In the guise of combating fraud, HUD may be putting thousands of veterans and other vulnerable Americans at greater risk of losing their housing.
Imagine a landlord wants to evict a tenant solely to get around legal limits on rent increases. So he uses the tenant’s emotional support animal as a pretext for eviction. Until recently, the Fair Housing Act and decades of HUD policy provided clear protections for people in that situation.
Now, HUD has given landlords a new tool to challenge those protections. According to former HUD official Eric Hein, the change could contribute to thousands of additional veterans becoming homeless.
In 1988, Congress strengthened the Fair Housing Act to protect Americans who face housing discrimination because of disabilities. Republican President Ronald Reagan hailed the legislation as “the most important legislation in twenty years” and invited one of its supporters, Congressman John Lewis, to stand beside him at the Rose Garden signing ceremony.
Nearly four decades later, a very different president—and a very different kind of Republican—has taken a markedly different approach.
On May 22, 2026, the Trump Administration, through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, revised regulations governing emotional support animals and reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. For years, HUD recognized that children, veterans and others with legitimate disabilities could be entitled to emotional support animals as a reasonable accommodation under the Fair Housing Act.
The new policy narrows those protections to licensed service animals only and shifts the balance toward housing providers seeking to deny renewals or new tenants.
HUD argues the changes are intended to reduce fraud. Fraud should be addressed. But if that is truly the goal, the better approach would be to scrutinize questionable certification practices rather than weaken protections for people with legitimate disabilities.
Because Trump has spent much of his public life settling scores, it is reasonable to wonder whether the new regulations are motivated, at least in part, by a longstanding grudge. In the 1970s, he was a defendant in a Fair Housing Act lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against his family’s real estate business. In United States v. Trump, his attorney, the notorious Roy Cohn, generated far more heat than light, and the Trump organization ultimately agreed to a federal consent decree requiring compliance with fair housing laws.
To be clear, HUD has not changed the law. Only Congress can do that.
What HUD has changed is enforcement. The message to landlords is that the federal government is less likely to pursue these cases and less likely to support local agencies and advocacy organizations that do.
That matters.
Some landlords may view the change as permission to deny accommodations or pursue evictions they would have previously avoided. Tenants, meanwhile, may wrongly conclude they no longer have rights.
They do.
The Fair Housing Act remains in force, and landlords who violate it remain subject to significant civil liability. Courts—not HUD policy memos—ultimately determine what the law requires.
Fortunately, California provides additional protections that often exceed federal standards. State and local fair housing agencies can still investigate disability discrimination claims involving emotional support animals. What has changed is that HUD may no longer reimburse agencies for that work.
For tenants facing discrimination, the strongest remedy has always been enforcement through the courts. Unfortunately, litigation is expensive and uncertain, placing the greatest burden on those least able to bear it.
President Trump cannot repeal the Fair Housing Act through regulation. But by weakening enforcement, his administration has made it harder for some of the nation’s most vulnerable people to vindicate rights Congress intended them to have. Until Congress, the courts, or a future administration acts, many disabled Americans may pay the price.
Cherie Dimmerling is Executive Director of the Fair Housing Council of Greater Sacramento and the former Director of the Fair Housing Council of Northeast Ohio. She sits on the Advisory Board of The Salvation Army and The Sacramento Historical Society.
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