'Deeply concerning': Experts alarmed by Trump's newest confirmed appointee

After reports that the Trump administration has gutted its enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, civil rights and housing advocates are warning that the president’s newly confirmed appointee to lead the office responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws will seek to further erode civil rights protections.

On Tuesday, the US Senate confirmed Craig Trainor—as part of a group of 107 nominees to various executive posts—to be assistant secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The office is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws, including laws that prohibit housing discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, and sex.

Upon his confirmation, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) described Trainor as someone “with a history of discriminatory practices.”

Since February, Trainor has worked as the acting assistant secretary of the Department of Education’s (DOE) Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The National Fair Housing Alliance said that during his tenure in the Education Department, Trainor “has overseen the illegal weaponization of the Department’s civil rights authorities for purposes contrary to the advancement of civil rights.”

Demetria McCain, the director of policy at the LDF, says “Trainor advanced a radical and inaccurate view of civil rights law that was blocked by federal courts.”

In February, Trainor sent a “Dear Colleague” letter describing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives pursued by colleges and K-12 schools as “illegal” forms of discrimination against white and Asian students and threatened federal funding for those that did not comply and reverse the policies.

The LDF sued the DOE in April, calling the effort an attempt “to prohibit and chill lawful efforts to ensure that Black students are afforded equal educational opportunities,” and arguing that the DOE was “intentionally discriminating against Black students through its efforts to defund federal grantees based on erroneous facts and interpretations of law.” Three federal courts sided with the LDF later that month and blocked Trainor’s office from enforcing the demands in the letter.

In the meantime, the OCR also paused thousands of civil rights investigations into discrimination based on race, gender, national origin, and disability. Employees told ProPublica that they declined to open new investigations and were told to stop communicating with students, families, and schools involved in cases launched during previous administrations. One attorney said he and his colleagues had “been essentially muzzled.”

Trainor would later unpause some investigations related to disabilities, but others remained on hold. Meanwhile, he launched new “discrimination” investigations, including one highly publicized case against Denver Public Schools for installing an all-gender restroom, which Trainor argued “appears to directly violate the civil rights of the district’s female students.”

In March and April of 2025, the OCR dismissed civil rights cases at an unprecedented rate of 89-91%, compared to the historic average of around 70%. Meanwhile, the number of cases in which violations were found dropped precipitously, from 200 per month during the Biden years to around 50-60 in April.

“Under the Trump administration, the OCR moved away from addressing systemic discrimination toward a narrower enforcement agenda aligned with the administration’s political priorities,” read an August report from the human rights group ImpACT International. “For instance, investigations into racial disparities in school discipline—which disproportionately affected Black students and those with disabilities—were deprioritized or outright abandoned. Simultaneously, the OCR shifted intense focus toward investigating transgender students, particularly targeting their participation in girls’ and women’s sports.”

Mike Pillera, a former OCR attorney, said that under the new administration, “OCR is the most useless it’s ever been, and it’s the most dangerous it’s ever been. And by useless, I mean unavailable. Unable to do the work.”

In June, following Trainor’s nomination for the Fair Housing Office, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) grilled the official, noting that in 2021, he wrote an article titled “George Floyd and the Rise of the Rival Constitution,” in which he described the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the catalyst for an “all-embracing ideology of diversity” that threatens the “actual Constitution,” which he said he preferred.

Warren also noted that while serving on the New York Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, Trainor dismissed well-documented evidence of discriminatory evictions of minority tenants by New York landlords, suggesting that while it may have occurred “many decades in the past,” it was not a problem today.

“It is deeply concerning that the Senate confirmed Craig Trainor to be the administration’s top fair housing official without even holding an individualized vote, much less scrutinizing his troubling record,” said NFHA Executive Vice President Nikitra Bailey. “This administration has already attacked fair housing enforcement in many ways.”

The appointment of Trainor to oversee the Office of Fair Housing comes just weeks after half a dozen whistleblowers told the New York Timesthat “Trump’s political appointees had made it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs.”

The majority of staff were axed or reassigned by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the early months of Trump’s administration, leaving a skeleton crew to pursue fair housing cases. Staff, meanwhile, brought forward emails showing that Trump appointees systematically obstructed investigations.

Like in the DOE’s civil rights office, hundreds of housing discrimination investigations were frozen, and employees were cut off from communication with clients who alleged mistreatment by landlords and banks. Meanwhile, senior officials pressured employees to stop pursuing cases related to decades-old discrimination precedents, such as appraisal bias and redlining that impact the ability of nonwhite families to sell and purchase homes.

Two of the whistleblowers, attorneys Palmer Heenan and Paul Osedebe, reported being fired shortly after the Times report and their complaint to Warren were made public.

Warren joined in criticizing the confirmation of Trainor, whom she noted “is currently being sued by the NAACP for civil rights violations at the Department of Education.” His confirmation, she said, “comes just one week after the Trump administration fired and suspended whistleblowers who shared documents with my office describing the administration’s systematic attack on civil rights protections in housing in the office Trainor will now lead.”