HUD director Ben Carson with President Donald Trump. (photo: AP)
Secretary Carson's HUD Budget May Push Thousands of Poor Families Into
Homelessness
By Alec MacGillis, ProPublica
25 August 17
A long-harbored conservative dream the dismantling of the administrative
state is taking place under Secretary Ben Carson.
In mid-May, Steve Preston, who served as the secretary of housing and urban
development in the final two years of the George W. Bush administration,
organized a dinner at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C., for the new
chief of that department, Ben Carson, and five other former secretaries
whose joint tenure stretched all the way back to Gerald Ford. It was an
event with no recent precedent within the department, and it had the
distinct feel of an intervention.
HUD has long been something of an overlooked stepchild within the federal
government. Founded in 1965 in a burst of Great Society resolve to confront
the urban crisis, it has seen its manpower slide by more than half since
the Reagan Revolution. (The HUD headquarters is now so eerily underpopulated
that it cant even support a cafeteria; it sits vacant on the first floor.)
But HUD still serves a function that millions of low-income Americans depend
on it funds 3,300 public-housing authorities with 1.2 million units and
also the Section 8 rental-voucher program, which serves more than 2 million
families; it has subsidized tens of millions of mortgages via the Federal
Housing Administration; and, through various block grants, it funds an array
of community uplift initiatives. It is the Ur-government agency, quietly
seeking to address social problems in struggling areas that the private
sector cant or wont solve, a mission that has become especially pressing
amid a growing housing affordability crisis in many major cities.
Despite its Democratic roots, Republican administrations have historically
assumed stewardship over HUD with varying degrees of enthusiasm among the
departments more notable secretaries were Republicans George Romney and
Jack Kemp, the idiosyncratic champion of supply-side economics and
inner-city renewal.
Now, however, HUD faced an existential crisis. The new presidents
then-chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had called in February for the
deconstruction of the administrative state. It was not hard to guess that,
for a White House that swept to power on a wave of racially tinged rural
resentment and anti-welfare sentiment, high on the demolition list might be
a department with urban in its name. The administrations preliminary
budget outline had already signaled deep cuts for HUD. And Donald Trump had
chosen to lead the department someone with zero experience in government or
social policy the nominee whose unsuitability most mirrored Trumps lack
of preparation to run the country.
This prospect was causing alarm even among HUDs former Republican leaders.
At the Metropolitan Club, George W. Bushs second secretary, Alphonso
Jackson, warned Carson against cutting further into HUDs manpower. (Many
regional offices have shuttered in recent years.) Carla Hills, who ran the
department under President Ford, put in a plug for the Community Development
Block Grant program, noting that Ford had created it in 1974 precisely in
order to give local governments more leeway over how to spend federal
assistance.
The tone was collegial, built on the hopeful assumption that Carson wanted
to do right by the department. We were trying to be supportive, Henry
Cisneros, from the Clinton administration, told me. But it was hard for the
ex-secretaries to get a read on Carsons plans, not least because the
whisper-voiced retired pediatric neurosurgeon was being overshadowed by an
eighth person at the table: his wife, Candy. An energetic former real-estate
agent who is an accomplished violinist and has co-authored four books with
her husband, she had been spending far more time inside the departments
headquarters at LEnfant Plaza than anyone could recall a secretarys spouse
doing in the past, only one of many oddities that HUD employees were
encountering in the Trump era. Shed even taken the mic before Carson made
his introductory speech to the department. Were really excited about
working with She broke off, as if detecting the puzzlement of the
audience. Well, hes really.
The story of the Trump administration has been dominated by the Russia
investigations, the Obamacare repeal morass, and cataclysmic internecine
warfare. But there is a whole other side to Trumps takeover of Washington:
What happens to the government itself, and all it is tasked with doing, when
it is placed under the command of the Chaos President? HUD has emerged as
the perfect distillation of the rights antipathy to governing. If the great
radical conservative dream was, in Grover Norquists famous words, to drown
government in a bathtub, then this was what the final gasps of one
department might look like.
