Americans facing racial discrimination, disability-related barriers, and other illegal treatment in the housing market are losing access to the investigators who protect their rights.
This comes as the Trump administration has stopped providing federal complaint records that tracked housing discrimination nationwide for 30 years, according to a new report documenting thousands of complaints, disappearing enforcement staff, and nonprofit agencies struggling to remain open.
The National Fair Housing Alliance, headquartered in Northwest D.C., found that the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Justice Department refused to provide housing discrimination data for 2025, breaking a practice dating to 1996. The missing records leave researchers unable to determine the full number of complaints filed nationally, even as organizations responsible for investigating discrimination have laid off employees, suspended investigations, and turned away people seeking assistance.
“When someone faces discrimination, they don’t call an office building in Washington, D.C. They call the fair housing center in their own city, usually on the worst day they’ve had in years,” the alliance wrote in its 2026 Fair Housing Trends Report.
The organization 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 they did not provide their data.
The report’s authors warned against interpreting the lower count as evidence that discrimination has declined. Organizations that once investigated complaints were operating with fewer employees, reduced funding and, in some cases, no ability to accept new cases.
“Discrimination is hard to detect and harder to document,” the authors wrote. “Many people who experience discrimination never report it because they are unable to detect it, doubt anything will be done about it, or they fear retaliation from a landlord or neighbor.”
More than half of the documented complaints involved people with disabilities. The alliance recorded 11,543 such cases, including disputes over housing accommodations and accessibility. Another 2,327 complaints alleged racial discrimination, while 1,239 involved sex discrimination.
Rental housing accounted for 18,753 complaints, more than 90% of the total.
The report also identified 1,892 complaints involving discrimination based on source of income, a protection recognized under the District of Columbia’s Human Rights Act and certain other local laws. Such complaints can involve landlords refusing to rent to people who rely on housing vouchers or other lawful income.
Federal enforcement staffing declined during the same period.
At least 3,188 HUD employees departed in 2025, according to federal workforce figures cited by the alliance. The department’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which investigates discrimination allegations, had approximately one-third of its January 2025 workforce remaining, the report said.
The Justice Department filed 31 housing and civil enforcement cases during fiscal 2025, compared with 44 the previous year. Twenty-six were filed between October 2024 and January 2025, before the Trump administration’s first full month in office. Only five were filed between February and September.
Cases alleging patterns or practices of discrimination dropped from 21 to three.
The losses were damaging to nonprofit organizations that investigate complaints, test landlords and lenders for discriminatory practices and help residents pursue legal remedies.
Of 82 organizations surveyed, 62 reported federal funding disruptions. Fifty-eight reduced services, 14 eliminated staff positions, 15 curtailed or suspended discrimination testing, and 11 stopped or restricted accepting new cases.
Four organizations temporarily closed their offices. Nine reported being unable to pay employees, borrowing money to meet expenses or exhausting financial 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.
In Arizona, the Southwest Fair Housing Council lost more than half its workforce during an 18-month funding disruption, leaving four employees to cover a state with 7.6 million residents.
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 previous year.
A Louisiana organization handled 77% more complaints despite a six-month funding interruption that forced layoffs and reduced public education and investigative services.
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, replacing a system that historically distributed grants to more than 100 local organizations.
The plaintiffs argued that the changes would exclude established enforcement groups and threaten their ability to remain open.
A federal judge vacated the disputed fiscal 2025 funding notices in August and reaffirmed the ruling in September.
The report does not provide a separate complaint count for the District or establish how many D.C. residents could not obtain assistance, but it does document reductions in the federal enforcement system that protects housing rights in the nation’s capital and elsewhere.
The alliance warned that the missing federal records and shrinking nonprofit workforce make it increasingly difficult to measure how many Americans encounter illegal discrimination without receiving assistance.
“Discrimination didn’t decline,” the organization concluded. “The administration of appropriated resources to tackle it did.”
