Waste, fraud, and abuse

 

Elizabeth Warren is working: GAO Investigations

The U.S. Government Accountability Office plans to scrutinize changes at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including any led by the White House or Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, according to a letter sent to Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The GAO, Congress' nonpartisan research arm, told Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Mark Warner it will review the SEC's recent efforts to cut staff, end leases and consolidate its work.

  MSN

We'll see how far they get.  Who's in charge at the GAO?

The SEC has undergone big changes since President Donald Trump took office and Republicans took over the agency, scrapping high-profile cases, reorganizing staff and reining in enforcement staff's ability to kick off formal probes.

[...]

The SEC's budget is set by Congress, but the funding comes from transaction fees imposed on the financial sector and not taxpayer dollars, according to the agency.

[...]

The commission is also facing an exodus, with hundreds of staff taking resignation offers.

So, the "investigation" could take years, right?

The top watchdog agency on Capitol Hill said Tuesday that it will investigate Trump administration cuts to a key program at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

[...]

Warren was joined on the request by fellow Democratic U.S. Sens. Alex Padilla, of California, Rapahel Warnock, of Georgia, Tina Smith, of Minnesota, and Cory Booker, of New Jersey.

[...]

The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s investigation into cuts to cuts to fair housing enforcement at HUD came at the request of a group of lawmakers led by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

[...]

Plans by Musk and Trump to “cut 80% of HUD’s fair housing staff would harm families across the country who have experienced housing discrimination, whether it be a landlord refusing to make repairs to accommodate someone’s disability, or a Black family whose home is being appraised lower than it should. I look forward to closely following the results of GAO’s investigation,” Warren [said].

[...]

In a March 28 letter, the watchdog office confirmed that the request was “within the scope of its authority,” and that “staff with the required skills will be available shortly to initiate an engagement.”

  Mass Live

"Shortly".

Looking for Lenin

 

Cleaning up Trump's mess

UPDATE:

Deconstructing America as fast as they can

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction to stop the Department of Housing and Urban Development from implementing a rule that would have made it harder to bring discrimination claims under the Fair Housing Act.

The rule, set to take effect Monday, would have required plaintiffs to meet a higher threshold to prove unintentional discrimination, known as disparate impact. The new rule — an update to the agency’s 2013 disparate impact rule — would also have given defendants more leeway to rebut the claims.

[...]

The injunction means HUD will be unable to implement the new rule until the legal challenge is resolved.

  Politico

They'll probably take it to the Supreme Court, which they've packed. ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump admin promoting white nationalist and conspiracy websites

An arm of the Justice Department regularly sent summaries and links to articles from an online white nationalist publication over the last year, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. In addition, similar newsletters sent to the Labor Department, ICE, HUD, and the Department of Homeland Security included links and content from hyperpartisan and conspiracy-oriented publishers.

In daily bulletins about media coverage for the department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the nation’s immigration courts, a government contractor sometimes included links to VDare, an anti-Semitic and racist site whose editor has claimed that American culture is under threat from nonwhite peoples. That contractor, a Dade City, Florida–based company called TechMIS, also compiles newsletters for other agencies, including the Department of Labor, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Office of Housing and Urban Development.

[...]

[A]n EOIR [Executive Office for Immigration Review] press secretary said that the Department of Justice “condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms” and that the post should not have been included. A former senior DOJ official said that the email in question was “generated by a third-party vendor that utilizes keyword searches to produce news clippings for staff. It is not reviewed or approved by staff before it is transmitted.” “That’s absolutely incorrect,” said TechMIS CEO Steven Mains, adding that EOIR was the most specific and particular of the company’s clients. The agency’s staff would review its work “down to misspellings” if there was anything wrong before sending, he said.

[...]

“It shows an increasing effort to politically charge the perspective of immigration judges who are being tasked with being neutral judges who apply the law,” said the employee, who was not authorized to speak on the matter publicly. “The administration has been taking steps to make the court a political weapon in various ways, some big, some small, this is just one example.”

[...]

On Friday afternoon, immigration court employees were informed that they would no longer receive the briefing and were told to subscribe to a DOJ-wide briefing if they were interested. This instruction was sent hours after BuzzFeed News reached out to DOJ officials for comment on the discovery of the additional VDare links.

[...]

