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The housing and mortgage finance industries are bracing for the repercussions of cuts to federal programs and personnel by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with a potential government shutdown the most immediate looming threat.
As a March 14 debt ceiling deadline approaches, Senate Democrats are warning that a government shutdown is a possibility if they’re not included in ongoing talks to pass a full-year continuing resolution favored by President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, The Hill reported.
Senior House Democrats are contemplating a government shutdown to protest DOGE’s cuts, Politico Capitol Hill bureau chief Rachael Bade reported Tuesday, citing “multiple well-placed Democratic sources.”
“At some point you’ve got to have a goddamn backbone,” a senior Democratic lawmaker told Bade. “I am not giving them a blank check until September.”
On its official website, DOGE claims to have saved taxpayers $105 billion through March 2 through “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings and workforce reductions.”
But DOGE has deleted or altered more than 1,000 savings claims as news organizations scrutinize them and find errors like counting millions as billions, or claiming credit for cancelling contracts that expired years ago, The New York Times reported Monday.
On Feb. 14, for example, DOGE posted on the social media site X that “$1.9 billion of HUD money was just recovered after being misplaced during the Biden administration due to a broken process.”
But one of the two companies identified as recipients by DOGE, Carrington Mortgage Services, told Inman that the money allocated to it was never spent and that the contract had expired. Although DOGE’s social media post about the $1.9 billion in recovered HUD money is still live, that claim is not listed on the agency’s “Wall of Receipts.”
Billionaire Elon Musk — DOGE’s most public figure, if not its official head — repeated a debunked claim on Joe Rogan’s podcast Friday that there “were 20 million dead people marked as alive” in the Social Security Administration’s database.
While many of the savings DOGE has claimed have turned out to be questionable or false, the Trump administration has frozen or eliminated billions in spending and is on track to fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers this year.
In a Feb. 25 analysis, Pantheon Macroeconomics economists Samuel Tombs and Oliver Allen forecast that the federal government’s payroll will shrink by 200,000 by October, and that fallout from cuts to federal programs and employment will cost another 100,000 jobs at private companies.
Moody’s Analytics’ Dante DeAntonio told FoxBusiness that forecasters at the firm expect that the federal workforce will shrink by about 400,000 this year “due to a combination of the ongoing hiring freeze, deferred resignations, and DOGE-initiated layoffs.”
Economists say even job cuts of that magnitude would affect only a small percentage of the U.S. workforce. But tariffs imposed Tuesday on goods from Canada and Mexico could lead to more private sector layoffs in industries like automobile manufacturing, in which American companies rely on parts manufactured outside of the country.
Foreign manufacturers like Honda and Toyota employ more than 55,000 workers in U.S. plants, and layoffs at those plants alone could ripple through supporting businesses and idle nearly 500,000 U.S. workers, according to an Urban Institute analysis.
Many of the federal workers and programs being cut by DOGE provide services to millions of Americans — including programs that support affordable housing and mortgage finance.
The Trump administration is reportedly gearing up to slash 4,300 jobs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), with 40 percent of the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) workforce potentially in line to get pink slips. Employees at mortgage guarantor Ginnie Mae are also thought to be targeted for layoffs.
The Trump administration has characterized such reports as inaccurate, but has yet to provide details on the extent of planned staff reductions at HUD, FHA and Ginnie Mae.
National Housing Conference CEO David Dworkin, a centrist advocate for affordable housing stakeholders, has warned that DOGE’s moves could destabilize the mortgage finance system.
In a series of articles, analysts at the Urban Institute called Ginnie Mae — which guarantees payments to investors who buy pools of FHA-, VA- and USDA-backed mortgages — a “pillar of the housing finance system,” and warned drastic staffing cuts would “threaten its stability.”
Cuts to FHA’s mortgage servicing arm could also “cause instability in the housing finance market,” Urban Institute analysts warned, while planned layoffs and budget cuts at HUD would undermine its mission to support affordable housing for about 10 million households nationwide, they said.
Another widespread concern about DOGE is the access that its staff of newly-hired tech experts have to government data, and whether that data remains secure.
WIRED recently reported that DOGE has a six-person team operating at HUD who have access to “vast troves of data” from five different HUD systems.
The DOGE team at HUD reportedly includes Scott Langmack — currently “on hiatus” from his position as COO of real estate data, analytics and applications platform Kukun — and Michael Mirski, who WIRED was told is on leave from his job mobile home park operator TCC Management.
Citing anonymous HUD sources and internal documents, WIRED said DOGE’s team within HUD has access to “the individual identities of every single federal public housing voucher holder in the U.S., along with their financial information,” and information on hospitals, nursing homes, multifamily housing, and senior living facilities that HUD helps finance.
That data, along with information on federally insured mortgages, homelessness rates and environmental hazards, “could give someone with access unique insight into the U.S. real estate market,” WIRED reported.
[A HUD spokesperson declined to comment on many of the specific questions raised by WIRED, but told the publication that “DOGE and HUD are working as a team” and that “to insinuate anything else is false.”]
President Trump and Musk have dismissed critics of DOGE — and its avowed goal of rooting out government fraud, waste and abuse — as left-wing defenders of the “deep state.”
But some government reform advocates see DOGE as a missed opportunity that could end up doing more harm than good.
“Musk has been wielding a sledgehammer and tearing down existing structures with little thought for what could replace them,” Harvard Business School Professor Linda Bilmes — an expert on public finance — said in a recent critique. “A more strategic approach could have transformed DOGE into a force for genuine reform.”
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