Romney borrowed the dismissal line from a prospective 2012 presidential candidate named Donald Trump who a few years later would claim that “space is actually being taken over privately.” That’s not technically true. Yet.
— 36 —
THE SECRETARY OF GENTRIFICATION
Dr. Ben Carson
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Dr. Ben Carson sort of wanted to be president, even if his listless debate performances and tendency to wander off the campaign trail suggested otherwise. But the man who Donald Trump shredded during the pre-primary campaign—noting that Carson had described his own temper as “pathological,” Trump told CNN: “You don’t cure these people. You don’t cure a child molester. There’s no cure for it. Pathological, there’s no cure for that.”—definitely never wanted to be secretary of housing and urban development. When the prospect was raised following the 2016 election, Carson’s friend and frequent spokesman Armstrong Williams told Reuters: “Dr. Carson doesn’t feel like that’s the best way for him to serve the president-elect.”
Williams explained to the Hill newspaper in Washington that “Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience, he’s never run a federal agency. The last thing he would want to do was take a position that could cripple the presidency.”
A renowned neurosurgeon who made a fortune peddling inspirational books, Carson got credit for rejecting a place in the cabinet after determining that his education, his background and his skills had not prepared him for the job. Then he changed his mind.
That put Carson in front of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, where the nominee struggled to explain why he wanted a job for which he was unqualified. It had already been revealed that Carson had even less experience than his supporters imagined—former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s attempt to justify Trump’s choice by describing the nominee as the first potential Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary “to have actually lived in government housing” fell apart when Carson said he hadn’t actually lived in government housing. But everything was cool, said Carson, because he would be sort of a CEO of HUD, delegating responsibility to capable people.
Comedian Trevor Noah sorted that one out: “Dr. Carson, I’m confused, I thought Donald Trump was the hands-off CEO, and now you’re also the hands-off CEO? No, no, think about it—Donald Trump said he does not know how to do the job but he’ll make sure he’ll hire the best. Now Dr. Carson says that he doesn’t know the job but he’ll make sure to hire the best. How far down does this… go? Who actually knows how to do the job?”
That’s a good question, because the job is actually quite challenging. HUD is an agency, as Peter Dreier, the chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College, has explained, “with a $47 billion budget that oversees federal rental assistance programs serving more than five million of the country’s lowest-income households. The largest of these is the housing choice voucher program (formerly known as Section 8), which helps low-income families rent apartments in the private market. HUD also oversees a million units of public housing run by local governments, administers $5 billion in community development funds, insures the mortgages of more than one-fifth of all homeowners, and enforces fair housing laws that bar racial discrimination by lenders and landlords.”
Dreier reminds us that “Carson has no experience with any of these programs—nor any experience in government at all.” New York City Council Housing Committee chair Jumaane Williams has been blunter. He ripped the selection of Carson to head this particular department as a move that was “ill-advised, irresponsible and hovers on absurdity.”
The absurdity was made abundantly clear when Carson appeared before the Senate Banking Committee and was asked whether Trump’s real-estate empire (which has a stake in affordable housing developments) might benefit from his oversight of the agency. “It will not be my intention to do anything to benefit any American particularly,” he mused. “It’s for all Americans, everything that we do.”
“I understand that,” responded Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a committee member. “Do I take that to mean that you may manage programs that will significantly benefit the president-elect?”
“You can take it to mean that I will manage things that will benefit the American people. That is going to be the goal,” replied Carson, who could have left it there. But he kept going, telling Warren that “if there happens to be an extraordinarily good program that is working for millions of people and it turns out that someone that you’re targeting is going to gain $10 from it, am I going to say, ‘No, the rest of you Americans can’t have it’? I think logic and common sense will probably be the best way.”
What Carson said there was not understood as a guarantee that scrupulous care would be taken to avoid rewarding America’s developer in chief and his family.
Trump family profiteering was among the lesser concerns regarding Carson at HUD. A bigger concern, the Washington Post suggested, was the potential for “a collision between [Carson’s] philosophical aversion to social safety-net programs and an agency that administers some of the government’s most expansive programs for helping minorities and low-income people.”
“Coming to lead an agency that serves the poorest people in the country with a philosophy of if people are that poor it’s because they’re not trying hard enough could have a big impact on the people HUD serves,” fretted National Low Income Housing Coalition president Diane Yentel.
Yentel had reason to worry
As a presidential candidate, Carson dismissed initiatives to identify and address patterns of racial and income disparity in housing as “mandated social-engineering schemes” and wrote: “These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse. There are reasonable ways to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens, but based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous.”