In a story posted on New American and circulated to ICE staffers earlier this month, an author references an “invasion” of immigrants at the border. “Border patrol officials have said as much for months, but House and Senate Democrats, who hope to keep illegals coming in to swell the ranks of the party, have ignored them,” the post read.

Shawn Neudauer, a spokesperson for ICE, said the agency sends the clippings to a subset of its employees. The news briefing is delivered through an email service to the employees after the agency receives the brief from the contractor. He said the agency scans the briefings, which also include links to mainstream news outlets, as a way to understand how they are being written about online.

“Most federal agencies monitor news and clipping services capture headlines from web-published stories,” he said in an email. “It says absolutely nothing about the value of the material received — only noting whatever source said whatever ‘thing’ — which happens to be fairly useful in combating false narratives about the critical work our special agents and officers do every day.”

  Buzzfeed

Sleazy.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Jesus wept

background

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Ben Carson is still an arrogant asshole idiot

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:







He's oblivious.  Very much like Trump himself, Carson seems to believe he's the one making the points.  He's a narcissist.

UPDATE:



UPDATE:

Proving my point:



UPDATE:



Smug, ignorant bastard.

UPDATE:



His house is a monument to himself.

UPDATE:







Jesus wept.

Deconstructing America

A top Department of Housing and Urban Development official is leaving the agency Thursday following disagreements with other members of the Trump administration over housing policy and the White House’s attempt to block disaster-recovery money for Puerto Rico, according to five people with direct knowledge of the situation.

  WaPo

Sadly, it is NOT Ben Carson.

Deputy Secretary Pam Patenaude, second-in-command at the agency helmed by Ben Carson and widely regarded as HUD’s most capable political leader, is said to have grown frustrated by what a former HUD employee described as a “Sisyphean undertaking.”

[...]

She denied that internal conflicts played a role and said she looks forward to spending time with her husband at their home in New Hampshire. “These jobs are all-consuming,” she said. “There are no ulterior motives. I’m not mad at the administration.”

Patenaude was the main administrator running the agency for much of her 16 months as deputy secretary, according to political and career HUD staffers.

She is departing at a critical moment for HUD, as its largely inexperienced political ranks grapple with the fallout of a prolonged partial government shutdown.

The aim of the Trump administration is to deconstruct America. So far, they're doing a great job. They came in with no planning and no knowledge, and a willingness - if not a desire - to burn it all down. I'm currently reading "The Fifth Risk" by Michael Lewis, an accounting of the Trump transition that will astound (and scare) you. I recommend it anyway. (They didn't even send anyone to the agencies they'd be taking over to be shown the ropes.) Here's an NPR synopsis. And here's an interview of Lewis about the book with Preet Bharara.

Back to HUD...

Housing advocates and HUD employees described Patenaude’s departure as a blow to an agency in which the morale of career staffers has deteriorated under Carson.

[...]

Her impending departure, planned before the shutdown began Dec. 22, hurt the agency’s ability to anticipate and plan for the closure. [...] HUD is under fire for not renewing hundreds of expired affordable-housing contracts before the shutdown went into effect, jeopardizing the budgets of property owners and the housing stability of low-income tenants.

[...]

“She knows the HUD building, the issues, the policies and the politics. She was an especially strong and important counterpoint to Secretary Carson’s early lack of knowledge on any of the issues that he was expected to lead on,” said Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

[...]

Last fall, Patenaude expressed concern over the Trump administration’s intervention in disaster-recovery money that Congress had appropriated for Puerto Rico and states hit by hurricanes.

President Trump in late September grew incensed after hearing, erroneously, that Puerto Rico was using the emergency money to pay off its debt, according to two people with direct knowledge of Trump’s thinking.

Trump told then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney that he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico, because he thought the island was misusing the money and taking advantage of the government, according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal deliberations. Instead, he wanted more of the money to go to Texas and Florida, the person said.

“POTUS was not consolable about this,” the person said.

"Consolable"?

Patenaude told White House budget officials during an early December meeting in the Situation Room that the money had been appropriated by Congress and must be sent.

[...]

In her meetings with Puerto Rico’s governor and other officials, Patenaude made it clear the territory would need to establish an oversight structure and meet other conditions to receive federal funding, said Carlos Mercader, the executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration in Washington.

