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We are the biggest producers...The heck with the others...Energy independence…Drill baby, drill...Amen...
WWW.MOEISSUESOFTHEDAY
.BLOGSPOT.COM Wednesday, November 21, 2018
All Gave Some~Some Gave All
*****
US crude oil dives 6% to fresh one-year low as stock market slides
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Oil prices fall amid concerns about rising global supplies and growing fears of an economic slowdown.
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OPEC and its allies are set to meet on Dec. 6 to discuss supply cuts.
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The head of the International Energy Agency warns the oil market is "entering an unprecedented period of uncertainty."
Spencer Platt | Getty Images …
Oil prices dropped sharply on Tuesday, snapping a four-day winning streak amid concerns about rising global supplies as OPEC weighs a possible cut in production.
Growing fears of an economic slowdown, which saw global stock markets tumble again, added further pressure on crude.
Brent crude oil futures, the international benchmark for oil prices, were down $3.27, or 4.9 percent, at $63.52 a barrel at 9:56 a.m. ET (1456 GMT). U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures fell $3.47, or 6.1 percent, to $53.73 per barrel.
The head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned of the effects of geopolitical instability on prices.
"We are entering an unprecedented period of uncertainty in oil markets," Fatih Birol told a conference in Norway.
Oil prices are around a quarter below their recent peaks in early October, weighed down by surging supply, especially from the United States, as well as a slowdown in global trade.
"The same old adage applies...Too much supply, not enough demand," said Matt Stanley, a fuel broker at StarFuels in Dubai.
U.S. crude oil production has soared by almost 25 percent this year, to a record 11.7 million barrels per day (bpd).
Amid the uncertainty, financial traders have become wary of oil markets, seeing further price downside risks from the growth in U.S. shale production as well as the deteriorating economic outlook.
Portfolio managers have sold the equivalent of 553 million barrels of crude and fuels in the last seven weeks, the largest reduction over a comparable period since at least 2013.
Funds now hold a net long position of just 547 million barrels, less than half the recent peak of 1.1 billion at the end of September, and down from a record 1.484 billion in January.
Concerned about an emerging production overhang similar to the one that led to a price slump in 2014, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is pushing for a supply cut of 1 million to 1.4 million bpd.
"We expect OPEC to agree to a supply cut at its next official meeting on 6 December," French bank BNP Paribas said.
The bank added that it expected Brent to recover to $80 per barrel before year-end.
"In 2019, we expect WTI to average $69 per barrel and Brent $76 per barrel," BNP said.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), which represents the interest of oil consumers, on Monday warned OPEC and other producers of the "negative implications" of supply cuts, with many analysts fearing that a spike in crude prices could erode consumption.
Troops Sent To U.S.-Mexico Border Under Anti-Caravan Push To Start Heading Home
Elise Foley
The troops President Donald Trump sent to the border ahead of the elections earlier this month will reportedly soon be leaving, in spite of continued flows of asylum-seekers and other migrants coming to the United States.
Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is overseeing the troop deployment at the border, told Politico on Monday that the Pentagon will begin heading home as soon as this week after completing the tasks of fortifying ports of entry and building base camps.
“Our end date right now is 15 December, and I’ve got no indications from anybody that we’ll go beyond that,” Buchanan told Politico.
Pentagon spokeswoman Laura Seal said in an email to HuffPost that she had no details on redeployment to announce at this time, but that troops “have made significant progress in closing gaps and hardening points of entry” and are authorized to support Customs and Border Protection until Dec. 15.
The Pentagon sent a follow-up statement to media Tuesday morning that downplayed reports, stating that “[n]o specific timeline for redeployment has been determined” and that it “may shift some forces to other areas of the border to engineering support missions in California and other areas.”
Buchanan said troops had completed many of their tasks, such as placing concertina wire and other barriers, which meant many engineers would not need to stay much longer. Troops involved in logistics will also be able to depart now that base camps have been built, while helicopter pilots, medical personnel and engineers who can help close traffic at ports of entry will stay on longer, Politico reported.
