She’s inheriting an agency in crisis after the Senate confirmed her Wednesday in a 66-34 vote.
The Senate confirmed Marcia Fudge as the next housing secretary in a 66-34 vote Wednesday, clearing the way for her to take on a cascade of crises: millions of people facing eviction amid a pandemic, a rise in homelessness, soaring housing prices worsening a years-long affordable housing crunch.
And when Fudge reports for work at the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Brutalist headquarters in Southwest D.C. — what her predecessor Ben Carson called the “ugliest building” in the city — she’ll also be taking over an agency that is itself in crisis.
“I think that Rep. Fudge may be walking into the biggest challenge at HUD since Jack Kemp,” said National Housing Conference President and CEO David Dworkin, referring to George H.W. Bush’s HUD secretary, who took over the agency after years of neglect under the Reagan administration.
“HUD’s ranks have been gutted, morale has never been lower, and the challenges to HUD’s constituents have never been higher,” Dworkin added.
This wasn’t the job that Fudge initially wanted. But last month, at her Senate confirmation hearing, the Congressmember made an impassioned pitch to overhaul housing policy, calling on lawmakers to dramatically increase funding for housing programs to care for the nation’s most vulnerable.
That will be no easy task. HUD today is operating with less than half the staff it had 30 years ago. And while the decline isn’t all on Fudge’s predecessor — HUD lost 18.5 percent of its staff over the Obama years, even as the overall government workforce grew by 11 percent — Carson repeatedlypushedbudget requests that would have slashed HUD funding by about 15 percent, although Congress routinely ignored those suggestions.
The staff exodus stands to get worse, thanks to the agency’s aging workforce: In its “strategic workforce plan” for the years 2018-22, HUD predicted that by next year, 63 percent of HUD employees, including 50 percent of supervisors and managers, would be eligible for retirement. Those staffing gaps resulted in “an inability to sustain positive changes,” according to a December report by HUD’s inspector general.
Meanwhile, Fudge has already committed to making fair housing a priority after years of rollbacks under the Trump administration, which scrapped one Obama-era fair housing rule and watered down another while pulling back on enforcing fair lending laws across the board.
But the agency’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, too, has been decimated. As of July, more than one in four of the positions in the office was not regularly staffed: 21 percent were vacant, and another 7 percent were filled on an acting basis.
“We want to put the Black person in HUD”
Back in December, Fudge told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Carson did some “silly things. So I really do think that HUD has not fulfilled its mission. And I think it should.”
Fudge’s supporters believe her no-nonsense approach— both as a Congressmember representing the Cleveland area over the last 12 years and as the former mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio — makes her just the woman for the job of HUD Secretary.
Fudge complained to POLITICO in November that Black policymakers have traditionally been relegated to just a handful of Cabinet positions, including HUD secretary.
“As this country becomes more and more diverse, we’re going to have to stop looking at only certain agencies as those that people like me fit in. You know, it’s always ‘we want to put the Black person in Labor or HUD,’” she said then.
HUD stressed on Wednesday that Fudge was eager to take on the role, pointing to a statement she released after her selection saying she considered it an “honor and a privilege.”
As the one-time chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and member of the House Agriculture Committee, Fudge made protecting and expanding food stamp benefits a focus of her time in Congress. And she openly lobbied the Biden transition team to get the nod to lead the Agriculture Department, with support from influential backers like Majority Whip Jim Clyburn.
In an interview, Clyburn lauded Fudge as one of “the best [CBC] chairs we’ve ever had” — only after himself, that is. He and a group of Black lawmakers who represent predominantly Black, rural districts — including Mississippi’s Bennie Thompson, Georgia’s Sanford Bishop, and Louisiana’s Cedric Richmond, who is now a senior Biden official — were vocal about their desire to see Fudge become the nation’s first Black Agriculture secretary.
When Biden instead tapped former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to return to the role, it didn’t outright dismay Clyburn, who said Fudge was never a frontrunner for the job. Instead, he said, it was important to get her on the Cabinet in any capacity. Still, given the precedent of African Americans’ role in the foundation of America’s agricultural system, increased representation of African Americans in that department mattered to him.
“Black people came to this country for agricultural purposes, we didn’t come here for Wall Street,” Clyburn said. “We were brought into this country to work on plantations. Growing stuff, to feed this country and feed the world.”
When people “start talking about programs for the Black community’s inner-city youth, I’m sick and tired of that,” Clyburn added. “The majority of Black people in this country still live in the South. They don’t live in the inner cities.”
Fudge waved away a question about the apparent snub in the Plain Dealer interview: “[M]ind you, I can help poor people as much at HUD as I could at Ag,” Fudge told the paper. (Fudge declined a request for an interview.)
Bishop, one of the lawmakers who originally pushed Fudge for Agriculture, said he was optimistic about HUD under her leadership too, describing her as a thorough and dedicated public servant.
