DOGE and the Department of Housing and Urban Development

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is an entity established within the Executive Office of the President and led by entrepreneur Elon Musk, which plans to focus on (among other things) government spending and waste. That is a laudable objective. One area in which the federal government spends a tremendous amount of money is grants to nonprofits. An analysis of these grants from USASpending.gov provides examples of some of the things that DOGE may wish to examine.

While government efficiency should hopefully be a bipartisan aim, DOGE is specifically associated with the second Trump Administration. Accordingly—and for both recentness and simplicity—this analysis focuses on grants with performance periods that began during the Biden Administration. It pays particular attention to grants that conservative Americans might find ideologically objectionable, as well as grants with questionable usefulness or effectiveness. The amounts given refer to the total “obligated amount” according to USASpending.gov, which does not necessarily correspond to the total “outlayed amount” at any given time.

The following are some examples of federal grants made to nonprofits by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

UnidosUS and the National Urban League

First, it is worth noting that UnidosUS and the National Urban League, two significant HUD grantees, also received substantial funding from the Department of Labor. Both are major national left-of-center advocacy nonprofits, and both are also major grantees across multiple federal departments. According to their most recent IRS Form 990 tax filings (from 2023), government grants accounted for approximately 20 percent of UnidosUS’s $55 million total revenue and approximately 40 percent of the National Urban League’s $83.4 million.

HUD awarded over $12.3 million worth of housing counseling grants to UnidosUS, with performance periods set to begin between April 2021 and October 2024. While the group’s stated goal of promoting homeownership is certainly a worthy one, UnidosUS also takes distinctly left-of-center stances on numerous controversial political and public policy issues. It supports abortion and gun control and has been highly critical of law enforcement—even signing on to a letter from the ACLU that disparaged school resource officers as instruments of “the criminalization, discrimination, and mental and physical harm of our students.” UnidosUS has also accused “conservatives” of manipulating the debate over critical race theory as part of “their concerted efforts to undermine social justice for communities of color.”

Immigration policy is a priority for UnidosUS, and the group has published material arguing that American immigration laws are rooted in racism rather than economic or security concerns. President Joe Biden was scheduled to speak on that issue (among others) at the group’s annual conference in July 2024, before being forced to cancel after contracting COVID-19. When Biden withdrew from the presidential race just days later, the affiliated 501(c)(4) UnidosUS Action Fund—which endorsed him in 2020—immediately threw its support behind the Kamala Harris campaign.

Over the same April 2021 to October 2024 time period, HUD awarded over $10.4 million to the National Urban League, most of which was also for housing counseling purposes. Like UnidosUS, the National Urban League’s work to promote homeownership is a worthy objective. But also like UnidosUS, the National Urban League takes numerous left-of-center political and public policy stances, such as on gun control and abortion. It has criticized law enforcement and the criminal justice system as having “clear links to slavery, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws [which] now looks like targeted policing, brutality, and mass incarceration,” and it called voter ID laws “racially-targeted voter suppression tactics.”

Politically, the National Urban Leage was very supportive of President Biden, declaring his first 100 days to be “one of the most successful starts to an Administration and Congress in recent memory.” A statement released by the group on inauguration day 2025 praised the outgoing Biden Administration as the “most equity-focused presidential administration in U.S. history” and attacked the incoming Trump Administration as “the modern era’s most aggressive effort to erase racial progress and reinforce white advantage.”

Housing was a focal point for the group’s president and CEO Marc Morial during the runup to the 2024 presidential election. He spoke about it at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he attacked Trump for having allegedly engaged in past discriminatory housing practices and declared that “Kamala Harris has a plan to build more housing, keep rent prices fair, and help more people own homes.” On the group’s website, Morial wrote that “I had the opportunity to bring [the National Urban League’s] advocacy for fair, safe, and affordable housing to the Democratic National Convention.” Before his speech, Morial gave an interview in which he explained that his purpose was to create “a contrast between what a Harris presidency would mean for housing, and the record of Donald Trump.” As an aside, this raises a question about where exactly all of this falls along the line strictly prohibiting 501(c)(3) charities like the National Urban League from intervening in political campaigns.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation

Perhaps the most notable single award that HUD made to a nonprofit in 2024 was a $10 million cooperative agreement with the California-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation under the tenant education and outreach program. The department’s website explained that the foundation and its co-applicant Massachusetts Alliance of HUD Tenants “will sub-award and subcontract the available funding over the next two years to approximately 30 eligible tenant advocacy organizations . . . with the goal of building the capacity of tenants as active partners in the preservation of affordable rental housing for low-income residents.” The money “can be used for training tenant organizers and technical assistance to tenant organizations, as well as legal services to establish and operate tenant organizations.”

