As Donald Trump's incomprehensible incompetence continues to dominate the 24-hour news cycle at a stunning clip, New York magazine has a lengthy meditation on the catastrophic damage Ben Carson is doing to public housing as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Bottom line: Not only does Carson have no idea what he's doing, he also doesn't give two licks about keeping our nation's most vulnerable citizens housed. Alec MacGillis writes:
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 there’d 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,” [former Obama Housing Sec.] Shaun Donovan told me. “So when you have a 15 percent cut to that budget, by definition you’re going to be throwing people out of their homes. You’re literally taking vouchers away from families, you’re literally shutting down public housing, because it can’t be maintained anymore.” [...]
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. “I’m 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.
Just another narcissist with a soft spot for portraits of himself ruining a significant part of the nation’s social safety net. If our country survives Trump and his team of well-coiffed ghouls, we'll spend years trying to rebuild the decimated government they leave behind.