Marcia Fudge

UPDATE: Confirmed.

If Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) is confirmed as housing Secretary on Wednesday as expected, she’ll be confronting 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.

But 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.

  

Give her the resources and she'll get it done. This is not the time to hand someone the reins and a shoestring budget.

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.

[...]

“HUD’s ranks have been gutted, morale has never been lower, and the challenges to HUD’s constituents have never been higher,” Dworkin added.

Much like the other agencies Trump tried to run into the ground. (See, for one, Michael Regan's challenges at EPA.)

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.

[...]

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 repeatedly pushed budget requests that would have slashed HUD funding by about 15 percent, although Congress routinely ignored those suggestions.

[...]

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.

Recruit. People need jobs....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.