2016 ELECTION/BEN CARSON/HUD: “Before Ben Carson accepted President Trump’s offer to become secretary of housing and urban development, a friend implored him to turn down the job to preserve the reputation he had earned as a brilliant neurosurgeon and lost, in part, as a politician.
The confidant, Logan Delany Jr., who was the treasurer of Mr. Carson’s 2016 presidential campaign, described HUD as a ‘swamp’ of ‘corruption.’ He predicted in an email that Mr. Carson’s ‘lack of a background in housing’ would make him prey to the department’s career staff and political appointees, as well as predatory lobbyists…
Mr. Delany’s most dire prediction has not materialized. But many of the other problems outlined in the memo have come to pass during Mr. Carson’s first year running a sprawling $47 billion-a-year community development bureaucracy that provides rental subsidies for about five million families and oversees people living in 1.2 million units of public housing. And Mr. Carson’s own lapses in judgment — combined with the questionable behavior of his family and his reluctance to aggressively engage Mr. Trump — have left him at the margins of the cabinet.
Mr. Carson, people close to him said, has been whipsawed by a job he has found puzzling and frustrating — so much so that he considered quitting during recent wrangling over the department’s budget.”
-Glenn Thrush, “Ben Carson on His Vexing Reign at HUD: Brain Surgery Was Easier Than This,” The New York Times online, Mar. 5, 2018