Clenching his fist, his gaze to the camera, associate pastor Scott Turner assured a stadium of thousands of worshippers that his role in the Trump administration was nothing short of divine.
“HUD is the vehicle,” he said in December, referring to the federal housing agency. “But the kingdom is the mission. HUD is the vehicle to be a blessing to the communities of America by way of housing, by way of revitalization.”
As he spoke, a smile played on his lips, as if he were unspooling a secret that both he and the audience already knew.
Just one month before the sermon, delivered and live-streamed from Prestonwood Baptist Church, in the suburbs north of Dallas, President Donald Trump tapped Turner to serve as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was not an obvious choice, as a former National Football League cornerback who became a state legislator and then, briefly, a multifamily housing development executive.
Since lawmakers confirmed Turner in February, much of the news surrounding HUD has centered on drastic staffing cuts and existential threats to key housing programs. The agency tasked with creating more housing may shrink its workforce, according to reports, and completely overhaul rental assistance programs. Many expect the spending plan currently being drafted to slash the agency’s budget.
Those moves are a reflection of the Trump administration’s mandate to every federal agency to eliminate “waste, bloat, and insularity,” and not necessarily Turner’s personal agenda. Turner told The Real Deal he sees the changes as a rebalancing of the agency, ensuring that existing programs “fulfill the mission to build more affordable housing, to eradicate homelessness.”
He believes in helping Americans who are hurting but also that they should help themselves.
But housing construction is difficult, and doing more of it without resources to handle increased volume could be wishful thinking. How the new secretary navigates that contradiction will define HUD’s role in addressing an issue that was paramount in the 2024 presidential election: housing affordability.
“You can’t have it both ways,” a former HUD official said. “You can’t say, I support housing and homeownership and then get rid of the people that support it and cut the programs.”
“HUD is the vehicle to be a blessing to the communities of America by way of housing.”
Turner called reports that HUD would cut half its staff “totally false” and said the agency is being “very strategic and surgical about how we are managing our staff and our team members.”
HUD directly provides financing to property owners and developers to build new housing and rehab existing stock, and has a program that allows private developers to renovate and manage struggling public housing complexes. A loss of federal financing at the state and local level could mean public subsidies for private housing development get redirected to social safety net programs.
Disinvestment in the agency isn’t new, and housing advocates have pointed out for years that HUD hasn’t had the resources to fix the housing crisis. In his first nearly three months on the job, Turner has toured the country to preach the president’s housing priorities. He has also committed to “cutting red tape” to make it easier to build, a concept that even critics of the Trump administration can get behind, though few details have emerged.
“The previous administration, they lost focus of the core mission,” he said. “We’re modernizing, we’re increasing technology, we’re maximizing our budget.”
A gift
Turner’s appointment to HUD is not the first time that observers have looked skeptically at the Richardson, Texas, native and thought, “him?”
In his sermons at Prestonwood, he’s made self-deprecating remarks about how he doesn’t look like he spent nine seasons playing professional football. His comparatively slight figure suited him as a defensive back, though, where speed is a virtue.
“The Lord gave me a great gift to run,” Turner told the Texas Tribune in 2014.
He began his career with the Washington Redskins and the San Diego Chargers, then played one season for the Denver Broncos before a leg injury ended his football career in 2004.
Aware of the alternative meaning of NFL, “Not for Long,” Turner began preparing for his football retirement soon after signing with the Redskins, starting a motivational speaking company in 1996. Today, Turner is a charismatic orator, who slips religious flourishes — can I get an amen? — and sports analogies into speeches about housing.
Turner also worked as an intern for then-U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Republican from California, during off seasons. Turner credits the internship as kickstarting his interest in politics, telling the host of the Prestonwood Christian Academy podcast in October that “God dropped a dream and desire in my heart” to serve and lead.
He took big swings early on. In 2006, he ran for an open Congressional seat in California, and lost with less than 2 percent of the vote. Six years later, he ran to represent the 33rd District in Texas in the state House of Representatives and won. In his second term, he tried to unseat House Speaker Joe Straus. Straus had held the position since 2009, and the state hadn’t seen a contested vote for speaker since 1975, according to the Tribune.