Nov. 9 brought open weeping in the halls of HUD headquarters, a Brutalist
arc at LEnfant Plaza that resembles a giant concrete honeycomb. Washington
was Hillary country, but HUD employees had particular cause for agita. For
years, the department had suffered low morale, and there was the perception,
not entirely unjustified, that it was prone to episodes of self-dealing and
corruption most recently under Jackson, who was scrutinized for awarding
HUD projects to companies run by his friends. But the department had
experienced a rejuvenation in the Obama era, with morale rebounding under
the leadership of his first secretary, Shaun Donovan, an ambitious,
politically savvy housing administrator from New York. While it faced
postrecession budget austerity with its ranks dropping well below 8,000,
from more than 16,000 decades earlier the department made homelessness
reduction a priority. Under Donovans successor, Julián Castro, the former
mayor of San Antonio, HUD embarked on a major initiative to address
residential segregation by requiring cities and suburbs to do more to live
up to the edicts of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Before the election, Hillary Clintons campaign sent over a large team of
policy experts to study up on HUD and prepare to take the baton on these
efforts. The Trump campaign sent one person. And everyone was joking,
Well, hell be gone on November 9, one staffer told me.
So the stricken employees were slightly relieved when Trumps operation
announced a five-person landing team for HUD that included Jimmy Kemp, son
of Jack. There may be hope for us after all, a veteran staffer in one
local HUD office told his colleagues. The semblance of normalcy was
short-lived. In late November, word got out that Trumps choice to run HUD
was Carson. To Twitter wags, the selection was comical in its stereotyping:
Of course Trump would assign the only African American in his Cabinet to the
urban department. But to many HUD employees, the selection of so
ill-qualified a leader felt like an insult. People feel disrespected. They
see Carson and think, Ive been in housing policy for 20 or 30 years, and if
I walked away, I would never expect to get hired as a nurse, said one
staffer at a branch office, who, like most employees I spoke with, requested
anonymity to guard against retribution.
Carson himself had some qualms about running HUD. His close friend Armstrong
Williams, a conservative commentator who was exposed for receiving payments
from George W. Bushs administration to tout Bushs education policies on
air, told The Hill in November that Carson had reservations about such a
job. Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience; hes never run a
federal agency, Williams said. The last thing he would want to do was take
a position that could cripple the presidency. Williams later said his
remark had been misconstrued, but Shermichael Singleton, a young political
operative who worked for Williams and became a top aide on Carsons
campaign, told me that Carsons ambivalence was real. Trumps offer,
Singleton said, had provoked deep questions for Carson about his lifes
purpose. It was, Should I do this? What does it all mean?
In the end, Singleton said, Carson accepted out of a sense of duty that came
from having risen to success from humble origins: raised by a single mother,
a housekeeper, in Detroit. Hes someone born in an environment where the
odds were clearly stacked against him, and he believes by personal
experience that he could do a lot of good for others. Kemp agreed. Carson
accepted, he said, because he wanted to do something about poverty. If
anything, Kemp said, Carson felt more suited to the HUD job than he would to
a health policy one. Being surgeon general or secretary of [health and
human services], I dont think he was fully equipped to do that, having been
a neurosurgeon, Kemp said. In other words, Carson knew how little he knew
about health policy, an awareness he lacked when it came to social policy.
He thought with HUD, Its so clear that our approach to poverty has not
been completely successful and we can do better, and I think I have some
ideas that can be applied, Kemp said.
Underlying this rationale were two related convictions. One was the standard
conservative bias against expertise and bureaucracy, according to which
experts lacked the common sense that an outsider from the private sector
could provide a conviction shared, of course, by the man who nominated
Carson for the job. The other was a more particular conviction that he,
Carson, possessed extra doses of such common sense by virtue of his
biography.
