Former federal housing officials are weighing in on a new dynamic that has quickly emerged in this fall’s race for the White House.
Marcia Fudge, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the Biden administration, has publicly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. This follows the seismic political news that President Joe Biden will not seek reelection.
Fudge, selected by Biden to assume control of HUD roughly one month after his 2020 election victory against former President Donald Trump, offered thoughts on the changed dynamic for the presidential race to independent news outlet The 19th.
She was described as “holding back tears” upon hearing the news that Biden would not seek renomination for the presidency. Fudge served as a cabinet secretary in the Biden administration before resigning earlier this year. She has since served as a co-chair for the 2024 Biden-Harris campaign.
“It’s a very, very sad time,” Fudge said. She went on to say that she was proud of Biden’s time in office and “feels good” about his decision to hand off the race to the vice president.
“It’s the right thing for our country and our democracy,” Fudge told the outlet. “I would’ve been disappointed if he had not done it. I know there were those for whom part of the dilemma was, ‘What are they gonna do with her (Harris)?’ Whatever it takes, I’m all in.”
Speaking to The New York Times about the direction that Democrats will seek to take their presidential campaign, Fudge recalled Harris’ earlier political career as a prosecutor and later as the attorney general of California.
“She is a former prosecutor and [Trump] is a convicted felon,” Fudge told the Times. “If there ever was a huge choice, this is it.”
Fudge also revealed to the Times that she had spoken directly with Harris on Sunday.
Additionally, former HUD Secretary Julián Castro, who served in the Obama administration, appears to have thrown his support behind Harris, writing on social media platform X that “Kamala Harris has been an excellent vice president, an electric campaigner, and is the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump.”
But Fudge and Castro are not the only former HUD secretaries who have endorsed the standard bearer of their party. Former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, one of only six cabinet officials that served from the beginning of Trump’s term in office to the end, offered his support for his former boss during a rally late last year in Iowa.
“Donald Trump believes in our freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms,” Carson said in October 2023, according to reporting from The Hill. “So we can fix our country, and we can make America great again. And President Donald J. Trump is the person to do that.”
On X this week, Carson briefly weighed in on the selection of Harris after questioning the health of Biden, only saying that “DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is alive and well.”
Trump has also picked up endorsements from other former housing staffers during his term in office. These include former official and Carson adviser John Gibbs, along with former HUD regional administrator Lynne Patton, who herself was barred from government employment for four years by the Office of Special Counsel for purportedly using her official government position to create a political video for the 2020 Republican National Convention.