“Pam Patenaude showed the most commitment to Puerto Rico of any of the public officials inside the Trump administration,” said Mercader, who accompanied Patenaude on several of her visits to the island. “From the governor down, we are all grateful for everything she did.”

[...]

Patenaude is the third senior political appointee with housing experience to leave HUD in recent weeks. Neal Rackleff, the assistant secretary of community planning and development, left in December. Michael Bright, executive vice president and chief operations officer at the Government National Mortgage Association, or Ginnie Mae, announced his resignation last week.

[...]

Patenaude, who began her career at HUD as a 21-year-old intern during the Reagan administration, has spent more than two decades in housing policy and economic development, serving as President George W. Bush’s assistant secretary for community planning and development at HUD.

“I’m going to continue to be supportive of the president and his agenda,” she said. “I’m going to be working very hard for his reelection.”

Whaaaaaaaaaaat!?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The best people

So..how's Ben Carson doing?

https://t.co/DVDFoWH58Z?amp=1

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Ben Carson is evil

Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson on Wednesday unveiled a plan that would triple the rent for Americans on housing assistance, as well as impose work requirements for the program.

[...]

A release from HUD sought to emphasize that the increases will not apply to households “comprised of elderly persons or persons with disabilities.”

[...]

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in March that Carson was looking for more "responsible" spending options going forward as HUD secretary.

  The Hill

Too bad that didn't apply to office furniture.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Making America great again

Winning!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

"You can't even buy a decent chair for $5,000"

That story on Helen Foster's lawsuit sparked some investigative journalism.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will reportedly spend $165,000 on “lounge furniture” for its D.C. office, according to The Guardian.

This comes on the heels of President Trump proposing a $6.8 billion budget cut for the department, cuts that would leave fewer resources for programs that help the poor and homeless.

  The Hill

If they're going to be following suit on Trump's deconstruction of America and underfunding of programs, they won't need to work.  And if they aren't working, they're going to need some good lounge furniture.

On Tuesday it was also reported that HUD Secretary Ben Carson spent $31,000 late in 2017 on a dining set for his office.

A dining set for his office??

HUD officials are also reviewing Carson’s family involvement in the department after officials reportedly expressed concerns about Carson’s oldest son inviting potential business partners to HUD an event.

What's good for the Trumps is good for the Carsons.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 3/1:





FURTHER UPDATE:

Is he saying his wife doesn't tell hiim what she buys?

And, to answer Chris' question:  because we left planet reality in November 2016, and we're not going back any time soon.

FURTHER FURTHER UPDATE:




😁

UPDATE 3/14:  He was as surprised as anyone.

An email [...] sent to Carson's assistant last August reportedly cites "printouts of the furniture the Secretary and Mrs. Carson picked out" and has a subject line that says: "Secretary's dining room set needed."

  The Hill

They didn't take these positions to be pinching pennies

Trump's administration is full of incompetents who are there for the bling. They fly royalty class, or not at all. They're not peasants, after all.

A senior career official in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development has alleged that she was demoted and replaced with a Donald Trump appointee after refusing to break the law by funding an expensive redecoration of Ben Carson’s office.

[...]

[Helen] Foster, 47, claimed that she also faced retaliation for exposing a $10m budget shortfall, and for protesting when she was barred from handling a pair of sensitive freedom of information act (FOIA) requests relating to Trump apparently because she was perceived to be a Democrat.

[...]

Foster said she was told “$5,000 will not even buy a decent chair” after informing her bosses this was the legal price limit for improvements to the HUD secretary’s suite at the department’s Washington headquarters.

  The Guardian

By that measure, not a person reading this has a decent chair.

The complaint letter said that the day before Trump’s inauguration in January last year, Foster was asked by acting HUD director Craig Clemmensen to help Carson’s wife, Candy, obtain funds for the redecoration of her husband’s office suite. When Foster replied that there was a statutory limit of $5,000, Clemmensen allegedly told her that administrations had “always found ways around that in the past”.

Maybe why there was a $10 million shortfall.

When she had not relented by 10 February, Foster was repeatedly told by Clemmensen “to ‘find money’ for Mrs Carson.”

[...]

A copy of a complaint letter filed by Foster to a watchdog for federal employees was obtained by the Guardian. It alleges that HUD violated laws protecting whistleblowers from reprisals. Foster is seeking a public apology, compensatory damages and reinstatement as HUD’s chief administrative officer.