Still, the reduction in troop levels now ― after Trump largely stopped tweeting or talking about the caravans post-midterm elections, but while thousands of migrants are still en route to the U.S. ― is likely to bolster critics who said the deployment was more about pre-election fear-mongering than responding to a need.
Members of the U.S. military install multiple tiers of concertina wire along the banks of the Rio Grande near the Juarez-Lincoln Bridge at the U.S.-Mexico border, Friday, Nov. 16, 2018, in Laredo, Texas.
The troops President Donald Trump sent to the border ahead of the elections earlier this month will reportedly soon be leaving, in spite of continued flows of asylum-seekers and other migrants coming to the United States.
Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is overseeing the troop deployment at the border, told Politico on Monday that the Pentagon will begin heading home as soon as this week after completing the tasks of fortifying ports of entry and building base camps.
“Our end date right now is 15 December, and I’ve got no indications from anybody that we’ll go beyond that,” Buchanan told Politico.
Pentagon spokeswoman Laura Seal said in an email to HuffPost that she had no details on redeployment to announce at this time, but that troops “have made significant progress in closing gaps and hardening points of entry” and are authorized to support Customs and Border Protection until Dec. 15.
The Pentagon sent a follow-up statement to media Tuesday morning that downplayed reports, stating that “[n]o specific timeline for redeployment has been determined” and that it “may shift some forces to other areas of the border to engineering support missions in California and other areas.”
Buchanan said troops had completed many of their tasks, such as placing concertina wire and other barriers, which meant many engineers would not need to stay much longer. Troops involved in logistics will also be able to depart now that base camps have been built, while helicopter pilots, medical personnel and engineers who can help close traffic at ports of entry will stay on longer, Politico reported.
Still, the reduction in troop levels now ― after Trump largely stopped tweeting or talking about the caravans post-midterm elections, but while thousands of migrants are still en route to the U.S. ― is likely to bolster critics who said the deployment was more about pre-election fear-mongering than responding to a need.
Hundreds of angry residents took to the streets of downtown Tijuana on Sunday to protest the caravan of Central American migrants that has been streaming into the city in recent weeks.
Carrying Mexican flags and singing the national anthem, the demonstrators marched to a sports complex where about 2,000 of the migrants are being housed. There, held back by a wall of riot police, they denounced the mostly Honduran migrants as “criminals” and “freeloaders” who were openly flouting Mexican law.
“This is an invasion!” shouted local carpenter Luis Alexis Mendoza, according to the Los Angeles Times. “We demand respect. We demand that our laws be followed.”
Sunday’s anti-caravan march reflected simmering tensions in Tijuana, a sprawling border city of about 1.6 million, over the arrival of the latest Central American caravan. While the city has long been a waypoint for migrants of all stripes heading to the U.S., it has not had to deal with the presence of thousands of homeless Central Americans who are waiting indefinitely to apply for asylum at the ports of entry.
Some Tijuana officials, concerned about the city’s ability to accommodate thousands of newcomers, have called on the Mexican federal government to stop or divert migrants who are en route to the city.
“Tijuana is a city of immigrants, but we don’t want them in this way,” Tijuana Mayor Juan Manuel Gastelum said in an interview with Milenio Television on Thursday. “It was different with the Haitians, they carried papers, they were in order. It wasn’t a horde, pardon the expression.”
The mayor’s comments reflected anger among many Tijuana residents at the increasing number of caravan migrants camped in shelters and public spaces in the city. At least 3,000 were there as of Sunday, and thousands more are expected to arrive over the coming weeks.
Wait times to apply for asylum at U.S. ports of entry near Tijuana are expected to skyrocket in part because of tougher border security measures the Trump administration has implemented in recent weeks. Under a new executive order, anyone caught crossing the border illegally is ineligible for asylum protections, meaning asylum seekers have to line up at ports of entry to have their claims heard.
