What do you do?
I’m fairly high up at HUD, still work there, and I’m absolutely terrified about what the planned staffing cuts mean for the literally millions of vulnerable people on rental assistance. I help manage some of HUD’s programs. This involves making sure funding is available, fixing problems when something doesn’t work right, and making/updating clear policy so program participants across the country know how it works and have a similar experience.
How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?
I intended to be a social worker but stumbled into the housing field after college and worked for nonprofits at first. I started noticing things that weren’t working well – why were there always huge waiting lists for affordable housing? Why was it so hard to build more? I learned that the answer to these questions was public policy, and it sounds silly but it was a job I never knew existed. I wanted to make things better, so I went back to school for a Master’s in Public Policy, and joined federal service wanting to combine my practical experience in the field and what I’d learned in grad school to make the best use of the scarce resources we have.
What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?
I love that my work enables me to be creative, use data analysis to inform good policy, and that it makes a difference for people in need of affordable housing. It’s fulfilling for me, every day brings a new challenge.
What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?
People really rely on these programs so it’s important that they’re predictable and fair, and that’s what my work is meant to ensure. HUD in total provides rental assistance to around 5 million households nationwide, many of whom are seniors or others on fixed income who literally could not afford an apartment on their own. It means that I get to live in a country where people who can’t afford a market-rate apartment still have options to find a home they can be proud of. Resources might be scarce and waiting lists are long, but for the people who have stable housing they can afford, it makes a huge difference in every other aspect of their life and I’m so glad to be a small part of that.
What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it’s all going to impact your work and your mission?
I think above all I want people to know how hard my team works and how fragile things actually are. We’re working with software from the 90’s and it’s a lot of manual work, and there’s a lot of (necessary) oversight. If the proposed cuts at HUD happened, it wouldn’t be long before payments stopped coming and thousands of people were evicted. Almost all of us could go make more money in the private sector, but we stay because it’s important to keep people housed.
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