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is “the largest provider of HIV/AIDS medical care in the world,” according to its website, serving over two million patients globally. At the same time, it has become a highly controversial entity in both the medical community and California politics—due in no small part to the polarizing nature of its powerful “ex-Trotskyite” founder and president Michael Weinstein, whom Politico characterized as “one of the state’s most elusive personalities.”

In 2023, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s revenues were an astonishing $2.29 billion, with only $41.8 million of this reported as having come from government grants. However, this substantially underrepresents how much money the group brings in thanks to the federal government. Under a legal framework known as the 340B Drug Pricing Program, certain health care providers (such as the AIDS Healthcare Foundation) can purchase discounted medications directly from manufacturers, but bill insurance for the full price when they distribute the medications to patients—pocketing the difference. “That money,” according to a 2017 New York Times report, “subsidizes [the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s] expansion and advocacy as well as the group’s political activities.”

Those political activities notably include housing, where “Weinstein has cast himself as an anti-MAGA progressive savior who can singlehandedly reshape the rental economy through the ballot box,” according to Politico. Specifically, this has entailed vast sums spent on three separate efforts to expand rent control in California via ballot measure in 2018, 2020, and 2024—all of which voters roundly rejected. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation spent well over $40 million pushing the 2024 measure (known as Proposition 33), after having reportedly spent a combined $64 million on the 2018 and 2020 measures. It also runs a major advocacy campaign called Housing is a Human Right to push for what it calls “equitable housing legislation and policies,” though the group’s activist future is in doubt after California voters narrowly approved Proposition 34 in 2024. Assuming it survives legal challenges, Proposition 34 would ultimately require the AIDS Healthcare Foundation to spend at least 98 percent of its 340B revenue on direct patient care.

Relatedly, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is also a major low-income rental housing operator—and a controversial one. Numerous complaints have been made about conditions at its properties, according to a 2023 Los Angeles Times investigation. The report observed how the health care charity had simultaneously “transformed itself into one of the nation’s most prolific funders of tenants’ rights campaigns and one of Skid Row’s biggest landlords,” having spent over $240 million on low-cost rental properties in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Reason magazine noted the irony of a $10 million HUD grant to make the foundation “responsible for awarding taxpayer dollars to tenant advocacy groups to fight against the kinds of living conditions that are reportedly widespread at AHF’s own properties.”

Legal Aid Groups

Legal aid charities also receive grants from HUD. This money is often related to the Fair Housing Act and alleged housing discrimination, and it can include funds to help with investigation and enforcement. Many of these groups do good work, and civil legal aid is a genuine public need. That said, some HUD grantees also evidence rather strong political and/or ideological biases that would suggest a mission that goes considerably beyond simply providing charitable legal assistance.

For example, from 2021 through 2024 the department awarded over $2 million in grants and cooperative agreements to California Rural Legal Assistance, a self-described “radical” organization whose mission is “to dismantle unjust systems through community lawyering,” according to a statement it released after the 2024 election. From 2021 through 2023 HUD also awarded $1.88 million to Legal Aid Chicago, which argues that systemic racism has created “a world that is often complacent and, therefore, complicit in the suppression of [our clients’] advancement.” From 2022 through 2023, HUD awarded $1.2 million to Brooklyn Legal Services, which despite being a separate nonprofit is controlled by Legal Services NYC and is listed as one of its local borough offices. Legal Services NYC uses the law “as a tool for social change,” challenging what it calls “systemic injustices that trap people in poverty”—for instance, by defending New York City’s controversial rent stabilization laws.

In 2023, HUD awarded $1.275 million to Bay Area Legal Aid, which the previous year published a land acknowledgement declaring its offices to be on Native American land that was “stolen” and “never ceded” to the United States, which it accused of inflicting “generational harms.” In furtherance of efforts to “decolonize,” it suggested that individuals find ways to “contribute to the reparation of Indigenous sovereignty and the rematriation of Indigenous land.” In 2023, Bay Area Legal Aid received 93 percent of its over $29 million total revenue from government grants. It is truly remarkable for a group utterly dependent on taxpayer dollars to openly question the very legitimacy of its benefactor’s sovereignty.

