Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said Thursday that “nobody is going to get kicked out of their houses” as a result of big cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in President Trump’s proposed budget.
The proposed budget slashes billions of dollars from HUD, including $2 billion from public housing, and eliminates most federal community development grants. Asked during the daily press briefing if he believes the proposed budget keeps Trump’s campaign promise that urban black voters have nothing to lose, Mulvaney set a rather low bar for success.
“Nobody is going to get kicked out of their houses,” he said. “What we did when we looked at the HUD budget was try to figure out a way to spend money better. What we saw, and I talked to Dr. Carson about this just today, what we saw when we went through the analysis of the HUD budget is a lot of money got spent on government housing, building it. It’s actually infrastructure.”
Mulvaney said that Carson told him he wanted to shift that money out of HUD, which Mulvaney described as “not very well run,” and into a larger program.
“These do not mean the President is changing his commitment to infrastructure. Far from it,” he said. “For years and years we have built infrastructure like this and it doesn’t work very well. So what we’re doing now is taking it out of the discretionary budget and move it into the larger infrastructure.”