The policy, which is aimed at channeling asylum seekers to the ports of entry, comes as thousands more Central American migrants have assembled in caravans headed for the southwest border.
There are as many as 10,000 migrants crossing the country in several caravans, according to the Mexican interior ministry. Most of those migrants are expected to end up in Tijuana in the coming months.
Dan Crenshaw To New Dem Reps: What Do You Mean When You Say That Our Freedoms Are “Under Attack” From Trump?
ALLAHPUNDIT
I can’t decide if this is stronger proof that Crenshaw is good at this or that the Democrats he’s paired with are bad at it. Some of both, for sure.
"This broad brush criticism that the president is somehow undermining our democracy, I always wonder like, what exactly are we talking about?" @DanCrenshawTX tells @margbrennan
If you’re a Dem and you’re invested in the idea that Trump is a unique threat to the media, you have to come armed to this with evidence stronger than “Jim Acosta wasn’t allowed to grandstand at press conferences for a few days” or “Trump is disrespectful towards the media clerisy.” And you need to be ready for the obvious counterargument that I flagged earlier today and which Crenshaw notes, that Obama and Eric Holder were more aggressive about snooping on the media than Trump and Jeff Sessions have been.
An interesting footnote about Crenshaw in light of his (qualified) defense of POTUS here: He took a beating in the primary this year for having harshly criticized Trump in a Facebook post in 2015.
In the runoff for the 2nd Congressional District — where U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Houston, is not seeking re-election — Houston state Rep. Kevin Roberts has seized on a series of years-old Facebook posts from his opponent, Dan Crenshaw, to paint him as unfriendly to Trump. In a 2015 post that has drawn the most scrutiny from Roberts and his allies, Crenshaw writes that Trump’s “insane rhetoric” toward Muslims “is hateful” and takes away from conversations around “the reform of Islam.” He also calls Trump an idiot while writing of “equally ignorant liberals” on the other side of the debate.
He’s been toning down the volume ever since. How much of that is sincere and how much of it is due to a reckoning with electoral reality, that his political career could be a short and unhappy one in Texas if he makes an enemy of the president, only he knows. His bottom line, though, is similar to one I made myself in a post last week. For all the authoritarian law-and-order rhetoric from Trump about cops roughing up suspects and mass deportation, he just endorsed a major criminal-justice reform bill and offered Democrats a deal earlier this year that would grant amnesty to nearly two million DREAMers.
In his worst moments he can sound like Duterte but the actual policies he ends up pushing are almost always mainstream Republican, even centrist Republican, fare. He’s spent the better part of two years publicly lambasting Jeff Sessions and Bob Mueller but Sessions lasted all the way through the midterms and Mueller is hard at work even now.
Jonathan Last recently noticed the mismatch between Trump’s most blowhardy verbiage and his seeming total disinterest in following through on it via policy, describing his administration as “The Vaporware Presidency.”Vaporware, Last noted, is a tech term used to describe software that’s supposedly in development but which may not even exist. Which seems familiar:
My personal favorite bit of Trump vaporware was the president’s announcement that he was going to end birthright citizenship via executive order. There was, as you may recall, quite a kerfuffle about this ridiculous proposal. Some people argued that not only could Trump do away with birthright citizenship with a stroke of his pen, but that he must do so, because it was a critical step for defending our nation state.
And then a week or so later, suddenly the entire topic of birthright citizenship was just . . . gone. Trump stopped talking about it. Trump supporters seemed to forget about it. And the people who had rushed out to argue how crucial it was that Trump end it were suddenly on to the next thing.
There are literally dozens of examples of that from the past two years you can conjure up yourself. E.g., how many times has Trump complained about tightening up libel laws to punish the “Fake News Media”? And how many times has he done anything that might remotely advance that idea legislatively? (Never mind that any congressional bill would be DOA in court.) “Trump’s not a fascist, he’s a golfer,” said James Kirchick last year. He can sound like a fascist, which is what the Democrats on the panel are worried about, starting with his “enemy of the people” rhetoric, but when it comes time for the hard work of turning that rhetoric into law, the man would usually rather play golf. That’s what Crenshaw’s focused on. Trump’s almost all talk.
