GAO Finds HUD Cut 29 Percent of Its Workforce and Ended 21 Percent of Its Contracts, Then Did Not Answer the Auditors

GAO found that the Department of Housing and Urban Development cut its workforce by about 29 percent between December 2024 and December 2025, from about 8,800 employees to about 6,300. The report, GAO-26-108442, was released on October 14, 2026.

HUD also ended 144 of its 675 active contracts in 2025, about 21 percent, worth $367 million. And through most of the audit, the department didn’t answer GAO’s questions. GAO says HUD did not respond to most of its requests for information and didn’t provide documents to back up the initiatives it had announced in public. GAO had to rebuild the picture from federal personnel, contract and grant databases, and from interviews with 20 organizations that deal with HUD.

Who left

3,188 people left HUD in 2025. Of those, 2,296, about 72 percent, went through a deferred resignation program, either HUD’s own or the government-wide offer. The other 892 left by retirement, transfer, firing or other routes. HUD hired 193 people over the same twelve months.

The departures skewed senior. More than half of those who left had at least 10 years at HUD. Forty-one percent had more than 20. Deferred resignation was voluntary, and long-serving staff close to retirement had the most reason to take it. A department that loses its most experienced people this way doesn’t choose which offices they leave from.

That showed up in the interviews. Nearly all of the 20 organizations, six national groups and 14 from site visits, told GAO that experienced HUD contacts had left. They described confusion about who now handled their programs, slower replies and funding disruptions. GAO notes that the interviews can’t be generalized, but the pattern was consistent.

HUD runs 54 field offices and 10 regional offices. GAO found no field office reorganization started in 2025. On June 24, 2026, HUD announced it would fold its Kansas City, Missouri, field office into the regional office across the state line in Kansas City, Kansas.

Contracts and grants

Most of the ended contracts, about 81 percent, were for professional or IT services. Of the $367 million in total value, about $291 million had already been obligated, about 9 percent of HUD’s contract obligations for the year. Ending a contract after the money is obligated doesn’t always return all of it; some goes to work already done and to settlement costs.

Grants moved less than the headlines of 2025 suggested. GAO looked at 68 grant programs that made new awards at some point from fiscal 2016 to 2024. In fiscal 2025, 32 of them made new awards. Of those 32, 21 made fewer new awards than their median year over 2016 to 2024. The median award got larger, rising from about $123,900 to about $178,500 in 2025 dollars. Fewer, bigger grants is one reading. GAO doesn’t say whether that was policy or a side effect of a thinner staff processing applications.

A department that stopped answering

GAO audits rest on access. Federal law gives the Comptroller General the right to an agency’s records, and agencies usually respond, even when they dispute the findings. HUD gave GAO technical comments on the draft, which GAO worked in. It didn’t respond to most of GAO’s requests during the work itself, and it didn’t discuss or document the initiatives it had announced.

So GAO did what it could with the government’s own data, the same approach it used when it checked DOGE’s savings claims against federal records. Without HUD’s files, GAO can count what changed. It can’t say why, or what the changes did to program results.

The report makes no recommendations. It was requested by Senator Elizabeth Warren, the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, Representative Maxine Waters, the ranking member of House Financial Services, and Senators Cory Booker, Alex Padilla, Tina Smith and Raphael Warnock, all Democrats. The administration’s case for the cuts is that HUD was overstaffed and its contracts were bloated. The department hasn’t put that case to GAO in documents.

What Congress can use it for

HUD’s budget runs through the Transportation-HUD appropriations bill, which hasn’t been enacted for fiscal 2027. The department is open on the stopgap law that runs to December 11. Appropriators writing the full-year bill now have a count of who left, which contracts ended and which grant programs went quiet. What they don’t have is HUD’s account of why.