Trump’s pick for housing agency chief has opposed efforts to aid the poor

As HUD secretary, Scott Turner would oversee billions in housing aid, but as a Texas state legislator he voted against protections for poor tenants and has called government assistance “one of the most destructive things for the family.”

By Jesse Coburn and Andy Kroll for ProPublica

As Donald Trump’s nominee to run the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner may soon oversee the nation’s efforts to build affordable apartments, protect poor tenants and aid the homeless. As a lawmaker in the Texas House of Representatives, Turner voted against those very initiatives.

Turner supported a bill ensuring landlords could refuse apartments to applicants because they received federal housing assistance. He opposed a bill to expand affordable rental housing. He voted against funding public-private partnerships to support the homeless and against two bills that called merely to study homelessness among young people and veterans.

Behind those votes lay a deep-seated skepticism about the value of government efforts to alleviate poverty, a skepticism that Turner has voiced again and again. He has called welfare “dangerous, harmful” and “one of the most destructive things for the family.” When one interviewer said receiving government assistance was keeping recipients in “bondage” of “a worse form to find oneself in than slavery,” Turner agreed.

Such views would seemingly place Turner at odds with the core work of HUD, a sprawling federal agency that serves as a backstop against homelessness for millions of the nation’s poor, elderly and disabled. With an annual discretionary budget of $72 billion, the department provides rental assistance to 2 million families, oversees the country’s 800,000 public housing units, fights housing discrimination and segregation and provides support to the nation’s 650,000 homeless. If Turner’s record indicates how he will direct the agency’s agenda, it is those clinging to the bottom of the housing market who have the most to lose, researchers and advocates said.

“It just doesn’t seem to me like this is someone who is at all aligned with what the values of that agency should be,” said Cea Weaver, director of the advocacy group Housing Justice for All. “It’s a deregulatory agenda, and it’s an anti-poor people agenda.”

Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project, said Turner’s views, if translated into policy, could increase homelessness. “If, at a fundamental level, you believe that people getting assistance with their rent when they’re very poor and struggling, if you think that’s actually dependence and a bad thing, you’re going to try to undermine those programs,” he said.

One former colleague offered a more optimistic view of Turner’s stewardship of HUD. “My sense of him is he will try to help people,” said Richard Peña Raymond, a Democratic Texas House member who served on a committee with Turner. “I do think he’ll do a good job.”

Turner did not respond to detailed questions. A spokesperson for the nominee said: “Of course ProPublica would try and paint a negative picture of Mr. Turner before he is even given the opportunity to testify. We would expect nothing less from a publication that solely serves as a liberal mouthpiece.”

The Trump transition team and HUD did not respond to requests for comment. Trump’s announcement of Turner’s nomination praised him for “helping lead an Unprecedented Effort that Transformed our Country’s most distressed communities” as head of a White House council that promoted opportunity zones, a plan to spur investment in low-income neighborhoods by offering generous tax breaks, during Trump’s first administration. “Under Scott’s leadership,” the announcement went on, “Opportunity Zones received over $50 Billion Dollars in Private Investment!”

Turner is hardly the only Trump cabinet nominee to display skepticism or outright hostility toward the work of agencies they may lead. But, while other nominees have faced intense scrutiny in recent weeks, Turner has attracted little public attention and said even less about his intentions, beyond vowing to “bring much-needed change” to HUD, as he wrote on Facebook last month. ProPublica pieced together his views on housing through a review of legislative records and of Turner’s public speeches, podcast appearances and sermons at the Plano, Texas, megachurch where he is a pastor.

A possible HUD agenda for Turner can be found in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations for a conservative presidential administration. The report calls for cutting funding for affordable housing, repealing regulations that fight housing discrimination, increasing work requirements and adding time limits for rental assistance and eliminating anti-homelessness policies, among other changes. The Project 2025 chapter on HUD lists Ben Carson, the department secretary during the first Trump administration and a mentor to Turner, as its author. Carson, as secretary, was involved in efforts to end an anti-segregation rule, add work requirements for housing assistance and make it harder to prove housing discrimination.

Turner’s views appear to be deeply rooted in his upbringing outside Dallas, where he was, as he later put it, “a young kid from a broken home, from a poor family.” His parents’ relationship was “filled with violence, domestic violence, abuse, a lot of anger [and] alcohol.” Years later, as a legislator, Turner said that his sister had been “on state assistance and wasn’t feeding [Turner’s] nephew while she was on drugs.” (ProPublica was unable to locate Turner’s sister for comment.)

Football proved an escape. Turner received a scholarship to play for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and then he went on to a nearly decadelong career in the National Football League. He began transitioning into politics while still in the league, interning for California Rep. Duncan L. Hunter. After an unsuccessful run for a California congressional seat in 2006, Turner moved back to Texas and was elected in 2012 to the state House of Representatives, where he served for four years.

There, Turner solidified his position as a deeply conservative member opposed to many government interventions into the housing market, legislative records show. He voted against supporting foreclosure prevention programs. He opposed legislation to help public housing authorities replace or rehabilitate their property (although he voted for a minor expansion of that bill two years later). He also sought to require drug testing for poor families applying for government assistance, the Houston Chronicle reported at the time. Turner did support some modest housing assistance measures, such as bills helping housing developments for seniors and in rural areas seek low-income housing tax credits.

During his time in office, Turner was the lead author of 17 substantive bills. None were related to housing, and none of them became law.

“He’s a very nice guy,” but “he didn’t really make much of a legislative impression,” said a former high-ranking Republican Texas lawmaker, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about a former colleague. “He didn’t leave a deep footprint.”

That did not stop Turner, however, from mounting an audacious bid for the House speakership, a move reportedly backed by Tim Dunn, a West Texas pastor and oil billionaire who has used his fortune to push the state Legislature far to the right. Turner’s speaker campaign failed, but it helped solidify his position within Texas’ deep-red Christian political milieu, where he has remained ever since.

Turner is an associate pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church, a political force in Texas that has counted numerous statewide elected officials as congregants. Jack Graham, the church’s senior pastor, prayed over Trump at an event in October and praised his electoral victory from the pulpit in November. Turner’s skepticism about government assistance has found its way into his sermons there, where he has derided the “perverse incentives created by the government and the welfare system, which in turn creates an epidemic of fatherlessness in our country.”

Turner or his political staffers also used campaign money to attend three conferences held by WallBuilders, an organization that seeks “to reveal the historical truths” about the “Christian foundation of our nation,” campaign finance records show. In 2016, Turner gave a $10,000 gift to WallBuilders from his campaign account.

Turner’s allies on the Christian far right also include Ziklag, a secretive network of ultrawealthy Christian families and religious influencers that support Trump. As ProPublica reported, Ziklag has raised millions of dollars as part of a larger mission to help Christian leaders “take dominion” over key areas of American society, from education and business to media and government. This year, Ziklag spent millions of dollars to mobilize Republican-leaning voters in swing states despite being a tax-exempt charity that isn’t allowed to intervene in politics. (A lawyer for Ziklag previously told ProPublica that the organization does not endorse candidates for political office.)

In June 2019, Turner and his wife, Robin, attended a private Ziklag conference at the Broadmoor luxury resort in Colorado Springs, Colorado, according to photos of the event posted by an attendee. At the time, Turner was working in the first Trump administration as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, where he served as a public salesman for the opportunity zones initiative. Turner has praised the program as a way to improve neighborhoods with high poverty and unemployment rates. Previous reporting by ProPublica found that the program was exploited by wealthy, politically connected investors, which drew scrutiny from members of Congress.