If his Democratic colleagues were on their game they would have countered by arguing that Trump, wittingly or not, is moving the Overton window of what’s not merely acceptable but potentially dogmatic in right-wing politics. Trump’s not going to change birthright citizenship; he’s not committed enough to that battle and he hasn’t done enough to rally the right behind it. But as the idea takes root, maybe pols will come along who are committed to it; maybe it’ll become a litmus-test issue by which a Republican’s resolve in decreasing immigration is measurer. That’s what the chatterati mean when they complain about Trump and “norms.” He can’t do much about the laws but he can do something about the norms on which American law is based. The “attack on our freedoms” or whatever may show up 25 years from now, with Trump having cut an ideological path for it.
But who are we kidding? In 25 years America will be a socialist paradise under President Ocasio-Cortez. In lieu of an exit question, a fun ad from Crenshaw’s primary that failed to sink him.
Does America oppose female genital mutilation – or not?
A Detroit judge suggests such barbarism can be accepted
Douglas Murray
Twenty years ago almost no one in the West had heard of Female Genital Mutilation. Then in the 2000s, thanks to a few brave and vocal campaigners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, knowledge of this barbaric practice began to spread.
Originally there was some queasiness about taking up the subject at all. Lawmakers and opinion formers took a while to work out their line. There was an early question mark over whether FGM wasn’t just the same as male circumcision. Most people swiftly learned that the difference was, gynecologically speaking, almost everything. There were some holdouts among people who thought that since FGM was practiced among Muslims there might be something ‘Islamophobic’ about objecting to the mutilation of young girls’ genitals with knives. On such fine judgement calls (‘child mutilation’ vs the suspicion of prejudice?) is the modern liberal conscience formed.
Eventually by this decade most countries in the West had settled on a consensus that FGM was wrong. Although the question of exactly what to do about it remained.
In the UK, a law banning the practice has actually been on the books for three decades. Yet to date only a handful of people have been charged with the offense and there has not been a single successful prosecution. Some of the reasons are understandable. Collecting evidence in such cases is difficult, and it often relies on children giving evidence about someone close to them. Nevertheless there is a huge question mark over the whole matter. If thousands of girls are being tortured and mutilated in your country every year why would the state not move heaven and earth to bring all those responsible to justice?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Now America has come to one of its stumbling moments in the prosecution of this crime. Two doctors from Michigan have been charged (alongside six others) with mutilating at least nine girls. This is the first attempt in the US to prosecute anyone for this crime. As the Detroit Free Press reports:
‘The historic case involves minor girls from Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota, including some who cried, screamed and bled during the procedure and one who was given Valium ground in liquid Tylenol to keep her calm, court records show.’
But a judge in Detroit has dismissed the charges against the doctors because he has accepted an argument put forward by the defense that the country’s FGM laws are in fact unconstitutional:
‘The judge’s ruling also dismissed charges against three mothers, including two Minnesota women whom prosecutors said tricked their 7-year-old daughters into thinking they were coming to metro Detroit for a girls’ weekend, but instead had their genitals cut at a Livonia clinic as part of a religious procedure.’
US District Judge Bernard Friedman ruled that ‘as despicable as this practice may be,’ the US Congress did not have the authority to pass the 22-year-old federal law that criminalizes FGM, and that it is for the individual states to regulate the matter.
‘Oh my God, we won!’ was the reported reaction of the lawyer for the accused. It will now be for the government to decide whether to appeal the judge’s decision. A number of other charges, including conspiracy and obstruction still remain. But those lawyer’s words speak to something far beyond this one individual case: to the whole difficulty countries like America are having facing up to the nature of this crime.
FGM. OMG. Here is where barbarism and modernity meet, and try to work out if they can’t get along together just fine.