First, though, Carson had to survive his confirmation hearing. The prepping
was intense. His top handler was Scott Keller, a longtime lobbyist who had
served as chief of staff under Jackson and, in that role, become embroiled
in the contracting scandals. Kellers pupil was attentive, and his
performance at the January hearing before the Senate Banking Committee was
judged a relative success by the press, punctuated by Carsons disarming
remark that the panels top Democrat, Sherrod Brown, reminded him of
Columbo. Carsons family and closest aides took him to the Monocle, the
lobbyist hangout on the Hill, to celebrate.
As Carson awaited confirmation, though, a leadership cadre was already
entrenching itself in the administrative offices on the 10th floor of HUD.
The five-person landing team had given way in January to a larger
beachhead team. This was a more eyebrow-raising group. Its few alums from
past GOP administrations were outnumbered by Trump loyalists such as Barbara
Gruson, a Manhattan real-estate broker whod worked for the campaign;
Victoria Barton, the campaigns student and millennial outreach
coordinator; and Lynne Patton, who had worked for the Trumps as an event
planner.
The most influential of the new bunch, it would quickly emerge, was Maren
Kasper. Little-known in housing policy circles, and in her mid-30s, Kasper
arrived from the Bay Area startup Roofstock, which linked investors with
rental properties available for purchase. It partnered with lenders
including Colony American Finance, a company founded by Tom Barrack, the
close Trump associate. This link to Trump, combined with Kaspers background
in one sliver of the housing realm, was enough to win her a place as one of
the minders appointed by the White House to keep an eye on each government
department, a powerful role without precedent in prior administrations.
Kasper, the holder of an MBA from NYUs Stern School of Business, took her
new management role seriously, asserting herself as the final arbiter in the
absence of a confirmed secretary. This led to friction both with career
housing policy experts and with Carson loyalists, notably Singleton, who had
also been hired on. At meetings, Singleton said, Kasper was often
misrepresenting herself as standing in for Carson. I made it clear, You
dont speak for Dr. Carson. She said, Well, the White House
To which
Singleton said he responded, I get what the White House has selected, and I
respect that, but hes the secretary and you need to make sure you
understand that.
That friction lasted only so long. In mid-February, an administration
background check on beachhead team hires turned up an op-ed critical of
Trump that Singleton had written for The Hill before the election. Security
personnel came to notify him that it was time to go.
On March 6, Carson arrived for his first day of work at headquarters. In
introductory remarks to assembled employees, after hed gotten the mic back
from his wife, he surprised many by asking them to raise their hands and
take the niceness pledge.
He also went on a riff about immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, capped by
this: Thats what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity. There
were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked
even longer, even harder, for less. But they, too, had a dream that one day
their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons,
great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.
The assembled employees stifled their reaction to this jarringly upbeat
characterization of chattel slavery. But in HUDs Baltimore satellite, where
many in the heavily African-American office were watching the speech on an
online feed at their desks, the gasps were audible.
Carsons arrival brought with it a reckoning for career employees: Yes, this
person was really in charge. They responded in strikingly different ways.
The most progressive-minded were thrown into a sense of crisis: whether to
hightail it to avoid whatever radical shifts or indignities were in the
offing, or to stay put for the sake of the departments programs and the
millions of people they served.
Then there were the opportunists, those who saw in the vacuum in the upper
ranks, where it was taking unusually long to appoint political deputies, the
chance to claim higher stations than career employees would typically be
able to attain. There were a couple people in some meetings who were
bending over to ingratiate themselves with the transition team, said
Harriet Tregoning, a top Obama appointee in HUDs Community Planning and
Development division, who left in January. For some, it might be their
political leaning. For some, it might be an attempt to gain influence. I saw
it happening even while the Obama people were still in the building.
Finally, there were the clock-punching lifers, the Weebies (We be here
before you got here, and we be here after youre gone), who recognized a
chance to start mailing it in. Its I can now meet people for a drink at
five, said Tregoning. Or, as a supervisor in one branch office put it: As
a bureaucrat, HUDs an easier place to work if Republicans are in charge.
