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

15. Department of Housing and Urban Development · Minor

Reduce the anti-marriage bias in housing assistance programs

Not started

509 15. Department of Housing and Urban Development · abridged

“Where admissible in regulatory action, HUD should implement reforms reducing the implicit anti-marriage bias in housing assistance programs, strengthen work and work-readiness requirements, implement maximum term limits for residents in PBRA and TBRA programs, and end Housing First policies so that the department prioritizes mental health and substance abuse issues before jumping to permanent interventions in homelessness.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    HUD has taken up three of the four reforms in this sentence — work requirements (#1418), term limits (#1419) and Housing First (#1420) — and not this one. The word "marriage" appears nowhere in the rulemaking that carries the others: the proposed rule "Establishing Flexibility for Implementation of Work Requirements and Term Limits" (2026-03-02) contains zero instances of it across its full text, and a Federal Register full-text search of every HUD document since 2025-01-20 for "marriage penalty" returns nothing while "marriage" returns a single unrelated Privacy Act notice. No HUD rule, notice or guidance addresses how household composition or marriage affects rent or eligibility.

    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

  • Negative search:
    • A Federal Register search for “marriage penalty” in HUD’s documents on or after 2025-01-20 — 0 documents.
    • A Federal Register search for “marriage”, same agency and date floor — 1 document, a system-of-records notice (2025-08-01, FR 2025-14530).
    • The full text of govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-03-02/html/2026-04095.htm — 0 occurrences of “marriage” against 150 of “term limit” and 154 of “work requirement”. The file was cleaned of stray null characters before it was counted.
  • The Congress-side counterpart, #1421, is also not started: no bill removes a marriage penalty from housing benefits.
Action
other
Object
anti-marriage bias in HUD housing assistance programs
ID
1417