The target of Carson’s wrath was one of the most important, if undercovered, civil rights and social justice initiatives of the Obama administration: a 2015 rule that required cities to “affirmatively further fair housing.” The initiative sought, as the Atlantic noted, to give meaning to “a provision of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that had long been mostly ignored. Under the 2015 rule, cities are required to assess whether housing in their communities is racially segregated, and then release the results of that assessment every three to five years. Cities are encouraged, through financial incentives, to set desegregation goals, establish new low-income housing in integrated neighborhoods, and track their progress on those goals.”
Trump decried the rule, as did Carson, who claimed that it relied on “a tortured reading of the Fair Housing laws to empower the Department of Housing and Urban Development to ‘affirmatively promote’ fair housing, even in the absence of explicit discrimination.” Of course, discrimination is often implicit. And if Carson had bothered to review the HUD mission statement, he would have known that the agency does not make distinctions. It simply says that HUD seeks to “build inclusive and sustainable communities free from discrimination.”
Carson says something different. He argues that what housing advocates hail as a serious and needed intervention is just a repeat of “the failed socialist experiments of the 1980s” (someone should probably tell him that Ronald Reagan was president for most of that decade) and past attempts to “usher in a new era of racial utopia in America.”
After Trump announced his HUD pick, New York mayor Bill de Blasio said: “Carson’s utter lack of qualifications, combined with the hostility he has expressed towards fair housing and social programs, does not bode well, especially with Republicans in control of Congress and the presidency.” There is good reason to accept that assessment by the mayor of the nation’s largest city. So let’s mark Carson down as another Trump cabinet
member who is disinclined to carry forward the Obama administration’s efforts to respond to existing problems. But what if Carson makes America’s affordable housing crisis worse? What if he makes it a lot worse? What if the man who has no government experience is supposed to cripple an agency with a mission “to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all”?
That’s what scares Seema Agnani, executive director of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. “[What] does it mean that the worst kind of developer—one of the biggest, wealthiest, and most aggressive developers—is the boss of the boss of HUD?” she asked after Carson’s nomination.
Agnani, a veteran housing activist with long experience in New York City, argues that “anything having to do with HUD or the issues in HUD’s purview must be evaluated in the context of Donald Trump, the real estate magnate” and, further, she asks: “What does it mean for fair housing that a landlord with a history of fair housing violations is Houser-in-Chief? It means that Ben Carson’s ignorance of fair housing law wasn’t some incidental flaw—something that one might associate with the normal shortcomings of an underqualified political appointee—but rather, it is his central qualification for the job. It is license for racist landlords to discriminate more openly, for racist city leaders to more aggressively create policies and allocate resources in ways that segregate and exploit communities of color. It is the signal of the intent to dismantle fair housing as we know it.” And just as worrisome, she continues: “What does it mean for HUD to have a president who has been so cavalier about conflict of interest? And who has such a long history of ties to contractors, developers, predatory investors, and a whole set of players in the real estate industry? What does this specifically mean for federally subsidized housing and infrastructure development? With the worst of the industry taking their cues from the Developer in Chief, I fear it will create a climate of graft where important and scarce federal resources will be siphoned into private pockets or will be channeled toward developments that have dubious public benefit. Any and all block grants, federal pass-throughs, and Public-Private-Partnership activities should be examined in terms of their impact on the Trump brand or their propensity to line the pockets of Trump’s companies and those that he works with.”
Those are not idle fears, especially those concerns about “a climate of graft” and the prospect that “scarce federal resources will be siphoned into private pockets.”
The Atlantic’s Alana Semuels reminds us that “Trump could, for instance, focus more on privatizing public housing, and asking real-
estate developers to take responsibility for revitalizing the neighborhoods around housing complexes.”
Public housing projects that were constructed decades ago near the centers of major cities, at a time when upper-class and then middle-class urbanites were moving to the suburbs, now sit atop desirable real estate. Central cities are booming. Well-to-do young people are moving downtown to be where the action is; well-to-do older folks are retiring near the theater, the symphony and the waterfront. Developers with an eye for gentrification can tick off the names of public housing projects that are located on attractive parcels. HUD can make privatization seem necessary, not by selling off properties itself but by squeezing funding for local housing authorities across the country (the New York City Housing Authority gets 40 percent of its income from the federal agency), by creating incentives for sell-offs and by developing programs that suggest to cities that they have no alternative but to turn to developers. The federal government has already experimented with so-called rental assistance demonstration schemes, under which developers sign agreements to provide public housing in high-cost cities such as San Francisco. Under the Obama administration, Federal Housing Administration aides and advisors emphasized “public housing preservation… to ensure that the housing units are preserved and affordable for the long term.” But as journalist Toshio Meronek noted in an assessment of the program in Truthout: “Tenants and housing rights activists are worried the program is just another step toward dismantling public housing altogether.”