They dont think its an important department, they dont have ideas, they
dont put in changes. Left unsaid: that such complacency was an unwitting
affirmation of the conservative critique of time-serving bureaucrats.
To the extent that the new leadership was providing any guidance at all, it
was often actively discouraging initiative on the part of employees. Shortly
after the inauguration, a directive came down requiring employees to get
10th-floor approval for any contacts outside the building professional
conferences, or even just meetings with other departments. Ann Marie Oliva,
a highly regarded HUD veteran whod been hired during the George W. Bush
administration and was in charge of homeless and HIV programs, was barred
from attending a big annual conference on housing and homelessness in Ohio
because, she inferred, some of the other speakers there leaned left.
The department leadership was also actively slowing down new initiatives
simply by taking a very long time to give the necessary supervisory
approvals for the development of surveys or program guidance. In some cases,
this appeared to be the result of mere negligence and delay. In other cases,
it appeared more willful. For one thing, there was the leaderships strong
hang-up about all matters transgender-related. The 10th floor ordered the
removal of online training materials meant, in part, to help homeless
shelters make sure they were providing equal access to transgender people.
It also pulled back a survey regarding projects in Cincinnati and Houston to
reduce LGBT homelessness. And it forced its Policy Development and Research
division to dissociate itself from a major study it had funded on housing
discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender people the study ended
up being released in late June under the aegis of the Urban Institute
instead.
More upsetting for many ambitious civil servants than the scattered nays
coming from the 10th floor, though, was the lack of direction, period.
Virtually all the top political jobs below Carson remained vacant. Carson
himself was barely to be seen he never made the walk-through of the
building customary of past new secretaries. It was just nothing, said one
career employee. Ive never been so bored in my life. No agenda, nothing to
move forward or push back against. Just nothing.
On May 2, I went to the Watergate to see Carson address an assemblage of the
American Land Title Association, title attorneys in town for a regular
lobbying visit to buttress the crucial support that HUD and others in
Washington provide to the American home-buying machine. I was hoping the
speech would give me a better sense of what Carson had in mind for the
department, which had been hard to elucidate in his few public appearances.
Up to that point, hed made only a few headlines for getting caught in a
broken elevator at a housing project in Miami; for declaring, on a later
visit to Ohio, that public housing should not be too luxurious, a concern
that the elevator snafu had apparently not allayed. This comment had drawn
mockery but genuinely reflected his long-standing outlook on the safety net:
grudging acceptance of its necessity only for those at their most desperate
moments, a phase of dependency that must be as brief as absolutely possible.
This philosophy was frequently intertwined with allusions to the Creator
so frequently that supervisors at one HUD division sent down word to
employees that, yes, their new boss was going to talk a lot about God and
theyd probably better just get used to it.
But Carsons address to the lawyers offered little further clarity on his
agenda. He opened with a neurosurgery joke. He touched on his vague proposal
for vision centers where inner-city kids could come to learn about
careers. He repeated one of his favorite mantras, that the government needs
to make sure people dont get unduly reliant on federal assistance, because
everybody is either going to be part of the engine or part of the load.
And then, in the heart of the speech, where a Cabinet secretary would
normally get down to programmatic brass tacks, came this meandering riff:
You know, governments that look out for property rights also tend to look
out for other rights. You know, freedom of religion, freedom of speech,
freedom of all the things that make America America. So it is absolutely
foundational to our success
On Sunday, I was talking to a large group of
children about whats happening with rights in our country. These are kids
who had all won a Carson Scholar [an award of $1,000 that Carson has
sponsored since 1994], which you have to have at least a 3.75 grade-point
average on a 4.0 scale and show that you care about other people, and I said
youre going to be the leaders of our nation and will help to determine
which pathway we go down, a pathway where we actually care about those
around us and we use our intellect to improve the quality of life for
everyone, or the pathway where we say, I dont want to hear you if you
dont believe what I believe, I want to shut you down, you dont have any
rights. This is a serious business right now where we are, that juncture in
our country that will determine what happens to all of us as time goes on.