Turner didn’t win but he had powerful people behind him, including the conservative group Empower Texans, which was financially backed by oil magnate Tim Dunn. The group, which has since spun off into other organizations and has been credited with pushing Texas further to the right, ranked Turner among the top five Republicans in its 2013 fiscal responsibility report.
His legislative record appears to align with his view of social safety net programs at HUD, which is to say, he sees them as fiscal drains that keep people reaching for assistance. As a representative, he voted in favor of a bill that preserved a landlord’s ability to refuse a tenant based on their source of income, including housing vouchers. He also voted against a measure that created a grant program for organizations that issue mortgages in areas with low homeownership rates. He did, however, support measures aimed at helping build housing for seniors and in rural areas, as previously reported by ProPublica.
He didn’t get any of his own bills passed, but some served as prequels to his policies under the Trump administration. He proposed a measure that would create stricter standards for determining that a student at a state college is a legal resident of Texas. He also pitched a measure that aimed to streamline funding for certain infrastructure projects.
Turner served two terms, and then worked as a chief inspiration officer at Systemware, a software company in Addison, Texas. He also launched a line of custom men’s suits with his wife, Robin, in 2014. Business records indicate that the company is no longer active.
In 2019, Trump appointed Turner as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, a group made up of various federal agencies that was figuring out how to dedicate resources to the Opportunity Zone program. By Turner’s count, he visited more than 70 cities to promote the controversial tax break, which is offered to those who invest in development projects in areas designated as distressed.
Then, according to Turner, he learned the ins and outs of building housing from a Texas development company.
Irving-based JPI, a multifamily development firm that has constructed more than 115,000 homes across 27 states, hired Turner in 2023 as its chief visionary officer. Before that, Turner had advised the company, providing “motivation and inspiration,” according to JPI’s website.
The chief visionary officer was a role that started with Turner and may well end with him, as the company has not named a replacement.
Turner was tasked with the big picture, helping executives strategize development and the company’s growth. In an April 2024 photo posted on JPI’s Instagram, Turner gives off idea-man energy: He’s posing in a checkered blue blazer, while the rest of the employees wear yellow construction vests.
The photo was taken at the ground-breaking of Jefferson Castle Hills, a 761-unit residential project in Lewisville, Texas.
David Palmer, who leads Dallas development for Weitzman, a retail-focused company that is partnering with JPI on the project, said he interacted with Turner during the land use negotiations and design phase of the project.
“I held him in the highest regard,” Palmer said. “He has a wonderful command of the subjects he talks about.”
He added, “Anybody that can spend nine years [in] the NFL playing as a cornerback, and isn’t any taller than I am, I really admire that guy.”
The mission
Turner’s own upbringing was difficult. He grew up in a “broken home, a poor family,” he has shared. He started working young, washing dishes at Spring Creek Barbeque — “barbecue sauce everywhere,” he remembered, “friends coming and laughing at me” — before he graduated high school. But he does not believe government should take the lead to help those struggling.
HUD had tried to change its mission statement during the first Trump administration by removing mentions of discrimination and adding a goal of encouraging “self-sufficiency.” This caused an uproar, and it appears then-Secretary Ben Carson ended up leaving the statement alone, according to archived snapshots of the agency’s website. Turner, like former HUD Secretaries Ben Carson and Marcia Fudge, is Black. Fudge famously complained that Black Cabinet members often end up at HUD or the Department of Labor.
Turner wants to revive the “self-sufficiency” focus. The agency is looking at implementing work rules and term limits on certain types of assistance, Turner said, noting that the average stay of housing residents in New York City public housing is 20 years.
“HUD and any type of social safety net was never meant to be a lifestyle,” he told Newsmax in April. “It was never meant to be a hammock for people to just rest the rest of their lives on government subsidies. But instead it was meant and created to be a trampoline to project people on a different trajectory.”
“It is not a formula for increasing [housing] production. It results in inaction — wait and see, and hold your fire — until we understand better what is going on.”
