Dealing with federal agencies could become more cumbersome for the commercial real estate industry as President Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) scrutinizes government spending and looks to cut staff. The Department of Housing and Urban Development appears to be the next target on DOGE’s list.

HUD employees were asked to justify hundreds of contracts across the agency earlier this week, according to an NPR report. The agency manages rental assistance, provides funding to house homeless people, helps lower-income families buy homes, and builds and repairs affordable housing. Its contracts include property management, inspections and appraisals on housing it oversees, credit analysis for its mortgage insurance arm, and research on how its programs perform and ways to improve them, the report said.

The impact of DOGE’s scrutiny is unclear, although stressed-out staffers and HUD union leaders speculated it would put future funding grants on pause. However there is some hope that inefficient processes could be improved, including the implementation of a $40 million HUD tool developed for inspecting public housing that has proved to be slow and difficult to use, the article said.