But the whole housing concern is something that concerns us all.
A few weeks later, it became clear that the housing concern perhaps did
not concern everyone when the White House released its budget proposal for
HUD. After word emerged in early March that the White House was considering
cutting as much as $6 billion from the department, Carson had sent a rare
email to HUD employees assuring them that this was just a preliminary
figure. But as it turned out, Carson, as a relative political outsider
lacking strong connections to the administration, was out of the loop: The
final proposal crafted by Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney called for
cutting closer to $7 billion, 15 percent of its total budget. Participants
in the Section 8 voucher program would need to pay at least 17 percent more
of their income toward rent, and thered likely be a couple hundred thousand
fewer vouchers nationwide (and 13,000 fewer in New York City). Capital
funding for public housing would be slashed by a whopping 68 percent this,
after years of cuts that, in New York alone, had left public-housing
projects with rampant mold, broken elevators and faulty boilers.
By the time I left, almost 90 percent of our budget was to help people stay
in their homes, Shaun Donovan told me. So when you have a 15 percent cut
to that budget, by definition youre going to be throwing people out of
their homes. Youre literally taking vouchers away from families, youre
literally shutting down public housing, because it cant be maintained
anymore.
The Trump cuts would mean that several programs would be eliminated
entirely, including the home program, which offers seed money for affordable
housing initiatives, and the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant
program that Carla Hills, Fords HUD secretary, had praised to Carson at the
dinner. In New York, CDBG helped pay for, among many things, housing-code
enforcement, the 311 system and homeless shelters for veterans. But the
grants were also relied on in struggling small towns, where they paid for
sidewalks, sewer upgrades and community centers. In Glouster, Ohio, a tiny
coal town that went for Trump by a single vote after going for Obama two to
one in 2012, officials were counting on the grants to replace a bridge so
weak that the school bus couldnt cross it, forcing kids from one part of
town to cluster along a busy road for pickup.
Without those funds, it would just cripple this area, said Nathan Simons,
who administers the grants for the surrounding region. HUD, for all its
shrinking stature and insecurity complex, has over time worked its way into
the fabric of ailing communities throughout the country, a role that has
grown only larger as so much of Middle America has suffered decline, and as
the capacity of so many state and local governments has withered amid
dwindling tax bases and civic disengagement. On my travels through the
Midwest Ive seen how many federally subsidized housing complexes there are
on the edges of small towns and cities, places very far from the Bronx or
the South Side of Chicago. People living in these places rely on a
functioning, minimally competent HUD no less than do the Section 8 voucher
recipients in Jared Kushners low-income complexes in Baltimore. In an age
of ever-widening income inequality, the Great Society department actually
plays an even more vital role than when it was conceived.
But if Carson was troubled by the disembowelment of his department, he
showed no sign of it. Even before the final numbers were out, he had assured
housing advocates that cuts would be made up for by money dedicated to
housing in the big infrastructure bill Trump was promising a notion that
his fellow Republican Kemp, among others, found far-fetched. Im not sure
he understood how that would work, Kemp told me. He was probably repeating
what had been told to him. Then, a day after the budget was released,
Carson downplayed the importance of programs for the poor in a radio
interview with Armstrong Williams, saying that poverty was largely a state
of mind. This, more than anything, seemed to be a crystallization of the
Carson philosophy of HUD: that privation would be solved by the power of
positive thinking, that his own extraordinary rise was scalable and could be
replicated millions of times over.
Two weeks later, Carson went to Capitol Hill to testify on the budget
proposal before congressional panels that would have the final say on the
numbers. With Kasper perched over his shoulder, he told both the Senate and
House committees that they shouldnt get overly hung up on the cuts. We
must look for human solutions, not just policies and programs, he said.
