Trump Cancels Biden’s Home Appraisal Discrimination Task Force

The Trump administration ended a Biden-era effort to tackle alleged racial bias in home appraisals, calling it “woke” and claiming it added regulatory burdens that harmed homebuyers.

Guidance specifying how appraisers should handle requests from borrowers to reconsider the value of their homes is among the policies the administration is officially terminating, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs announced Thursday.

“By tearing down these onerous hurdles, we’re freeing professionals from a tangle of red tape that drove up costs, inhibited access to homeownership, and discouraged market participation,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement.

The Biden administration created the HUD-led Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity Task Force in 2021 as part of a broader campaign to attack wealth inequality.

The task force released an action plan in 2022 seeking to bring accountability to the appraisal industry and eliminate algorithmic bias in appraisals, among other things.

The task force, which included the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal banking regulators, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and other federal agencies, was intended to find ways to ensure that Black homeowners got the same consideration of their homes’ values as White homeowners.

The task force’s members issued guidance aimed at increasing equity in home valuations, and several member agencies finalized a rule in 2024 aimed at boosting standards for appraisals using automated valuation models.

But the effort didn’t take into account research from the American Enterprise Institute that called systemic racial disparities in home valuations into question, the administration said Thursday, effectively disbanding the task force.

The Trump administration had previously removed documents related to the PAVE Task Force from HUD’s website.

Ending the task force is part of a push across the administration to deemphasize fair lending issues.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last month told examiners to stop using disparate impact, which relies on statistical evidence to identify discriminatory lending or other practices, in fair lending exams. Other regulators are expected to follow suit following an April executive order signed by President Donald Trump.