Judge Blocks Federal Layoffs During Shutdown, Including Deep Cuts at HUD’s Fair Housing Office

A federal judge has temporarily blocked thousands of layoffs of federal workers, including deep cuts in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development office dedicated to investigating discrimination in the housing market.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston on Wednesday granted a temporary restraining order requested by unions representing federal workers, pausing the layoffs that began last Friday.

Last week, 442 HUD staffers received layoff notices as part of a broader purge of more than 4,100 federal workers across multiple agencies, according to a government declaration in court filings this week.

The attempted layoffs follow President Donald Trump's vow to fire "a lot" of federal workers during the government shutdown, with the president saying on Friday that the cuts "will be Democrat-oriented," in an apparent reference to a federal program favored by Democrats.

At HUD, the cuts were concentrated in the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, where more than 100 workers who investigate claims of housing discrimination were given walking papers.

Staff cuts also hit HUD's offices of Public and Indian Housing, Housing Counseling, Housing Operations, and Community Planning and Development.

The layoffs were spread across HUD's 10 regional offices, with Bloomberg reporting that all Fair Housing Office staff were eliminated at two of the offices: Denver (which oversees Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana) and San Francisco (California, Nevada, and Arizona).

A HUD spokesperson said in a statement: “HUD is implementing a reduction in force as part of its ongoing efforts to realign its activities with its core statutory mission. It is HUD’s priority to serve the American people effectively.”  

The staffing cuts were decried by fair housing advocates and elected Democrats, who said that they would deliver a major blow to enforcement of federal laws that prohibit housing discrimination.

“Recent actions to dismantle the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity are a direct assault on our nation’s commitment to justice in housing," Michael Chavarria, director of the HOPE Fair Housing Center in Illinois, tells Realtor.com®. "By eliminating the staff responsible for enforcing the Fair Housing Act, our leaders are abandoning their legal duty to protect Americans from discrimination."

Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, issued a statement calling the layoffs "cruel, dangerous, and disgraceful."

"President Trump has once again chosen to attack working families and the very public servants who help keep roofs over their heads," says Waters. "Let’s be clear: Trump, with full support from Republicans, is illegally using this shutdown as a pretext to undermine our housing system and dismantle programs that protect millions of families in dire need of federal assistance."

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In an op-ed last week for the Daily Caller, HUD Secretary Scott Turner blamed the government shutdown on Democrats and said it was preventing the department from offering a wide range of services.

Turner said that the shutdown had halted the Federal Housing Administration's processing of new insurance applications for health care projects, FHA-supported reverse mortgages, lead hazard mitigation grants, and new loans for tribal communities.

The layoffs at HUD, as well as cuts at the departments of Treasury, Commerce, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services, are currently the subject of a lawsuit playing out in California federal court.

The lawsuit filed by federal employee unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, argues that the mass layoffs were made without statutory authority, a claim the Trump administration vigorously denies.

Judge Illston's ruling that temporarily blocked the layoffs came in after a hearing in that case on Wednesday.

In a separate lawsuit filed last month, five attorneys who worked on discrimination issues at HUD claimed they were involuntarily assigned to other divisions where they could no longer work on enforcement of the Fair Housing Act.

The government has yet to respond in court to that suit, which was filed in federal court in Washington, DC.

Chavarria, the fair housing advocate in Illinois, says that his group is "deeply alarmed" by the recent developments at HUD.

"At HOPE Fair Housing Center, we are deeply alarmed. The right to live free from housing discrimination is not a political preference—it is the law," he says. "Our hearts go out to the dedicated public servants who have devoted their careers to upholding these protections, only to become casualties of politics.”

This article has been update with information about Wednesday's court ruling.