Our programs must reach out and so must our hearts. The budget, he added,
would help more eligible Americans achieve freedom from regulations and
bureaucracy and the ability to govern themselves.
Members of both parties on the panels seemed dubious. Even conservative
Republicans challenged the elimination of CDBG and dismissed Carsons
repeated claim that those and other cuts would be made up for with
public-private partnerships, noting that such partnerships depended on
exactly the public seed money that the budget was jettisoning.
Carson remained unruffled. The cuts were made necessary by the atmosphere
of constraint created by a new paradigm thats been forced on us, he
said, presumably referring to the desire for tax cuts for the wealthy and an
even larger military. The problem that faces us now as a nation will only
be exacerbated if we dont deal with them in what appears to be a harsh
manner, he told the Senate panel. We have to stop the bleeding to get the
healing.
As I watched the hearings, it occurred to me that Carson was the perfect HUD
secretary for Donald Trump, the real-estate-developer president who appears
to care little for public housing. He offered a gently smiling refutation to
accusations from any corner that the departments evisceration would have
grave consequences. After all, Ben Carson had made it from Detroit to Johns
Hopkins without housing assistance, a point of pride in his family. Not to
mention that Carsons very identity theoretically helped inoculate the
administration against charges of prejudice. (Just last week, Carson said,
in the wake of racially tinged violence in Charlottesville, that the
controversy over Trumps support of white supremacists there was blown out
of proportion and echoed the presidents both sides language when
referring to hatred and bigotry.)
Even better, Carson could be trusted not to resist Mick Mulvaneys budget
designs. At one moment in the Senate hearing, Carson noted that Congresss
recent spending package for the current year had given the department more
than it had been expecting. Im always happy to take money, he said,
smiling. Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the committees top Democrat, was
unamused. You have to ask for it first, he said.
Over at headquarters, the department remained rudderless. By June, there was
still no one nominated to run the major parts of HUD, including the Federal
Housing Administration and core divisions such as Housing, Policy
Development and Research, Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, and Public and
Indian Housing, not to mention a swath of jobs just below that level.
(Across the administration, Trump had by the end of June sent barely more
than 100 names to the Senate for confirmation, fewer than half as many as
Obama had by that point in 2009.) Even the stern hand of Kasper was gone
she had been moved to a perch at Ginnie Mae, the arm of HUD that provides
liquidity to federal home ownership programs.
The rank and file (whose department book club reading for the summer was
The Employees Survival Guide to Change) took comfort that the two senior
nominations that had been announced, for deputy secretary and the head of
the Community Planning and Development division, were conventionally
qualified. But appointments further down the ranks were alarming.
There was the administrator for the Southwest region: the mayor of Irving,
Texas, Beth Van Duyne, who had gained notoriety by warning against the
gathering threat of Sharia. She had asked the Texas Homeland Security Forum
to help investigate the legality of an Islamic tribunal in North Texas and
had taken to Glenn Becks talk show to defend the arrest of the Muslim boy
whod brought a homemade clock to school. There was the conservative
commentator John Gibbs, who was hired as a special assistant in Community
Planning and Development. Sample headlines from his columns in The
Federalist: Voter Fraud Is Real. Heres the Proof; If He Really Wants to
Help Blacks, Colin Kaepernick Needs to Put Up or Shut Up.
Then there was Christopher Bourne, the retired Marine Corps colonel whod
served as the policy director of Carsons presidential campaign. He suddenly
showed up as a senior policy adviser in Policy Development and Research.
We dont know what his job is, and as far as I know, he doesnt know what
his job is, said one of his new colleagues.
In the context of such hires, it did not stun many HUD employees as much as
it did the broader public when news broke of the selection of Lynne Patton,
the Trumps event planner (whom tabloids gleefully referred to as a wedding
planner, for her unofficial advisory role on Eric Trumps nuptials), as
regional administrator for New York and New Jersey. It had been plain to see
that Patton had been striving to prove that she was no mere hanger-on. She
had been visiting senior career staff for a crash course on housing policy.
