) opens to the full set of headings, and we went through every one: it publishes handbooks (by program office), notices (CPD, Housing, PIH, Native American Programs, FHEO, CFO, labor, healthy homes), mortgagee/PIH/Title I/labor/preservation letters, guidebooks, forms, OGC legal opinions, acts and waivers. There is no directives or delegations class, and the string “delegat” does not appear on the index. The address hud.gov/hudclips/directives does not resolve.
Action
transfer
Object
HUD delegated powers
ID
1404