HUD and the Justice Department refused to share housing discrimination complaint data with researchers for the first time in nearly 30 years.

The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), a coalition headquartered in Northwest D.C. and led by President and CEO Lisa Rice, documented the data gap in its 2026 Fair Housing Trends Report. The agencies declined to provide complaint records for 2025, leaving researchers unable to determine the full number of discrimination complaints filed nationwide, as the Washington Informer reported.

The report documented 1,892 complaints nationally involving source-of-income discrimination, a protection recognized under the District's Human Rights Act. Those complaints can involve landlords refusing to rent to people who use housing vouchers.

Enforcement offices gutted

HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO), the office that investigates discrimination allegations, had about one-third of its January 2025 workforce remaining, the report said. At least 3,188 HUD employees departed in 2025, the alliance wrote, citing federal workforce figures. A separate Government Accountability Office report found HUD cut its workforce by 29 percent between December 2024 and December 2025, mostly through deferred resignation programs. More than 40 percent of departing employees had worked at HUD for over 20 years, the GAO found.

HUD did not respond to the GAO's requests for information during its audit, the GAO reported. No public response from HUD to the alliance's findings appears in available records.

The Justice Department filed 31 housing and civil enforcement cases during fiscal year 2025, down from 44 the prior year, according to the alliance's report. Twenty-six of those cases were filed between October 2024 and January 2025. Only five came after February.

Cases alleging patterns or practices of discrimination dropped from 21 to three.

Nonprofits stretched thin

The alliance surveyed 82 fair housing organizations. Sixty-two reported federal funding disruptions. Fifty-eight reduced services. Fourteen cut staff. Eleven stopped or restricted accepting new cases.

Four temporarily closed their offices. Nine reported being unable to pay employees, borrowing money to cover costs or exhausting reserves.

"In 2025, more of those calls went to offices running on half a staff, or to phones that nobody had the funding to answer despite Congress appropriating funding for their critical work," the alliance wrote.

The Massachusetts Fair Housing Center stopped accepting new cases three times during 2025, leaving an estimated 50 fewer families with fair housing assistance than the year before, the report said.

Complaint numbers fell

Working with limited data, the alliance documented 20,805 complaints handled by nonprofit fair housing groups and the Justice Department in 2025, compared with 24,001 the previous year. The figures exclude complaints processed by HUD and federally funded state and local agencies because those agencies did not provide their data.

The report's authors warned against reading the lower count as a sign that discrimination declined. More than half of the documented complaints, 11,543, involved people with disabilities. Another 2,327 alleged racial discrimination. Rental housing accounted for 18,753 complaints, more than 90 percent of the total.

"Discrimination didn't decline," the alliance concluded. "The administration of appropriated resources to tackle it did."

Lawsuit over program consolidation

In July 2026, the alliance and the Massachusetts Fair Housing Center sued HUD over directives that would have consolidated $46 million of a $56 million fair housing program into five awards. The previous system distributed grants to more than 100 local organizations. The plaintiffs argued the changes would exclude established enforcement groups, the report said.

A federal judge vacated the disputed fiscal year 2025 funding notices in August and reaffirmed the ruling in September. The alliance wrote that the money keeping local fair housing offices open "is now litigated year over year instead of allocated and disbursed as Congress intended."