Democrats on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs implored Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), not to support reported steep cuts to his department.
The Trump Administration is considered reducing HUD’s budget by more than $6 billion to $40.5 billion in fiscal 2018, according to a report in the Washington Post. The proposal would include a cut of $1.3 billion – nearly 70 percent – in the public housing repair budget.
The lawmakers called the proposed cuts “unconscionable,” saying they would be devastating for those that rely on the programs offered. They would also contradict Carson’s testimony to the Banking Committee during his Jan. 12 confirmation hearing.
Carson told the committee at the hearing that reducing agency budgets by 10 percent was too steep, the senators wrote in the letter. Carson testified that he supported only a 1 percent across-the-board spending cut, and that it would be “cruel and unusual punishment to withdraw these programs before you provide an alternative route.”
“You testified to your understanding of the real impacts that substandard housing have on the health and opportunities of children and their families, in particular how it is far more costly to ignore lead hazards than to spend the money to abate them,” the letter said. “If this reported budget stands, you will most certainly be presiding over an unprecedented attack on the health of some our most vulnerable Americans. It cannot stand and, if you are to remain true to the testimony you gave under oath, it must not.”
The letter was signed by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the committee’s ranking member, and Sens. Jack Reed (D-RI), Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Mark R. Warner (D-VA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV).