Whistleblower Aid clients continue their fight to ensure that every American is kept safe
Washington, D.C., January 12, 2026 – Two career civil rights attorneys retaliated against for exposing the Trump Administration’s systematic dismantling of fair housing will testify Tuesday before the Senate Banking Committee in a spotlight forum on unlawful retaliation and flagrant civil rights violations at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Palmer Heenan and Paul Osadebe, Whistleblower Aid clients and former attorneys in HUD’s Office of Fair Housing, warned of Trump Administration officials deliberately crippling enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, one of the nation’s most fundamental civil rights law, by blocking investigations, branding civil rights enforcement as unimportant, and ignoring and circumventing legal precedent.
“We are coming forward because enforcing the Fair Housing Act is not something that is optional, it’s the law,” said Paul Osadebe, one of the HUD whistleblowers. “With thousands of fair housing cases being stalled or flat-out shut down, the communities the law is intended to protect are being abandoned by the government that promised them these rights.”
Since January of last year, countless fair housing and civil rights cases have been terminated due to sweeping staffing cuts and political interference from the Trump Administration. This has left HUD attorneys unable to investigate discrimination against families, communities of...
Host Jonathan Porter welcomes Husch Blackwell partners Rebecca Furdek and Todd Gee back to the podcast to discuss the growing amount of enforcement under various state-level False Claims Acts, and ...