For housing advocates, that can sound like a threat to cut funding.
HUD supports housing in a handful of ways. Some programs target specific populations with housing aid, while others provide funding to localities, who can then slate the housing issues they’ll try to solve. The HOME Investment Partnerships Program is one block grant program, which sends funds to states and localities and lets them address housing needs for low-income families. Community Development Block Grants are provided on an annual basis, to provide “decent housing and a suitable living environment, and by expanding economic opportunities” to low-income communities. The Housing Choice Voucher Program, or Section 8, covers a portion of rent for some 2.3 million households across the country.
If the fiscal 2026 spending plan guts HUD’s budget, these are the sorts of programs that will get cut back, housing advocates fear. Public housing authorities in particular would scramble to cover costs; they’d likely defer maintenance even though there’s already a $70 billion maintenance backlog across all authorities in the U.S. This could hit landlords and developers too, if there’s less money for housing vouchers and tenants can’t afford their rent.
Some housing groups have already confronted the worst-case scenario.
In February, HUD abruptly canceled nearly $40 million in so-called Section 4 grants to Enterprise Community Partners, one of three national nonprofits that disburses this federal grant money to affordable-housing nonprofits.
Enterprise CEO and former HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan was not happy.
The move would “raise costs for families” and “hobble the creation of affordable homes,” he said.
Enterprise was suffering the DOGE method: Cut first, and later figure out if what was discarded deserves to be restored.
“These DOGE cuts have been pretty immediate, pretty impactful,” Rich Larsen, a partner at Novogradac, an accounting and consulting firm focused on real estate, said. “It’s really hard to plan for when you really aren’t sure what is going to happen.”
In Enterprise’s case, the group quickly submitted an appeal. HUD reversed course.
“I think the spirit of winning the appeal was Secretary Turner’s team saying, ‘We value your work on Section 4. We see its utility and efficacy,’” Pat Cave, senior vice president of policy at Enterprise, said.
“I think it was remarkably orderly, even if the cancellation of the contracts seemed haphazard,” he said.
Contradictory realities
Turner is still building out his team. Trump’s nomination for deputy secretary, Andrew Hughes, is awaiting Senate confirmation, as are other political appointees. In the meantime, Turner is fulfilling a task that is usually key to any HUD secretary: selling the president’s agenda. In 2025, this means ensuring undocumented immigrants do not benefit from federal housing programs and revoking federal funds from groups that promote diversity and inclusion programs.
Turner is working with the U.S. Department of the Interior to study opportunities to build housing on underutilized federal land, though reports have found that the amount of buildable, unused federal land is fairly limited. HUD also recently issued a temporary waiver for certain construction requirements for new single-family homes in special flood hazard areas.
He has also spent a lot of time touring projects in Opportunity Zones and espousing the merits of the program. The program is overseen by the Internal Revenue Service, and is not explicitly a housing program, though it has led to housing, alongside commercial, industrial and other types of projects. The program expires in 2026, but an extension is expected in what Trump has referred to as a “big, beautiful” tax and spending plan.
HUD is also working with the National Housing Conference to find ways to use artificial intelligence to simplify the Housing Choice Voucher program. Innovation in factory-built housing is another hope, a way the agency could increase housing construction efficiently, a senior career official at HUD said.
Generally speaking, streamlining existing programs would be welcome. For example, housing advocates and former HUD officials agree that paperwork and requirements for getting Section 8 voucher holders can be overwhelming.
“If that burden can be reduced, that’s going to go a long way,” Larsen said.
More information on specific policy aims are expected out of HUD once vacancies are filled and the agency has a budget.
For now, goals can seem in conflict with one another.
The administration wants to shrink HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development, which oversees disaster recovery efforts, according to the New York Times. At the same time, HUD has taken steps to simplify the application process for disaster victims seeking community block grants, overseen by the office that is slated to lose 84 percent of its staff.
Trump signed an executive order in January directing all federal agencies to pursue actions that will “lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply,” and HUD’s stated goal is still that more Americans should have access to affordable housing. The prospect of staffing and funding cuts could thwart these actions.
