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

15. Department of Housing and Urban Development · Minor

Review all HUD subregulatory guidance issued outside the APA

Partially done

508 15. Department of Housing and Urban Development

“The Office of the Secretary or the leadership in the Office of General Counsel should conduct a thorough review of all subregulatory guidance that has been instituted outside of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The Office of General Counsel — the office the Quote names — completed the same exercise and withdrew thirteen guidance documents effective 2025-09-25, including the 1990 DOJ–HUD enforcement memorandum of understanding, the 2016 guidance on the use of criminal records, the 2016 LEP guidance, the 2016 joint statement on land use, the 2021 Bostock guidance, the 2021 special-purpose-credit guidance, the 2023 memorandum "Limiting PHA and Owner Discretion in Admitting and Evicting Tenants in Federally Assisted Housing" and the 2024 source-of-income guidance. OGC set explicit withdrawal criteria and said the documents "have been removed from the HUD.gov website and should not be relied upon". Announced in the Federal Register on 2026-07-17.

  2. Partially done

    HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity completed a review of its own subregulatory guidance and withdrew eight documents effective 2025-09-17, among them the 2007 Title VI limited-English-proficiency guidance, the 2020 assistance-animal notice, the 2021 statement implementing EO 13988, the 2021 statement on special purpose credit programs and the 2022 memorandum implementing the criminal-records guidance. The notice states the Department-wide frame: "HUD is undertaking a comprehensive review of its sub-regulatory guidance" under EO 14192 and EO 14219, and that FHEO "determined to withdraw all existing guidance documents" failing a three-part test — statutorily prescribed, consistent with the statute, or burden-reducing. It is `partial`, not `done`: FHEO says it "is continuing to review its need for existing guidance", and the review covers one office rather than "all" HUD subregulatory guidance. The withdrawals were announced in the Federal Register on 2026-04-06, months after they took effect.

  3. Attempted

    Executive Order 14219 directed every agency to review all guidance and other agency actions for consistency with law and the administration's policy, and is the order HUD later named as the authority for its own review (with EO 14192). On the signing date nothing at HUD had been reviewed or withdrawn.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Both notices were read in full at govinfo (govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-04-06/html/2026-06624.htm and govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-07-17/html/2026-14432.htm); the quoted sentences and the withdrawal tables are from those texts.
  • Dating: each event is dated to the withdrawal’s own effective date, which is the date the guidance stopped being operative, rather than to the Federal Register publication that announced it months later. The publication dates are given in the notes.
  • Done would need an allowlisted statement that the Department-wide sweep is finished. FHEO’s notice says the opposite (“continuing to review”), and no comparable notice has appeared from Housing, PIH, CPD or the Office of the Secretary.
  • Corrected 2026-09-03: an earlier version of the bullet above read as though Housing/FHA had done nothing. It has published no review notice, but it has rescinded Mortgagee Letters — which are subregulatory guidance issued outside the APA — repeatedly inside the window. Read on 2026-09-03: ML 2025-08 (2025-03-19, rescinding ML 2024-07, ML 2024-16 and ML 2021-27 on appraisal review and reconsideration of value), ML 2025-17 (2025-06-27, rescinding the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard adopted by ML 2024-20) and ML 2025-18 (2025-06-27, “Rescission of Outdated and Costly FHA Appraisal Protocols”) were each read in full at their PDF addresses (hud.gov/sites/dfiles/OCHCO/documents/YYYY-NNhsgml.pdf); the HUDCLIPS index at hud.gov/hudclips/letters/mortgagee additionally lists ML 2026-07 (“Rescission of the Important Notice to Homebuyers Form HUD-92900-B Requirement”) and ML 2026-09 (“Eliminating Unnecessary Requirements for FHA Mortgagee Approval and Quality Control”). None of them describes itself as the product of a review of all subregulatory guidance — ML 2025-08 cites the January 2025 executive orders on the housing market — so they are outcomes consistent with a review rather than evidence that one was conducted, and they are recorded here rather than as a Status event. An open-ended “all X” ask is done only when the core object is gone or an allowlisted statement says the sweep is complete, so they leave the rung where the FHEO and OGC notices put it.
  • Withdrawn items reused elsewhere: the two special-purpose-credit guidance documents are the first two events of #1413, and the withdrawal of “Limiting PHA and Owner Discretion in Admitting and Evicting Tenants” is the first event of #1416.
Action
other
Object
HUD subregulatory guidance instituted outside the Administrative Procedure Act
ID
1409