A federal civil rights investigation launched by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development into whether Texas state officials steered federal disaster relief grants to whiter, wealthier areas is now over.
HUD closed the case investigating the Texas General Land Office’s practices in its distribution of disaster funding, according to a press release Wednesday from HUD. According to the agency, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity found that the Texas GLO did not engage in racial discrimination when making grant awards.
The move is the latest in a tug-of-war on policy spanning across three presidential terms to the present day. Former President Joe Biden reinstated a fair housing rule that was scrapped by the Trump administration during his first term.
“The Biden administration politicized enforcement of federal civil rights law and deprived rural communities of essential disaster mitigation funds,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement. Turner was a Plano, Texas-based pastor prior to his confirmation in February for the HUD secretary chair.
The findings contradict the initial 2022 probe, which found that Texas didn’t allocate any of the $1 billion in federal funds it received to protect communities from future disasters to any of the high-risk neighborhoods in Houston that experience regular flooding, as previously reported in The Real Deal, with the agency going on to state that excluding Black and Hispanic communities was discriminatory.
The focus on Houston began with Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts in 2017 and several costly storms in the following years that inundated the city. No other state adopted Texas’ method of distributing the funds, according to the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity under the prior administration. Without Texas’ discriminatory criteria, nearly four times as many Black residents and more than twice as many Hispanic residents would have benefited from the grants, according to the agency.
The state denied claims of discrimination and appealed HUD’s findings, arguing that the Texas General Land Office administered the federal grant program based on HUD approval. The state pointed out that its plan was approved two years ago and even called HUD’s objections “politically motivated.”
Turner agreed, publishing an op-ed in the magazine National Review Jan. 19, outlining a new rule proposed by the agency to drop use of “disparate-impact theory” in fair housing cases. According to a Library of Congress definition published in 2025, disparate-impact discrimination is identified “when a seemingly neutral policy or action causes a disproportionate and unjustified negative harm to a group, regardless of intent.”
HUD’s statement reiterated that in the Texas GLO case, the state agency effectively used a race-neutral competition standard for disaster mitigation projects.
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