Georgi Banna, an affordable housing attorney who heads policy and program development at the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, recently toured a public housing authority in Arkansas with a team that included Turner, and found the secretary “very engaged” and willing to listen to concerns.
But Banna, whose organization represents builders and managers of affordable housing, noted that understaffing a regulator would be painful.
“The processes, the approvals, aren’t going to shrink if we’re building more,” he said. “With less staffing, their capacity is going to be stretched.”
During an event in Miami hosted by the Urban Land Institute in April, Turner pointed to his repeal of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. The Obama-era rule, which was repealed by Trump and then reinstated by Biden, required local governments that receive federal funds to identify discriminatory housing policies, including zoning rules that have reinforced segregation, and find ways to address them.
Turner said the regulation wrongly transformed HUD into a “zoning entity,” and resulted in onerous paperwork for localities.
“Anybody that can spend nine years [in] the NFL playing as a cornerback, and isn’t any taller than I am, I really admire that guy.”
“We tore it down to unleash the power and flexibility back to the localities,” he said.
Turner has said that he doesn’t want to force localities to change their zoning to allow more housing. Zoning restrictions play a significant role in how much housing gets built in any given place, and those rules are controlled at the local level. The federal government should serve as a facilitator, he said, encouraging localities to find ways to make it easier to build. But the private sector, nonprofits and religious organizations should take the lead.
“We can’t keep running the same plays and getting the same results and expect anything to change,” Turner said at the ULI event, while apologizing for using a “tired” football analogy. “We have a crisis in our country, and it cannot continue.”
A“big, beautiful” future
Trump’s budget, expected sometime in May, will serve as a framework, but not every policy will come to fruition. During his last administration, Trump repeatedly pitched massive reductions to HUD’s budget, proposing an $8.6 billion cut in 2020, by eliminating the HOME, Community Development Block Grant and other programs, as well as cutting funding for public housing authorities and housing vouchers.
Those didn’t move forward. But housing groups expect Trump to take another crack at them, and to introduce new changes, including potentially converting the Section 8 program into a limited block grant, according to the New York Times. These cuts may have more appeal this time around as Congress endeavors to pay for a proposed $5 trillion in tax cuts.
Other key sources of housing finance, including the low-income housing tax credit and private activity bonds, are up for debate. Housing advocates have been pushing for an expansion of the former, and there are concerns that as part of the budget reconciliation process, the latter will be made far less attractive as an investment.
During the first Trump administration, Turner tweaked federal funding programs, including those under HUD, to give priority to projects located in Opportunity Zones. That is likely to continue, and the administration could frame OZs as a housing program this time around, giving Turner more of a purview.
Turner doesn’t control what level of funding HUD receives, and he has said that his responsibility is to take inventory of every agency program and direct funds as efficiently as possible. As part of that strategy, he is focused on helping nonprofits and religious organizations with workforce training programs.
“My heart is to get people off of subsidy, and live a life of self-sustainability,” he said. He points to his trajectory: He washed dishes, graduated high school, found a calling and then a few more.
But he acknowledged that initiatives like workforce training cannot lift everyone out of poverty.
“Will we have those people in our country that need assistance? Absolutely,” he told TRD. “We are very focused on serving that percentage and that specific part of our population.”
Soon after Trump tapped Turner to lead the agency, Henry Cisneros, who was HUD secretary during the Clinton administration, said he was encouraged by the administration’s early focus on housing.
“The president-elect is a houser, learned housing at his father’s knee,” Cisneros, who is also a former mayor of San Antonio and founder of infrastructure investment management firm American Triple I, said at the time. “He should understand the building process.”
In April, he had a different view. “Great turbulence” in the economy makes it difficult to opine on the status of HUD policies or priorities, Cisneros said. The lack of clarity on interest rates, tariffs and stock market volatility made it hard to see where agency policy would go, and how the private sector might react to its initiatives.
“You put all that together and it is not a formula for increasing [housing] production,” he said. “It results in inaction — wait and see, and hold your fire — until we understand better what is going on.”
— Additional reporting by Katherine Kallergis