Trump Administration Puts HUD Headquarters on the Chopping Block to Drain 'DC Swamp'

The Trump administration is making waves in Washington by announcing plans to sell—and possibly demolish—the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) headquarters. Secretary Scott Turner didn’t mince words, calling the place "the ugliest building in D.C." The plan isn’t just about real estate: the administration is also aiming to cut half of HUD’s staff and slash programs that have been controversial since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society days.

HUD’s reputation hasn’t exactly been sparkling. Back in 1998, former New York governor and then-HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo called HUD "the poster child for failed government." Detroit’s Carl Levin once called it "Hurricane HUD" for its role in Detroit’s woes, and even Vice President Al Gore said in 1996 that HUD-financed projects were "crime-infested monuments to a failed policy." The left-leaning Village Voice once dubbed HUD the worst landlord in America. If that’s not a collection of bad Yelp reviews, I don’t know what is.

Negligence and dysfunction have plagued the agency for decades. A 2011 investigation exposed how billions in HUD grants disappeared into a "dysfunctional system," with little oversight or accountability. Promised apartment complexes never materialized, leaving empty fields where homes should've been. HUD officials often seemed baffled about where the money had gone or how projects were progressing. Imagine losing track of billions—makes losing your keys seem trivial.

Crime in HUD-supported housing has also been a recurring headline. In the first half of 2016 alone, at least 30 people were killed in Chicago Section 8 housing, with thousands of other crimes reported. Studies have found that Section 8 recipients are more likely to commit violent crimes than similar folks without vouchers, and relocation programs have sometimes made things worse.

The Trump administration argues that HUD’s subsidized housing model has led to crime, declining property values, and dependency. It’s now pushing for deep cuts in rental subsidies for the coming year. Despite the billions poured in since 1965, the racial homeownership gap is actually wider now than when the Fair Housing Act was passed, according to Sandra Thompson of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

The Biden administration tried to close this gap by making borrowers with good credit subsidize those with riskier profiles—a move critics say is hardly a recipe for fixing America’s housing crisis.

Now, Secretary Turner says HUD’s focus is on efficiency and accountability, but the building itself is a money pit: it needs half a billion dollars in upgrades and costs over $50 million a year, despite being half empty even before recent layoffs. The maintenance tab now dwarfs the building’s original cost—talk about a fixer-upper nightmare.

Some are calling for a more dramatic gesture: raze the building outright, echoing the infamous demolition of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe project in the 1970s. A televised implosion might be more memorable than any sales price, serving as a warning to other federal agencies: fail spectacularly, and you could be next on the demolition docket.

For Americans tired of bureaucratic bloat and failed experiments, seeing HUD’s headquarters leveled could be the ultimate symbol of draining the so-called "D.C. swamp." And, honestly, it might finally give the building a legacy people actually remember—for all the right reasons.