Conservatives Slam Judge for Blocking Genital Mutilation Charges
Jean-Marc Bouju /AP 20 Nov 2018
A federal judge is facing a public outcry after he threw out federal charges against several Muslims who are suspected of cutting girls’ genitals to minimize future sexual desires.
“Outrageous,” said a tweet from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a U.S.-based advocate, who was born in Somalia and underwent Somalia’s severe form of the Islamic practice, dubbed FGM for Female Genital Mutilation. “Cutting girls genitals is a crime and must be prosecuted,” she added.
“Wait! What? Judge dismisses key charges in genital mutilation case,” said a tweet from Trump supporter Katrina Pierson: “I had no idea that we needed laws against #FGM in the United States.”
Ann Coulter ✔@AnnCoulter
Our new country's going to be GREAT! Detroit: Judge rules genital mutilation law unconstitutional.https://bit.ly/2R0GRxe
3:15 PM - Nov 20, 2018
“Congress can regulate every aspect of your life but it can’t regulate FGM,” commented Dan Horowitz, the editor of Conservative Review and a determined critic of over-powerful courts. “Folks, we are done.”
The judge’s decision may end the Detroit trial unless it is reversed on appeal. The Muslim defendants cannot be charged in the state because the state’s anti-FGM law was passed after their arrest. State officials may charge the defendants with other crimes, such as sexual assault.
The Detroit Free Press reported:
“Oh my God, we won!,” declared Shannon Smith, [defendent Jumana] Nagarwala’s lawyer, who expects the government to appeal. “But we are confident we will win even if appealed.”
Smith has maintained all along that her client did not engage in FGM.
“Dr. Nagarwala is just a wonderful human being. She was always known as a doctor with an excellent reputation,” Smith said. “The whole community was shocked when this happened. She’s always been known to be a stellar doctor, mother, person.”
In the Detroit case, Dr. Jumana Nagarwala’s parents come from a Muslim community in Northern India. She earned her medical degree with American doctors at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1998, and she displays her allegiance by wearing an Islamic head-covering. In Detroit, she worked at the Henry Ford Medical Group.
The judge is a libertarian nominated by President Ronald Reagan. He has tried to strike down laws protecting marriage as a dual-sex institution and also the University of Michigan’s race-based student-selection process. In this FGM case, he argues that it is too small an industry to be recognized as an interstate practice that can be governed by the federal constitution. But, he added, FGM can be outlawed and punished in state law.
He wrote:
Congress had no authority to pass this [anti-FGM] statute under either the Necessary and Proper Clause or the Commerce Clause.
That clause permits Congress to regulate activity that is commercial or economic in nature and that substantially affects interstate commerce either directly or as part of an interstate market that has such an effect. The government has not shown that either prong is met. There is nothing commercial or economic about FGM. As despicable as this practice may be, it is essentially a criminal assault, just like the rape at issue in Morrison. Nor has the government shown that FGM itself has any effect on interstate commerce or that a market exists for FGM beyond the mothers of the nine victims alleged in the third superseding indictment. There is, in short, no rational basis to conclude that FGM has any effect, to say nothing of a substantial effect, on interstate commerce.
….
As the Supreme Court has stated, “[a] criminal act committed wholly within a State ‘cannot be made an offence against the United States, unless it have some relation to the execution of a power of Congress, or to some matter within the jurisdiction of the United States.’” … For the reasons stated above, the Court concludes that Congress had no authority to enact 18 U.S.C. § 116(a) under either grant of power on which the government relies. Therefore, that statute is unconstitutional.
On April 27, the FBI promised to suppress the practice of FGM which has been brought into the United States by the federal government’s policy of stoking the economy with cheap imported labor and consumers. “The allegations detailed in today’s criminal complaint are disturbing,” Special Agent in Charge David Gelios said. “The FBI, along with its law enforcement partners, are committed to doing whatever necessary to bring an end to this barbaric practice and to ensure no additional children fall victim to this procedure.”
