D.C. Housing Authority Director Brenda Donald will depart the agency this summer, according to a late night announcement from officials.

A notice from the agency published Wednesday night did not cite a reason for Donald’s departure, saying only that DCHA’s board of commissioners has already launched a search for her successor. Donald’s contract expires at the end of September, and it is unclear when exactly Donald will step down — or whether the board will appoint an interim executive director until it hires her replacement.

DCHA’s announcement marks the end of a tumultuous two years for Donald, which saw her grappling with the fallout of a devastating report from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development that declared DCHA unfit to manage its most basic tasks: fairly providing clean, safe, and decent housing to tens of thousands of low-income Washingtonians.

Donald and her staff have scrambled to overhaul many of the agency’s administrative processes in the wake of that report, which also came with a list of dozens of reforms that DCHA’s parent agency is requiring it to make.

She will depart in the middle of significant administrative changes  — including training the entire agency’s staff on new governing procedures the agency adopted only last month, as well as adopting a completely new public housing waiting list system — and it is unclear whether or how her departure will impact those changes.

Her time at the agency was also marked in recent months by revelations that she accepted a $41,000 bonus just weeks after HUD published its scathing report of agency leadership, in which it said Donald needed training in “critical [public housing authority] functions, including the overall role of the Executive Director.”

In public hearings and in private correspondence with the D.C. Council, Donald declined to discuss exactly who approved the bonus; an April hearing led by At-Large Councilmember Robert White, chair of the council’s housing committee, turned contentious when White accused Donald of impeding his inquiry into the matter. A critical letter White sent to Donald last month characterized the bonus as being “paid in a suspect and likely illegal way.”

Donald accepted an interim contract to lead DCHA in June of 2021, shortly after a previous iteration of the D.C. Housing Authority’s board of commissioners ousted Donald’s predecessor. At the time, Donald had come off the heels of a long tenure at D.C.’s troubled Child and Family Services Agency, and had announced in the spring of 2021 she planned to “retire from public life.”

But by August, she received a two-year contract to lead DCHA, despite having no experience in public housing administration or housing development. (Then-executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, Patricia Fugere, likened Donald’s ascension to the post as “sending in an ophthalmologist to do open heart surgery on a dying patient.”)

In DCHA’s Wednesday press release, board chair Raymond Skinner thanked Donald “for her leadership through a challenging and complex time.”

“There are few leaders as accomplished as Director Donald in the hard work of public agency transformation,” Skinner said. “We are fully confident that the transformative
work she launched will continue. There is still much to do, and we remain fully committed to the work ahead.”