Not in this administration.

War on Poverty

What it always was: war on the poor.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would allow public housing authorities and private owners to require each adult in a household to work up to an average of 32 hours a week.

The elderly and disabled — who make up 55 percent of those receiving federal housing aid — would be exempt from the requirements. Another 26 percent of those receiving assistance are already working, NBC News reported Tuesday.

Education and vocational training could count toward those hours, but volunteer service would not, according to a copy of the draft proposal obtained by NBC.

[...]

The proposal also recommends rent increases for those receiving the subsidies. Rental contributions would increase to 35 percent of tenants’ income, up from 30 percent. Recipients would also not be allowed to deduct medical and child-care costs from their incomes.

The proposal also includes a higher mandatory minimum rent at about $150 a month, based on the federal minimum wage. This is a large increase from the proposed minimum rent of $50 per month included in Trump’s budget last year.

  The Hill

There'll be a surge of new people living on the streets.

Is this from the brilliant brain of Dr. Carson?  Or just a general GOP wish list?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sadly, it won't make a damned bit of difference to the poor

Satisfying, if disgusting, to watch, but it won't house the poor.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Keep Trump's Infrastructure Policy in Mind

An executive order issued by Trump earlier this month revoked an Obama-era directive that had established flood-risk standards for federally funded infrastructure projects built in areas prone to flooding or subject to the effects of sea-level rise – like many of those now sinking in Texas.

Houston already has some of the laxest building regulations for structures in potential flood zones and the president wants to spread that policy across the US.

[...]

Storms and flooding are generally becoming costlier and more frequent and data suggests climate change is a leading culprit.

Many towns are located in coastal areas and riverine floodplains, where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says “building codes are often insufficient in reducing damage from extreme events”. The number of “billion-dollar events” – natural disasters ranging from flooding to wildfires that incur more than $1bn in damage – has risen over the past few decades, increasing in cost from a roughly $10bn five-year average in 1985 to more than $50bn in 2015.

Obama signed executive order 13690 in 2015 in response to rising sea levels and surface temperatures and more frequent storms, particularly tropical cyclones. The Obama order, with its references to sea-level rise and climate change, became an instant target for an administration eager to expunge those terms from the political lexicon.

[...]

“It makes no sense,” said Steve Ellis, vice-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Taxpayers deserve to have the assurance that if they provide assistance to a community to build or rebuild, it’s done in a way that isn’t going to cost taxpayers money in the future.”

  Guardian

It makes sense if you're a building/real estate mogul with friends in the business.

The consequences of making it easier to build in flood zones are likely to be severe. So far 30,000 people are projected to have been displaced by flooding from Hurricane Harvey. This is the third major flood in the US this year, and the third the Houston area has seen since March of last year. Catastrophic flooding, whether on the coast or in the river-hashed central plains, is a given.

[...]

Public housing, which often stands upon flood-prone land that was inexpensive for housing authorities to purchase, is particularly vulnerable. According to HUD, more than 11,000 public housing buildings – 5% of the total – are in flood zones. In total New Orleans has 1,944 buildings in flood zones; Miami and Jacksonville, Florida, have another 1,157, according to HUD.

And guess who's at the helm at HUD. That's right - Ben - the pyramids are grain storage structures - Carson. What in God's name does a brain surgeon with bizarre ideas know about housing? About as much as a TV narcissist huckster salesman knows about running a country.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Been Wondering How HUD Is Doing Under Ben Carson?

Here's a New York Magazine article to fill you in.

Excerpt

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 Trump’s 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 right’s antipathy to governing. If the great radical-conservative dream was, in Grover Norquist’s famous words, to “drown government in a bathtub,” then this was what the final gasps of one department might look like.

  NY Magazine

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

So That's How It's Going to Be

A top aide to President Trump’s housing secretary nominee, Ben Carson, was fired and led out of the department’s headquarters by security on Wednesday after writings critical of Mr. Trump surfaced in his vetting, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Shermichael Singleton, who was one of the few black conservatives in the Trump administration, had been working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development since Jan. 23 as a senior adviser.

[...]

“My party in particular has allowed itself to be taken over by someone who claims to be a Republican but doesn’t represent any of our values, principles or traditions,” he wrote in The Hill in October 2016.

