Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, doesn’t want low-income housing and other resources for people struggling economically or with drugs to be too comfortable.
That sentiment came in an interview with the New York Times published Wednesday, during a tour of low-income housing and facilities for the chronically homeless, drug addicts and the elderly.
According to the paper, Carson said that “compassion” did not mean “a comfortable setting that would make somebody want to say: ‘I’ll just stay here. They will take care of me.’”
He noted separately that mentally ill, elderly and disabled people couldn’t be expected “to do a great deal to take care of themselves,” but that “[t]here is another group of people who are able-bodied individuals, and I think we do those people a great disservice when we simply maintain them.”
Huge swaths of the HUD budget were on the chopping block in the White House’s proposed “skinny” budget, but the agency escaped many deep cuts in the spending agreement Congress reached over the weekend.
In March, for example, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Meals on Wheels, funded through Community Development Block Grants, wasn’t “showing any results.” In the spending agreement, CDBG funding stayed consistent with 2016 levels.
Carson downplayed the White House’s threats to cut funding to the Times.
“I know they have been called out for elimination. My impression is that what he is really saying is that there are problems with those programs,” he said, referring to Trump’s proposal of a 13 percent cut in HUD’s budget. “And I think it may have been someone on his staff who kind of said, ‘Well, maybe we just need to get rid of the whole program.’ No, we don’t need to get rid of the whole program because there are some extremely good things there.”
Still, a multi-city listening tour with recipients of HUD funding doesn’t seem to have changed Carson’s spartan view of the purpose of low-income housing and other sources of federal dollars.
“We are talking about incentivizing those who help themselves,” he told the executive director of a housing center for recovering drug addicts, who asked for more federal help housing addicts. The Times reported he later asked how comfortable the center’s residents were allowed to get.
Read the full Times report here.
