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At a recent conference of the National Low-Income Housing Council, HUD Secretary Ben Carson said the Trump administration will seek to include housing funding in a future infrastructure spending bill. Secretary Carson said this to alleviate worry about the Trump administration’s proposed budget cut of $6.2 billion from HUD.

President Trump recently issued Executive Order 13781 requiring the director of the Office of Management and Budget to propose a plan to eliminate unnecessary federal agencies, components of agencies, and agency programs, and to merge functions for greater efficiency.

For the first time, a federal judge in Colorado ruled that the federal law barring housing discrimination protects LGBT people. The married couple who brought the case were denied a rental home along with their two children by a landlord who gave as a reason their “unique relationship,” they claimed in court.

HUD recently released a report that compared the health of HUD-assisted adults to the general adult population. The report is called “A Health Picture of HUD-Assisted Adults.” In 2011, HUD and the National Center for Health Statistics agreed to link administrative records for individuals receiving housing assistance from HUD with records from the National Health Interview Survey.

On March 2, Dr. Ben S. Carson, Sr. was sworn in as the 17th Secretary of HUD. Secretary Carson will now lead a cabinet agency of approximately 8,000 employees who oversee most of the nation’s affordable housing programs and will manage a nearly $50 billion budget. Sheila Greenwood, formerly an assistant secretary at HUD under President George W. Bush and a lobbyist for Prudential Financial Inc., will serve as Dr. Carson’s chief of staff.

The Urban Institute recently released a report entitled Moving to Work and Neighborhood Opportunity. This report explored how public housing authorities (PHAs) granted Moving to Work (MTW) status by HUD use their unique policy and fiscal flexibility to help low-income households move to opportunity-rich neighborhoods. Policy and programs adopted through MTW include changes to the tenant-based Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program or policies that increase the affordable housing supply in opportunity neighborhoods through the project-based voucher (PBV) program.

Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) recently introduced the “Equal Opportunity for Residential Representation Act of 2017.” The bill is designed to help provide legal and supportive services to lower income families. 

A report by the Public and Affordable Housing Research Corporation (PAHRC), The Education Boost: Lifting Families Out of Poverty, estimates the value that improvements in education can have on positive exits from rental assistance, describes the barriers low-income individuals face attending college, and investigates the gaps in educational attainment between rent-assisted households and low-income unassisted renters.

The Housing Trust Fund (HTF) is an affordable housing production program that complements existing federal, state, and local efforts to increase and preserve the affordable housing supply for extremely low- and very low-income households, including homeless families. The HTF was established under Title I of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, Section 1131. HTF funds may be used for the production or preservation of affordable housing through the acquisition, new construction, reconstruction, and/or rehabilitation of non-luxury housing with suitable amenities.

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently sent federal agencies a preliminary FY 2018 budget framework. The framework identifies its top-line funding amounts for the agencies and asks them for feedback on how they will achieve these targets. OMB officials said the budget framework identifies a $54 billion increase in defense and security spending and suggests the administration intends to fully offset this amount with nondefense program funding cuts.