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 color, survivors of domestic violence, and people with disabilities. Attorneys were barred from speaking to clients and prohibited from citing any past civil rights case, effectively paralyzing any hope of enforcement from the Fair Housing Act.
“Our job at HUD was to enforce the Fair Housing Act and protect families from discrimination,” said Palmer Heenan, the second HUD whistleblower. “The fact that we were stopped from doing so has nothing to do with helping Americans and everything to do with the politics of this administration. We will be speaking before the Senate because the law is being ignored, and the public ought to know about it.”
After reporting these violations to Congress, Heenan was fired while Osadebe was placed on administrative leave; their termination letters explicitly citing their lawful whistleblowing.
The Senate Banking Committee spotlight forum will take place on Tuesday, January 13th at 3:30 PM in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room G-50. There, Heenan and Osadebe will testify about the Trump Administration’s use of political interference to violate federal law.
“In the middle of a full-blown housing crisis, President Trump and his Administration are making it worse by systematically decimating fair housing enforcement in our country, ignoring civil rights laws, and abandoning Americans facing housing discrimination,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren. “I look forward to hearing from the two brave whistleblowers from HUD who came forward with their stories about this systematic attack on Americans’ civil rights. The Trump administration may have illegally fired them, but it can’t silence the truth.”
“Silencing whistleblowers doesn’t negate laws that provide vital protections for all Americans,” said David Kligerman, Whistleblower Aid Senior Vice President and Special Counsel. “Our clients are coming forward because when fair housing rules are violated families are denied homes, domestic violence survivors are left unprotected, and communities are locked out of housing that is affordable and safe.”
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Whistleblower Aid provides pro bono legal, advocacy, and communications support to government and private sector whistleblowers acting in the public interest. The organization’s lawyers have represented some of the most consequential national security and Big Tech whistleblowers in history, including the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, the anonymous intelligence community whistleblower whose disclosures led to the first impeachment of President Trump, and others.
Whistleblower Aid is a 501(c)(3) organization
