The Cynical Use of the Government Shutdown to Complete the Decimation of the Federal Civil Service: Reporting from Bloomberg CityLab with regard to HUD and EducationWeek with respect to the Department of Education captures how the Trump Administration has attempted to leverage the ongoing shutdown of the federal government to justify mass layoffs of dedicated civil servants. These reductions in force (RIFs) come on the backs of prior rounds of RIFs that preceded the shutdown, firings, and attempts to make working conditions so miserable that workers felt compelled to participate in the Deferred Resignation (or Fork in the Road) Program. Although there have been successes in litigation filed to challenge some of these actions, the work of decimating the federal civil service has largely achieved the objectives of the Trump Administration and of the architects of Project 2025. For people who believe in the imperative of government action to end poverty and to forge a racially and economically just society, there is now a need to come to terms with the fact that – at some point – we are going to have to undertake the herculean task of rebuilding the federal civil service. Although there are aspects of what the Trump Administration has dismantled that surely ought to be restored, largely as-is, we should also use this time to think creatively about how a rebuilt administrative state might be structured differently to best take on the challenges of our time, from combatting climate change to building social housing on a massive scale to guaranteeing a quality education as a basic right to enforcing our non-discrimination laws.
Other news and resources
In Case You Missed It – Housing Mobility Programs in the U.S. 2025: On October 2, 2025, PRRAC and our partners at Mobility Works published Housing Mobility Programs in the U.S. 2025, the first update to our flagship report on the state of housing mobility since 2022. Learn more about what state, regional, and local mobility programs are doing to increase access to opportunity here.
NHLP Resource on Federally-Assisted Tenants’ Rights During the Government Shutdown: As the shutdown of the federal government enters its third week, it is important for tenants in federally-assisted housing to know their rights. This helpful memorandum from our partners at the National Housing Law Project is a great resource for tenants, organizers, legal services lawyers, public housing authorities, and federally-assisted landlords who want to understand the current situation.
Building Housing on Top of Public Libraries: Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute has an interesting piece on attempts to build multifamily housing – both affordable and market-rate – on the same sites as public libraries.
