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

15. Department of Housing and Urban Development · Major · Needs Congress

Devolve HUD functions to states and localities in a wholesale overhaul

Attempted

512 15. Department of Housing and Urban Development

“Finally, and more fundamentally, Congress could consider a wholesale overhaul of HUD that contemplates devolving many HUD functions to states and localities with any remaining federal functions consolidated to other federal agencies (for example, by transferring loan guarantee programs to SBA; moving Indian housing programs to the Department of the Interior; moving rental assistance, mortgage insurance programs, and GNMA to a redesignated Housing and Home Finance Agency).”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The FY2027 President's Budget renewed the direction without repeating the block-grant proposal by name: it requests $73.5 billion for HUD, a 13 percent cut, and says the Budget "rightsizes the Federal role and eliminates the majority of HUD formula and competitive programs", proposing to abolish CDBG (−$3.3 billion) and HOME (−$1.3 billion) on the reasoning that "State and local governments are better positioned" and that "[l]ocal residents would be put back in control of the housing in their communities". That is elimination rather than transfer of the functions, and it too requires Congress.

  2. Attempted

    The President's FY2026 discretionary budget request asked Congress for a State Rental Assistance Block Grant: it would cut $26.7 billion by "transforming the current Federal dysfunctional rental assistance programs into a State-based formula grant which would allow States to design their own rental assistance programs", folding in Tenant-Based Rental Assistance, Public Housing, Project-Based Rental Assistance, Housing for the Elderly and Housing for Persons with Disabilities, and said the change "would also lead to significant terminations of Federal regulations". That is the devolution the Mandate names, put to Congress as a formal request; only Congress can enact it, and it had not been enacted as of 2026-08-27.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • No bill to devolve, restructure or abolish HUD was found among the 119th-Congress bills we keep and search (from congress.gov), and Congress funded HUD’s existing programs in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 (P.L. 119-75, 2026-02-03) — read on govinfo.gov only as a catalog record, so it is a lead and not cited above.
  • The FY2027 budget PDF carries no printed day of publication; it is dated here to April 2026, the month in the whitehouse.gov upload path (/uploads/2026/04/). If a firmer date is needed, OMB’s transmittal letter would supply it.
  • The three named consolidations in the same sentence — loan guarantees to SBA (#1440), Indian housing to Interior (#1441), rental assistance/mortgage insurance/GNMA to a Housing and Home Finance Agency (#1442) — are tracked separately and are all not started.
Action
transfer
Object
HUD functions
ID
1439