As a member of the House Administration Committee with oversight of the Capitol building, Fudge “developed relationships with people who clean the floors, who prepared the food, people who performed every support task,” Bishop said. “That’s important.”
Still, she can be sharp-elbowed at times. People who know her expect her to be a stalwart champion of HUD — both in securing its funding and in taking on aggressive enforcement.
Those sharp elbows aren’t likely to win her any GOP votes. Over the years, Fudge has sharply criticized Republican colleagues, racking up what Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) described during her nomination hearing as a “long history of intemperate comments.”
GOP lawmakers on the panel repeatedly pressed Fudge on whether she stood by comments speculating that Republicans don’t care about people of color “even a little bit” or that those who supported quickly filling former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat with Amy Coney Barrett had “no decency, no honor, no integrity” and were a “disgrace to the nation.”
Fudge insisted she has “always been able to work across the aisle.”
“Sometimes I am a little passionate about things,” she added. “Is my tone pitch-perfect all the time? It is not.”
Perhaps her bluntest public statement was her acid response to a woman claiming Fudge struck her in 2019: “If I had hit her, she would have been hurt,” Fudge told the court, which granted her a restraining order against the woman.
Before running for Congress in 2008 to fill the seat of her former boss and mentor, the late Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Fudge had been the mayor of Warrensville Heights, a city of about 13,000 people, for eight years. Both Fudge and her supporters point to her experience in local government as good preparation for taking the reins at HUD.
“I think the local perspective is more important than the national for this department,” former HUD Assistant Secretary Gustavo Velasquez said, noting that Fudge “will be surrounded by people who have the national experience.”
While several Republicansgrilled Fudgeabout her past partisan barbs during her hearing, they have also highlighted her lack of housing experience and what they view as a far-left vision of government.
Fudge used the hearing to call on lawmakers to boost funding for HUD: “We need to expand resources for HUD’s programs to people who are eligible,” she told the committee, pointing to studies that suggest between as few as 20 to 25 percent of eligible households actually receive HUD assistance.
The top Republicans with oversight of HUD — Sen. Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Rep. Patrick McHenry (N.C.) — both criticized the selection of Fudge over her limited housing portfolio.
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., questions Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday Dec. 10, 2020. | Sarah Silbiger/The Washington Post via AP, Pool
“The housing needs of Americans are too great to appoint someone who is accepting this position as a consolation prize,” McHenry said.
And GOP lawmakers and aides have already voiced concerns about an “activist HUD” run by a progressive Democrat.
Last summer, Fudge introduced a resolution calling for a “Poverty Bill of Rights” that listed “accessible, affordable, safe housing” as one of 23 rights of “all Americans to live a life free from poverty and its impacts.” She also, as a member of the House Education and Labor Committee, asked former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in 2019, “Do you realize it is your responsibility to educate every child in the United States?”
She also pledged to work to close the racial homeownership gap during her hearing, including by exploring down payment assistance programs.
“The biggest impediment to home ownership for communities of color is the down payment,” Fudge said. “We meet all of the other qualifications and so it’s like us being in a race with people who have already had a head start because we don’t have a mother or father to give us a down payment, we don’t have the wherewithal, the same kind of income, the same kind of access.”
Toomey, who voted against advancing her nomination, said he was “concerned Rep. Fudge’s approach will be to simply ask Congress for more money for HUD without working to reform it.”
Fudge, he noted, had responded to a question for the record about better targeting HUD programs for low-income people by saying, “The challenge for HUD programs isn’t that they aren’t targeted, it is that funding levels are inadequate to meet the need.”
Republicans weren’t the only ones to note Fudge’s scant experience with housing. Some advocates were dismayed by the pick, fearing it signaled that the incoming administration didn’t put much importance in housing.
Others said that even if they ideally would have selected someone with a more substantial housing background, Fudge was a good choice for one of the key issues they expect the Biden administration to pursue: bolstering efforts to reverse decades of housing segregation.
“I was concerned that he would bring on someone who didn’t understand that we have structural issues driving inequality in America,” said Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance.
“She understands those issues,” Rice added. “Would it be helpful if she were a housing expert on top of understanding those intricacies? Yeah, it wouldn’t hurt. But the fact that she gets that — it’s not a learning curve — that was comforting for me, to be honest.”
Congressional Black Caucus chair Joyce Beatty, whose relationship with Fudge dates back to her tenure as mayor of Warrensville Heights, sees her as a key figure in the caucus’ goal to pass sweeping housing legislation targeting Black and Latino communities, even as she faces an agency decimated by budget cuts and staffing attrition.
“As I listened to her confirmation hearing, it actually sealed the deal for us,” Beatty said, mentioning the caucus’ plan to provide mortgage relief to homeowners of color and expand eviction moratoriums. “We are all on board to work with others.”
“She knows that market, she will look to those communities where there have been food deserts and children have gone to bed hungry and without a roof over their head,” she added. “She knows those communities. … So she’ll bring diversity. She’ll bring different ideas to the table.”