From 2021 through 2023, HUD awarded approximately $2.25 million to the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, for Fair Housing Act-related enforcement initiatives. Although it provides some legal aid in certain cases, the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee also operates as a legal advocacy group. According to its website, the group works “to dismantle systemic racism and economic oppression so all people have an equal chance to succeed.” It is one of eight independent local affiliates of the national Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which itself is major left-of-center activist group. Before she was controversially confirmed in 2021 as assistant attorney general for the civil rights division in the Biden Administration’s Justice Department, Kristen Clarke was president and executive director of the national Lawyers’ Committee. In that capacity, she wrote an op-ed for Newsweek entitled “I Prosecuted Police Killings. Defund the Police – But Be Strategic.” She later distanced herself from that position.

Other Groups

HUD has recently given substantial sums to other groups that have adopted left-of-center positions on political and public policy issues.

From April 2021 through October 2024, the department awarded nearly $7.6 million in grants to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), most of which was for housing counseling purposes. In 2023, government grants accounted for about 17 percent of the group’s total revenue. The NCRC operates in accordance with what it calls its Just Economy Pledge, launched in 2021. Criticizing what it labeled the “tale of White Christian European arrival, endurance and triumph” in the United States, the pledge condemns American society as hopelessly and systemically racist and favors a distinctly socialist public policy shift for the country. Illustrative Just Economy proposals include “government programs to fully eliminate food and housing insecurity and to meet other basic needs”; a guaranteed “minimum basic income, regardless of employment”; the abolition of bail and court fees; and unspecified initiatives to “demilitarize and drive racism out of policing and law enforcement.” In 2024, HUD personnel presented the NCRC with a giant novelty grant check at the group’s annual Just Economy Conference.

From May 2021 through September 2024, HUD awarded over $7.1 million to the National Fair Housing Alliance, which claims to be “the only national organization dedicated solely to ending discrimination in housing.” After the 2024 elections, the National Fair Housing Alliance released a statement claiming that “under former President Trump’s leadership from 2017 to 2021, we witnessed a concerted and harmful effort to dismantle many of the key protections put in place to ensure fair and equal access to housing opportunities.” Although the group professed a hope to work with the second Trump Administration, it also warned that “we stand ready to confront any efforts to turn back the clock and undermine the progress we have made.” It is interesting to contrast the group’s 2020 press release responding to Biden’s nomination of Marcia Fudge for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, which was full of praise and featured a litany of public policy recommendations to undo “the profound harms done by the Trump administration,” with a corresponding press release from 2024 responding to Trump’s nomination of Scott Turner, which struck a much warier tone and warned that “we stand ready to defend any attempt to weaken existing fair housing and civil rights protections.”

Finally, HUD awarded a full $77 million worth of grants and cooperative agreements to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) for performance periods that began from June 2021 through December 2024. Housing is a major issue for the LISC, and according to its website the group has helped finance the creation of over 489,000 affordable homes and apartments since 1979. The LISC “integrate[s] climate adaptation strategies into all aspects” of its work to promote what it calls “a greener economy” and “climate resilience.” It is also a leading member of Power Forward Communities, a nonprofit coalition that received $2 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through the Inflation Reduction Act. The LISC explains that this money will fund “affordable residential decarbonization throughout the country, with a focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities.” Elsewhere, the LISC has stated that it believes poverty, inequity, and injustice “are largely rooted in this country’s historic and systemic racism, as well as in other forms of discrimination,” and that “every aspect of our work” is implemented through “the lenses of equity and anti-racism.”

Final Thoughts

These are some examples of HUD grants to nonprofits that DOGE may be interested in examining, but this short list is certainly far from exhaustive. Continuing a theme that was also evident in the Capital Research Center’s examination of the Department of Labor, it is notable how much federal grant money flows to nonprofits that could accurately be characterized as activist groups with distinctly left-of-center ideological and/or political views that appear almost totally at odds with the priorities of the Trump Administration and the values of the voters who elected it—often explicitly so. It is one thing for Americans to privately support such groups with their own money—indeed, this is a crucial pillar of civil society. It is quite another thing for those groups to be supported by tax dollars.

Another related theme evident in the Department of Labor analysis, even more pronounced at HUD, was that grants were made for seemingly worthwhile (at least on paper) purposes—such as promoting homeownership and combating housing discrimination—but to groups that evidence profound ideological biases. If such programs are worth retaining because they are found to be valuable and effective—an evaluation DOGE should properly undertake across the entire government—perhaps some less controversial and more traditionally “charitable” nonprofits might be found to carry them out.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/doge-and-the-department-of-housing-and-urban-development/