Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent says President Donald Trump may declare a National Housing Emergency this fall, amid a challenging environment for homebuyers.
“Bessent said housing affordability would be a critical leg of Republicans’ 2026 midterm election platform,” Bloomberg News reports. “Bessent declined to list any specific actions the president may take, but he suggested that administration officials are directly studying ways to standardize local building and zoning codes and decrease closing costs.”
Bloomberg also notes, “Housing affordability was a top issue in former Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign against Trump in 2024. She promised tax credits for builders that construct starter homes and $25,000 in down payment assistance for certain buyers.”
Over the weekend, the Associated Press reported that “Trump wants to axe an affordable housing grant that’s a lifeline for many rural communities.”
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“The program has helped build or repair more than 1.3 million affordable homes in the last three decades, of which at least 540,000 were in congressional districts that are rural or significantly rural, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data.”
Some critics question Trump’s focus.
Asked if the housing crisis is so severe Trump should be turning to an emergency declaration, House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters on Tuesday (video below), “It’s not clear to me what emergency powers Donald Trump seeks to utilize or what his solution would be in terms of dealing with the housing and affordability issue that is plaguing far too many Americans across the country.”
“Donald Trump promised that he would lower housing costs on day one. Here’s a suggestion for the Trump administration. Try to legislate. And maybe we can find common ground in order to get something done on behalf of the American people. The notion that Donald Trump and the administration would use emergency powers to address a housing crisis that has existed in this country since day one of his administration, and he’s done nothing about is a joke.”
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Leader Jeffries went on to warn that, “like many of the other efforts at utilizing emergency power, including most recently, the effort to use a so called emergency to justify the Trump tariffs, which are hurting everyday Americans, it will ultimately be struck down in court.”
Wall Street investment banker Evaristus Odinikaeze responded, saying that “Trump’s ‘day one’ promise on housing turned into a day-one disaster. He hasn’t introduced a single serious housing bill. No rent relief. No expansion of affordable housing. No mortgage protection. Just empty tweets, tariff tantrums, and more crony giveaways. Leader Jeffries is right that he should try legislating instead of litigating, retaliating, and dominating. That’s how we fix housing, not by blaming cities while inflating real estate bubbles with failed policies.”
Indeed, some say Trump has no power to unilaterally declare housing standards.
Georgetown University Professor of Law Victoria Nourse, one of the nation’s leading scholars of Congress, the separation of powers, and statutory interpretation, according to her bio, remarked: “POTUS has no constitutional authority to impose uniform building codes on the states.”
Some critics say the current housing crisis is actually being made worse by Trump’s own actions.
The Atlantic’s James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” remarked, “Trump jacked up tariffs on lumber and steel, raising the cost of home construction. Now he’s thinking about declaring a national emergency to remedy a problem he’s exacerbated.”
Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz framed it this way:
“1. Increase cost of materials through tariffs on steel and lumber. 2. Increase cost of labor through immigration enforcement. 3. ‘Declare a national housing emergency.'”
Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, asked, “Is ‘national emergency’ some sort of magical incantation that negates all laws and the Constitution?”
Watch the video below or at this link.
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