Meronek highlighted those concerns under an Obama administration that gave evidence of being at least somewhat sensitive to them. Under a Trump administration, however, it is hard to imagine that the sensitivities will remain. The Right to the City alliance of tenant and neighborhood groups has labeled Trump America’s “#GentrifierInChief” and warns that the president’s “cabinet nominations show deep allegiance to Wall Street and his intention to continue the policies of displacement, gentrification and rising rents at the expense of the American People.”
Housing affordability is an issue for tens of millions of Americans, and the chief issue for millions of them. We should all be concerned when experts on housing warn us, as does Andrea Shapiro of New York City’s Metropolitan Council on Housing, about the prospect that a developer-led presidential administration might radically alter housing policy to benefit landlords and real-estate developers rather than low-income families and communities. And that is exactly what Shapiro is saying when she reports that “advocates believe it is likely that his administration will attempt to privatize public housing. This would increase gentrification pressure and displace thousands of people who cannot afford housing on the private market.”
In the best of worlds, a wise and experienced secretary of housing and urban development might push back against the deconstruction, the dismantling and dismembering of HUD, and of America’s commitment to affordable housing. But, as was made quite clear when he was signaling that he was not up to the job, that’s not Dr. Ben Carson.
— 37 —
THE OOPSING OF NUCLEAR WASTE DISPOSAL
Rick Perry
Secretary of Energy
Rick Perry is known for a lot of things: a fine cha-cha turn on Dancing with the Stars, his “[the planet is] experiencing a cooling trend” rejection of climate science and those “smart-guy” glasses he started wearing to compensate for impressions left by one of the great crash-and-burn moments in American politics.
Perry was outlining his vision for slimming down the federal government during a November 2011 Republican presidential debate. “It does the things to the regulatory climate that has to happen,” the then-governor of Texas said of his agenda. “And I will tell you, it is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and the—what’s the third one there? Let’s see…” Perry paused. The crowd laughed. A lot.
Then-congressman Ron Paul, always a helper, filled the void: “You need five.”
“Oh, five, okay,” said a befuddled Perry. “So Commerce, Education, and the…”
The eventual nominee of the party that year, Mitt Romney, had an idea: “EPA?”
“EPA,” chirped a relieved Perry. “There you go…”
By now the crowd was laughing harder.
Then the moderator, John Harwood, committed an act of unintentional yet devastating cruelty. He prolonged Perry’s misery by asking: “Seriously, is the EPA the one you were talking about?”
“No, sir, no, sir,” admitted Perry. “We were talking about the agencies of government—the EPA needs to be rebuilt. There’s no doubt about that.”
“But you can’t,” Harwood interrupted, “but you can’t name the third one?”
The governor kept trying. “The third agency of government I would—I would do away with, Education, the…”
His fellow candidates were still trying to help: “Commerce?”
“Commerce and, let’s see. I can’t,” said Perry. “The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”
Oops.
But Perry’s a scrappy contender who doesn’t like to leave things unsettled. Later in the debate he interrupted one of his own answers to announce: “By the way, that was the Department of Energy I was reaching for a while ago.”
So it only made sense that Donald Trump—who got some unsolicited debate advice from the alwa
ys enthusiastic Perry during the 2016 fall campaign (when discussing the fine points of policy with Hillary Clinton, the Texan suggested, “Peel her skin off”)—would appoint Perry as energy secretary.
Never mind that those who know Perry did not see him as even remotely prepared for the position. Even among Lone Star State observers who liked Perry, there was widespread agreement with the assessment of Calvin Jillson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University in Texas who told the New York Times: “Rick Perry was pitch-perfect for Texas politics. He has very close ties to the oil industry. He is about ‘the Texas way’—low taxes, low regulation. But none of that gives him the depth of knowledge needed for running the Energy Department.”
Famously forgetful. Woefully unprepared. Totally tied to the industries he was supposed to regulate. Nice glasses. Turns out we all know a little about good old Rick Perry. But not many folks know this about Rick Perry: he’s a pioneering champion of privatized nuclear waste disposal.
During Perry’s tenure as governor, the Texas Observer recalls that he was a “Cheerleader for a Nuclear Waste Company.”
Not long after he won his first election for governor in 2002, Perry signed legislation that cleared the way for the privatization of radioactive waste disposal in Texas.
The company that stood to benefit from that legislation was Waste Control Specialists (WCS), an outfit owned by the late Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons. Political observers remember Simmons as the funder of those 2004 Swift Boat ads that attacked Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry for doing something Donald Trump could not get around to—serving in the military during the Vietnam War. But the Swift Boat ads were just a freelance distraction from Simmons’s political occupation: advancing the career of Rick Perry.