Trump Takes Step Backward Against Diversity, African Americans lose
In the first trump administration, the neurosurgeon Ben Carson was the only African American in the president’s cabinet, serving as secretary of the vast department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Once again, while African Americans will be prominent entertainers at the trump inaugural, trump has appointed just one African American, former professional football player Scott Turner, to sit on his new cabinet and once again it will be as HUD secretary.
During the campaign, trump called for an end to programs that African Americans and other minorities under the diversity, equity and inclusion guidelines. He also has backed efforts in various states to limit public education from teaching about critical race theory, a theory that systemic racism undermines the nation’s legal, social and educational programs.
It is impossible to guess why trump believes Blacks can be HUD secretaries but are not qualified for other equally critical cabinet posts. But it is clear that providing affordable housing is not a trump priority.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations for a conservative presidential administration, 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.
In the first trump administration Turner served under Carson, who supported ending an anti-segregation rule, adding work requirements for housing assistance and making it harder to prove housing discrimination.
Trump has a history of animus to federal housing officials, stemming from charges in 1973 that his company racially discriminated at trump housing developments in New York City.
During his first term, trump tried to sharply cut the HUD budget but was blocked by Congress. Trump campaigned last year on a plan to slash federal spending, appointing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” that’s focused on slashing government costs and regulations.
Turner, 52, served as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council from 2019 to 2021. He previously served as state representative for Texas’ 33rd House District, from 2013 to 2017. Before entering politics, Turner played cornerback in the National Football League (NFL) for nine seasons. He has a degree in speech communications from the University of Illinois and received an honorary doctorate from Dallas Baptist University in 2016.
Trump backed another NFL player when he endorsed the legendary running back Herschel Walker for U.S. Senate in 2023. Walker was crushed as he made numerous campaign blunders. Trump has now named Walker as ambassador to the Bahamas, a step down from trump’s earlier plan to appoint Walker as director of a new missile shield defense system.
As head of HUD, Turner would oversee the nation’s efforts to build affordable apartments, protect poor tenants and aid the homeless. HUD’s annual discretionary budget of $72 billion, 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 people.
But his past experience shows that Turner has been at odds with HUD’s goals.
A 2024 ProPublica story found that in his former post as a Texas state legislator, 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.
Turner also called government assistance “one of the most destructive things for the family.” He said welfare is “dangerous, harmful.”
Trump praised Turner for his work under the first trump administration, as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council. Trump praised Turner 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!”
The council was designed to help distressed communities by directing billions of dollars of private investment into so-called “Opportunity Zones” as part of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
Trump’s 2017 tax cut bill expires during his second term. If the Opportunity Zone program is renewed, Turner will likely once again play a role in its implementation. A 2200 study by the Urban Institute funded by JPMorgan Chase found that the program wasn’t fully effective.
“Although there are compelling examples of community benefit, the incentive as a whole is not living up to its economic and community development goals,” the study’s authors wrote. “The incentive’s structure makes it harder to develop projects with community benefit in places with greatest need.”
The success of the program was criticized in a N.Y. Times column by David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy and a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
Wessel said the intent of the 8,764 opportunity zones was to induce the wealthy to invest in poor neighborhoods. But the program became more an opportunity for the wealthy to cut their tax bills while building less than affordable projects.
“It’s a case study on how very hard it is to tweak the tax code to direct money to places and activities that Congress favors without creating windfalls for the rich,” Wessel wrote.
Wessel wrote that Opportunity zone money is funding the revival of downtown Erie, Pa., and affordable housing in South Los Angeles. But much more is funding projects like a Ritz-Carlton hotel and condo complex in downtown Portland, Ore., and a Virgin Hotel in New Orleans. Self-storage facilities, which create hardly any jobs, are sprouting with opportunity zone money. So is luxury student housing in university towns, which are eligible only because college kids show up as poor in census tallies.
After leaving the first trump administration, Turner started a nonprofit that promotes “Christ-centered reading enhancement programs” for children and helps people get driver’s licenses. He also became “chief visionary officer” at the multifamily housing developer JPI.
He also serves as chair of the Center for Education Opportunity at America First Policy Institute, a far-right advocacy group set up by former trump administration staffers devoted to “the primacy of American workers, families and communities.” In that role, Turner has advocated for school vouchers.
Turner, who is involved in the Christian far right, is an associate pastor at the 10,000-member Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas. Jack Graham, the southern Baptist church’s senior pastor, prayed over trump at an event in October and praised trump’s electoral victory from the pulpit in November.
Graham served as Honorary Chairman of the 2015 National Day of Prayer and was a member of President Donald Trump’s Religious Advisory Council. He participated in the National Prayer Service at the Washington National Cathedral the day after the inauguration.
In 1998, the church’s founding pastor, the Rev. Billy Weber, 45, resigned after admitting to his church deacons that he committed adultery.
In May 2022, Graham was named in a report on sex abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. The report said Graham allowed a youth music minister at Prestonwood Baptist Church to be removed quietly without notifying police. The minister, John Langworthy, had admitted to church officials that he had molested at least one student in the late 1980s. Langworthy went on to become a youth music minister at Morrison Heights Baptist Church in Clinton, Miss., where he was later accused of abusing young boys again.
Six African Americans have served as HUD secretaries, starting with Robert Weaver, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966. Weaver was the first African American appointed to a Cabinet-level position. A number of Republican presidents have only selected one Black person to serve in their cabinet. Former HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce was the only Black cabinet official under Ronald Reagan.
In contrast with trump, President Biden named a number of African Americans to major posts, including the first Black and Asian American vice president, a Cabinet more diverse than his predecessors’ and the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
An analysis by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that there remains insufficient Black representation in key federal jobs. The analysis examined the White House’s 139 most senior roles and found that a total of 15, or roughly 11 percent, were held by Black staffers, while Black voters made up 22 percent of Biden’s support in 2020.
Of the 24 members of Biden’s Cabinet, seven are Black, including Vice President Harris, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and budget director Shalanda Young. Others are Latino, Native American or Asian American.
Biden also chose Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, and another Black woman, Karine Jean-Pierre, is the press secretary.
Other African American members of the cabinet include Michael Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; and Shalanda Young, Director of the office of management and budget.
Biden appointed 228 federal judicial appointments, narrowly surpassing the 226 judges appointed by trump in his first term.
Sixty percent of his appointees are Black, Hispanic, Asian, or part of another racial or ethnic minority group, the highest percentage of any president. The total includes 85 women of color, compared with trump’s 5 percent of appointees who were women of color.