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STATEMENT: Housing Implications of Trump’s Disparate Impact Executive Order

  • Writer: Alliance for Housing Justice
    Alliance for Housing Justice
  • Apr 24
  • 2 min read

Updated: Apr 30

Trump’s so-called "RESTORING EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY AND MERITOCRACY" Executive Order on the disparate impact standard is a blueprint for legalized discrimination. It tells federal agencies to ignore outcomes—no matter how unequal.

AHJ Statement on Trump disparate impact order "RESTORING EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY AND MERITOCRACY

On March 23, 2025, Trump ordered federal agencies to abandon enforcement of the disparate impact standard—a civil rights tool that’s helped renters fight policies that appear neutral on the surface, but harm communities of color, women, low-income tenants, and other protected classes.

For decades, this standard has allowed tenants, survivors, and communities of color to fight back against hidden but devastating forms of housing discrimination.

It gave people recourse against zoning laws that excluded people of color, renter screening practices that hurt Black renters, or evictions that punish domestic violence survivors for calling 911.

This Executive Order aims to rip all that away, telling vulnerable renters “you’re on your own.”

The administration is attempting to overrule the other branches of government. An Executive Order cannot change existing laws passed by Congress or Supreme Court precedent. In 2015 the Supreme Court upheld the use of the disparate impact theory in the Fair Housing Act (FHA), finding it is what Congress intended. This Executive Order attempts to change the law without following the constitutional process.

With this order, the administration is giving corporate interests and exclusionary communities a greenlight to discriminate at scale—putting people’s homes and lives at risk—and calling it meritocracy.

We know better.


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