Sunday, January 16, 2005

By all means, let's get our priorities straight

The White House will seek to drastically shrink the Department of Housing and Urban Development's $8 billion community branch, purging dozens of economic development projects, scrapping a rural housing program and folding high-profile anti-poverty efforts into the Labor and Commerce departments, administration officials said yesterday.

[...]

Advocates for the poor [...] contended that the White House is trying to gut federal programs for the poorest Americans to make way for tax cuts, a mission to Mars and other presidential priorities.

[...]

"The purpose of the exercise has nothing to do with achieving or not achieving savings," said one administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid preempting the Feb. 7 release of the president's fiscal 2006 budget request.

"What we are trying to accomplish is to meet our obligation to people living in distressed communities, to hold communities accountable for helping those people and to become more efficient in the process," another official said.
  WaPo article

Ah, yes. Accountability.

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