BUDGET/HUD/INFRASTRUCTURE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The White House’s Fiscal Year 2019 budget proposal, released Monday [2-12-18], calls for work requirements for those who receive public housing subsidies and slashes funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development by $8.8 billion.
The budget outline also zeroes out the Public Housing Capital Fund, dedicated to rehabilitating and modernizing public housing developments, and eliminates the Community Development Block Grant which local governments can use at their discretion to address a variety of community and infrastructure needs… The budget underscores the administration’s push for Congress to pass legislation to add work requirements to ‘require able-bodied individuals to shoulder more of their housing costs and provide an incentive to increase their earnings.’ It also wants ‘greater private sector involvement’ to finance the revitalization of housing units.
The White House budget is non-binding but carries weight as a statement of the president’s spending priorities. In the two-year spending pact Congress passed last week and Trump signed into law, legislators allocated an additional $2 billion dollars for HUD over the current spending levels. The Trump administration’s document calls for a 14.2 percent decrease from current levels, including cuts to to various rental assistance programs like the federal housing subsidy known as Section 8. The reason, according to the budget document, is ‘to address the increasing and unsustainable Federal costs of rental assistance.’ “
-Brakkton Booker, “White House Budget Calls For Deep Cuts To HUD,” NPR, Feb. 13, 2018 05:00am