She had helped organize Carsons listening tour trips, for which her event
planning background had prepared her well. And she eagerly tweeted out
defenses of him Lets be clear: You can make life too comfortable for
anyone rich or poor when you do, its a disservice, she declared after
his comments on cushy public housing.
Yes, she would now be the chief liaison from HUD headquarters to a region
with the largest concentration of subsidized housing in the country
including the huge Starrett City complex in Brooklyn co-owned by Trump a
job once held by Bill de Blasio. (Normally, these positions go to people
who know what theyre doing, said one longtime staffer at headquarters.)
And yes, she would, just a few weeks later, respond to liberal criticism of
the departments decision to approve Westchester Countys long-litigated
desegregation plan with a tweet that ended with the words P.S. Im black.
But there were many other things for career employees to worry about that
werent getting as much attention. Such as what Carson had in mind with the
vague incentivized family formation push (which falls under the community
building part of HUDs antipoverty mission) that his team had included in a
briefing for Hill staffers.
Also worrisome was what the new leadership might do with major Obama-era
initiatives, like its desegregation initiative, which, in a 2015 rule called
Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, required local jurisdictions to come
up with ways to reduce segregation or risk losing HUD funding. Carson had
written an op-ed against this during the campaign, calling it a mandated
social engineering scheme and comparing it to a failed socialist
experiment, and Republicans in Congress were dying to kill it, but so far,
the department was still going through the motions with it.
Then there was the mystery of why Carsons family was taking such a visible
role in the department. There was the omnipresent Mrs. Carson. Even more
striking, however, had been the active role of the secretarys second-oldest
son. Ben Carson Jr., who goes by B.J. and co-founded an investment firm in
Columbia, Maryland, that specializes in infrastructure, health care and
workforce development, was showing up on email chains within the department
and appearing often at headquarters. One day, he was seen leaving the
10th-floor office of David Eagles, the new COO, who was crafting a HUD
reorganization to accompany the cuts.
And finally, there was the beginning of what appeared likely to be a stream
of committed career employees quitting. Ann Marie Oliva, the
anti-homelessness director, had met with mistrust from the 10th floor, and
she was startled when she wasnt asked to offer input for a speech Carson
was giving on homeless veterans. She gave notice in late May, prompting
calls from both parties on the Hill saying how sorry they were to see her
go. It is sad, she told me, because its not partisan and it couldve
been different from the beginning.
In early July, Ben Carson went on the next leg of his listening tour:
Baltimore. I was expecting the department to make a big deal of his return
to his longtime home city. But instead, after the poor press coverage from
the previous rounds of community outreach, the itinerary for the first day
was kept private.
I managed to get my hands on the schedule and tagged along with a
photographer. This did not please Carsons entourage, which included, among
others, a high-strung advance man in a bow tie, several security officers,
Candy Carson, Ben Jr. and even his wife. When we arrived at the café where
Carson and his family were having lunch with the mayor of Baltimore, Bow Tie
arranged to have the Carsons rush out through the kitchen area to a back
alley to avoid us. When, at the next stop, I was accidentally allowed into a
meeting that Carson was holding at the citys housing authority, Bow Tie
leaped across the room to eject me. By the next stop, at a tour of the
redevelopment near Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the federal agents
guarding Carson took my picture as I stood on the sidewalk chatting with a
neighbor. By the last stop, dinner with Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan at a
deluxe waterfront restaurant opened by Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank, I was
unsurprised when a Carson aide went to the maître d to report my presence
at the bar. This was Trumpian anti-press spirit taken to a new level:
protectiveness of a government executive to the point of seeking
invisibility.