The firing was reminiscent of the decision by the White House to block a senior Republican foreign policy adviser, Elliott Abrams, from becoming deputy secretary of state. The move came after Mr. Abrams’s anti-Trump writings came to the president’s attention.

[...]

A person close to Mr. Singleton said an initial vetting of the 26-year-old by HUD and White House personnel had come up with his criticism. He answered a number of questions regarding the article and expressed remorse for the piece and support for Mr. Trump.

  NYT

Yeah, that was his first mistake.

On Wednesday, Mr. Singleton was presented again with the piece and told it was the reason for his termination.

Now how stupid does he feel? Black man groveling, then whacked anyway.

Mr. Singleton plans to return to a previous job he held as a vice president with Howard Stirk Holdings, a media company run by Armstrong Williams, a conservative media personality and close friend of Mr. Carson’s.

It's hard for me to understand why a black man would be a Republican in the first place. Hard to feel sorry when someone who won't stand up for himself gets canned. But that doesn't take away from the fact that the reason here is abhorrent and disturbing.

You must not criticize the T-Rump.

When he can get his Supreme Court nominee in, perhaps he can sign an EO firing all journalists who do not speak glowingly of him. He'll start with the prize-winning journalist - black man with some dignity - who wrote this:

Dear Mr. So-Called President:

So let me explain to you how this works.

[...]

The bottom line is, you were elected.

And this does entitle you to certain things. You get your own airplane. You get free public housing. You get greeted with snappy salutes. And a band plays when you walk into the room.

But there is one thing to which your election does not entitle you. It does not entitle you to do whatever pops into your furry orange head without being called on it or, should it run afoul of the Constitution, without being blocked. You and other members of the Fourth Reich seem to be having difficulty understanding this.

[...]

Three weeks ago, your chief strategist, Steve Bannon, infamously declared that news media should “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

[...]

Just last Sunday, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller declared on CBS’ “Face The Nation” that “our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

What you do “will not be questioned?” Lord, have mercy.

[...]

Just who the hell do you think you are?

Meaning you and all the other trolls you have brought clambering up from under their bridges. Maybe you didn’t notice, but this is the United States of America. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Nation of laws, not of individuals? First Amendment? Freedom of the press? Any of that ringing a bell?

Let’s be brutally clear here. If you were a smart guy with unimpeachable integrity and a good heart who was enacting wise policies for the betterment of all humankind, you’d still be subject to sharp scrutiny from news media, oversight from Congress, restraint by the judiciary — and public opinion.

And you, of course, are none of those things.

[...]

I know, too, that you’re accustomed to being emperor of your own fiefdom. Must be nice. Your name on the wall, the paychecks, the side of the building. You tell people to make something happen, and it does. You yell at a problem, and it goes away. Nobody talks back. I can see how it would be hard to give that up.

But you did. You see, you’re no longer an emperor, Mr. So-Called President. You’re now what is called a “public servant” — in effect, an employee with 324 million bosses.

[...]

Yet you and your coterie of cartoon autocrats think you’re going to cow them into silence and compliance by ordering them to shut up and obey? Well, as a freeborn American, I can answer that in two syllables flat.

Hell no.

  Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Hell yeah.

It's Only Just Begun - Part 3

An hour after Donald Trump assumed the presidency Friday, his administration indefinitely suspended a pending rate cut for mortgage insurance required for FHA-backed mortgages, which are popular with first-time home buyers and those with poor credit.

The move by the Department of Housing and Urban Development — one of the first acts of Trump’s administration — reversed a policy announced in the waning days of the Obama presidency that would have trimmed insurance premiums for typical borrowers by hundreds of dollars a year.

  LA Times

Yay! Workin' for the people already, just like he said a few hours ago.

In cutting the insurance premium, the Obama administration had argued that the FHA’s finances had vastly improved since it received its first-ever bailout in 2013 to cover potential losses on the huge volume of low-down-payment mortgages it insured from 2007 to 2009.

The administration noted that the agency’s Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund’s capital reserve ratio exceeded requirements for the second year in a row.

“With sufficient reserves on hand to meet future claims, it’s time for FHA to pass along some modest savings to working families,” former HUD Secretary Julian Castro said in announcing the cut.

The suspension of that decision will be a disappointment to home buyers currently out shopping, especially on top of the rise in mortgage interest rates following the November election.

Aaaaand..Bingo!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.