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 units. 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 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.
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Meanwhile, the General Services Administration continues to brace for deep cuts under the auspices of DOGE cost cutting. According to another report by NPR, the agency, which manages federal real estate and contracts, is expected to cut its budget by half and increase monitoring or remaining staff.
The GSA employs about 12,000 people across the United States and had a $64 billion budget last year. The cuts made at GSA may become a model for how the Trump administration will approach its recommendations about agencies, NPR said.
On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to work with DOGE to cut jobs through large-scale reductions in force, attrition, and limits on new hiring. Some of the roles being targeted included communications, administrative support, stakeholder engagement and interns. In addition, all regional and field offices are set to be consolidated into four to five hubs for all GSA employees.
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Kristen Smithberg
Kristen Smithberg is a Colorado-based freelance writer who covers commercial real estate, insurance, benefits and retirement topics for BenefitsPRO and other industry publications.