The day had had its awkward moments. In his visit to the Baltimore HUD
office, Carson caused friction with his suggestion that staff needed to work
harder, comparing the federal work ethic unfavorably with the long hours he
put in as a surgeon. Employees were also struck by how he kept seeming to
look to his wife for cues as he spoke. At a later meeting with public health
officials and researchers, which his wife, son and daughter-in-law also
attended, he kicked things off 15 minutes early and referred to those who
arrived on time as being late. He demurred when asked by the citys former
Health Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein if hed commit the department to an
ambitious reduction in child lead poisoning, saying something to the effect
that he needed to be careful about setting big goals because he worked for
a guy who, if you dont meet your goals, hell so skewer you.
The next morning, Carson held photo ops at two homes that had undergone
HUD-funded lead abatement. At the first home, he looked confused when
workers explained that one of their first steps had been to make sure the
homes doors closed properly in the door jambs. What does that have to do
with lead? asked the nations secretary of housing. The workers explained
that a key to reducing lead paint flaking was to reduce the friction
involved in opening and closing windows and doors. A moment later, a deputy
housing commissioner noted that the work had been made possible in part by
Community Development Block Grants, which Trumps HUD budget eliminated.
Ben Carson Jr. resurfaced at the second days other open event, a visit to a
health fair in East Baltimore. I watched with some amazement as the younger
Carson, clad in tinted aviator shades, circulated among those seeking his
fathers attention. At one point, Carson Jr. was approached by two
entrepreneurs he knew who were hoping to pitch HUD on a proposal to use
public housing as the site to pilot their for-profit venture replacing cash
bail with the relinquishing of guns. Carson Jr. heard them out and then
said, Have you talked to Dad? He then led them over to a clutch of
Carsons HUD aides to make introductions.
A moment later, I asked Carson Jr. why he was taking such an active role on
the Baltimore trip. With anything where we can be helpful, if Dad asks us
to come along and help out, well always do that. Were here to offer
support, whatever we can do, he said. I asked about all the time he was
spending at HUD headquarters. If youre a concerned citizen and youre not
spending time in D.C. trying to actually make sure the right things are
happening, then you probably could do more, he said. You should have
access to your public officials, and if thats not allowed, then theres a
big problem with how the representatives are handling their relationship
with citizens. (Never mind that in this case, the public official was his
own father.)
Later, I asked Ben Carson for a comment on his sons role. Ben Carson Jr.
has visited me, but he has no role at the department, he said through a
spokesman. It was hard to know what to make of it all. On the one hand, it
bore obvious similarities to the proliferation of Trumps and Kushners inside
the White House, with all their attendant business conflicts.
But it was also possible that Ben Jr., and his mom, were so often at his
fathers side for just the reason Ben Jr. claimed, to provide support.
Because it was not hard to see why Carson would feel insecurity. He had been
chosen for a job he had few qualifications for by a man who had few obvious
qualifications for his own job, and he was now being left to his own devices
to defend the dismantling of the department he was supposed to run, with an
underpopulated corps of deputies at his side. (Even by mid-August, the
Office of Public and Indian Housing, which spends tens of billions per year,
did not have any senior political leadership whatsoever.) It was as if the
White House were ensuring that whatever mere starvation failed to accomplish
at HUD, indifference and mismanagement would finish.
The day before, as I waited outside the school building where Carson was
meeting with the public health experts, a young mother, Danielle Jackson,
had come along with her three young daughters. She asked me what was going
on inside, and I told her. She said she herself had been on the waiting list
for a Section 8 voucher for three years, and she seemed to take the fact
that the famous Baltimore doctor was now running HUD as an omen. I hope
something good happens, she said brightly.
Her optimism was shared by Carson himself. When I asked him at a brief press
conference behind one of the lead-abated homes the next morning how things
were going so far for him at HUD, running a big federal department with no
prior experience in government, he shrugged. Its actually a challenge to
inject common sense and logic into bureaucracy, theres no question about
that, he said. But its coming along quite nicely.
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