The Bipartisan Housing Bill Is Law. Now Comes The Hard Part.

Congress’ historic effort to boost the nation’s housing supply passed both chambers with overwhelming bipartisan support and became law earlier this month. It also left a mountain of paperwork for Washington’s significantly shrunken federal agencies, which are now tasked with turning dozens of new policies into reality.

Some of the lawmakers who pushed for the law worry that the Department of Housing and Urban Development — which has shed more than 30 percent of its core policy workforce in just three years following budget cuts — is too understaffed to quickly issue new rules and implement its provisions, aimed at making building and buying homes cheaper and easier.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner is “up to the task, but you’ve got to have the underlying organization to get it done,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters. “DOGE came in with a broad brush and made decisions … they’ve undermined some of these organizations’ [ability] to really move quickly to implement new legislation.”

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the first housing law of its kind in decades and is designed to address the affordability concerns that are expected to dominate the midterm election campaigns.

But the coming rulemaking process will test whether President Donald Trump’s reimagined executive branch, still reeling from staff cuts directed by Elon Musk’s DOGE team and the White House’s budget office, is capable of carrying out the lawmakers’ vision.

“My only thought has been getting a bill to the floor. And as soon as I celebrated for about an hour, the reality hit me that we had another challenge — maybe even more resistant — to the things we wanted to accomplish,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services panel’s housing subcommittee, said in an interview. “I would not be truthful if I stood up and said, ‘Oh I think they can do it, and it’s just going to be a few months.’”

The new housing law directs HUD to expand, reform and even create new programs that provide access to affordable housing. The changes include updating standards for manufactured homes and reforming block grants for low-income housing development.

Against that backdrop, HUD’s budget estimates show the offices that run the department’s programs shed more than 1,800 staff since 2023.

“There’s a lot of institutional knowledge that left the department over the past year,” said a former HUD senior official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “That does create challenges and is something that leadership there will need to figure out.”

Current department employees are worried too.

“HUD staffing shortages will create an unnecessary and self-inflicted bottleneck to implementation, especially since the bill includes no operational funding for HUD staffing,” said an official from the American Federation of Government Employees union council, which represents HUD staff. “There should be bipartisan consensus to increase our funding, staffing, and retention if those who voted for this bill truly believe in it.”

HUD’s budget documents say the agency’s leadership is planning to maintain the majority of the 2025 staff reductions, although they had to hire more employees this year to “provide for limited backfills for attrition in critical positions” — including some in the offices impacted by the new housing law.

“HUD has the organizational capability to satisfy and meet all of its obligations under the law,” a department spokesperson told POLITICO.

And Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and House Financial Services Committee Republicans — who worked to helm the housing law — said they remain confident in the administration’s ability to execute.

“Senator Scott will remain engaged with HUD and the administration to ensure this law delivers results for families in South Carolina and across the country,” Jeff Naft, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Republican, said in a statement.

Even so, some outside groups have begun offering to help.

The National Housing Conference, a coalition organization focused on affordable housing, is bringing together home supply advocates, experts and industry stakeholders hoping to encourage a speedy and effective implementation of the law. In a press release, the conference said it plans to use AI to help draft regulations to share with HUD and other agencies impacted by the legislation.

Marisa Calderon, president of the financial mobility advocacy organization Prosperity Now, co-chairs the coalition’s working group. She said it will offer rulemaking language as a starting place for HUD and other agencies, which have lost subject-matter experts.

Musk’s DOGE team focused on HUD as a potential target for staff reductions less than a month after Trump took office. Heading into last year’s fall government shutdown the White House Office of Management and Budget directed multiple agencies including HUD to lay off thousands of employees.

The administration has argued the staff cuts fulfilled Trump’s campaign promise to root out “‘waste, fraud and abuse.”’

Lawmakers from both parties see Turner as supportive of the effort to expand home supply, but some still worry that the past staff reductions under DOGE could undercut their efforts to address voters’ pressing affordability concerns.

“I don't think they’ll intentionally sandbag any of it,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said about HUD in an interview. “But this requires agencies to be functional, and you need staff for that.”

However, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a key architect of the housing law, said HUD under Turner’s leadership has not done enough to boost housing supply and homeownership broadly.

“That's a problem with the number of people left to do the work and decisions made at the leadership level,” she said.

Realistically, a 59-provision piece of legislation with a variety of deadlines will take years to be fully implemented, even in the most ideal of circumstances. Addressing an issue as complicated as the country’s shortage of several million homes will also require federal, state and local governments to deal with not only the new law but additional factors like zoning.

Moreover, there was no funding attached to the ambitious housing package, leaving any money up to future congressional appropriations.

Dennis Shea, executive vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said it would be difficult for HUD to create the programs the law directs it to “if there's not at least a signal from Congress that some of these programs will be funded.”

For now, lawmakers plan to stay engaged with the department.

“I’ve had some preliminary discussions with other members on both sides of the aisle, about how we can proactively encourage HUD to promulgate the rules,” Rep. Mike Flood, Cleaver's Republican counterpart on the housing subcommittee, said in an interview. “We just need to figure out a way to make sure HUD knows and understands the congressional intent.”

David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, said his industry and advocacy coalition sees its role as helping the administration implement the law with its current resources, “not the resources that they used to have.”

“The worst situation that supporters of affordable housing could have is one where, two years from now, there's anything less than a clear case that this bill was a success and the right thing to do — and that it had a tangible impact,” Dworkin said. “Because there's a lot more we need to do.”