Gallup Poll: Immigration Issue Is 'Most Important U.S. Problem’ 
Ferlon Webster, Jr. , @ferlonistheman
Since October, the biggest problems facing the U.S. have changed in American’s minds, according to a recent Gallup poll.
On a list of the ‘top problems’ facing the U.S. - immigration took the cake with 21% of Americans expressing this was what concerned them the most.
Last month, 35% of Americans polled saw ‘dissatisfaction with government/poor leadership’ as the biggest problem.
According to Gallup:
“Americans are more likely to name immigration as the top problem facing the U.S. in November than they were in October -- it surged to 21% from 13%. Mentions of healthcare as the most pressing issue also increased, from 6% last month to the current 11%. Meanwhile, the proportion who name government and poor leadership decreased by nine percentage points to its current 18%, but this remains among the top problems.”
The poll was taken during the first 11 days of November and the immigration issue reached the top of the list after the migrant caravan assembled last month with plans to cross the U.S. border.
Senate Democrats Block Trump’s Nominees for Key Posts
By Fred Lucas
Senate Democrats have used procedural tactics to delay confirmation of a number of President Donald Trump's nominees for top government posts. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Senate Democrats have stalled nominees to fill key posts in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, even while complaining about the agency’s performance.
An NBC News report last week alleged that HUD’s staffing problems were the fault of President Donald Trump and HUD Secretary Ben Carson. HUD’s enforcement office is at its lowest level since 1999 of moving against bad landlords who get federal subsidies, according to NBC.
But the network’s story didn’t address the high-level nominees that Senate Democrats have stalled from taking office through procedural tactics.
Four top-level HUD nominees await Senate action more than 22 months into Trump’s four-year term.
Chief among these is Robert Hunter Kurtz, who Trump initially nominated to be HUD’s assistant secretary for public and Indian housing on Sept. 15, 2017.
As has been the case with many other stalled nominations throughout the federal government, Kurtz isn’t particularly political, but rather has a career with HUD and public housing.
Kurtz served at HUD under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He was deputy director of Detroit’s Department of Housing and Revitalization under Mayor Mike Duggan, a Democrat.
The Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee sent Kurtz’s nomination to the Senate floor with a bipartisan voice vote. However, the Senate did not take up his nomination before the end of 2017.
So on Jan. 8, Trump renominated Kurtz. The committee again approved Kurtz, but he awaits confirmation by a vote of the entire Senate.
Democrats in the Senate minority use a procedural tactic to stall Trump’s nominees. Cloture is the process of forcing the maximum 30 hours of debate for each presidential nominee — even noncontroversial ones — to clog the Senate calendar.
By October, Democrats had forced 117 cloture votes, far in excess of the number forced on previous presidents.
By contrast, the Senate held just 12 clotures on nominees during Obama’s first two years, and four during George W. Bush’s first two years.Unlike a filibuster, which allows a minority to block a floor vote, cloture uses procedural tactics to prolong the confirmation process so much that it limits the number of nominees who may reach the floor for a simple majority vote.
Cloture is the only formidable weapon for a Senate minority since the decline of the filibuster, which required 60 votes to allow a nominee to come to the floor of the Senate. Now, nominees can pass with a 51-vote majority.
But getting a vote to the floor in a timely manner is the problem. The cloture rule that requires 30 hours of debate before a vote may occur has become the new delaying tactic. Trump administration officials have accused Democrats of “weaponizing” the cloture rule.
Another example is Seth Appleton, nominated Feb. 5 as HUD’s assistant secretary for policy development and research. The banking committee on May 15 approved Appleton, who has been a senior staff member in the House of Representatives.
From 2009 to 2017, Appleton was chief of staff to Republican Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri.
When Luetkemeyer was chairman of the House Housing and Insurance Subcommittee, Appleton was involved in the passage of The Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act, designed to reform rental assistance programs. The bill passed the House and Senate unanimously before being signed into law by Obama in 2016.
In another example, Trump nominated Michael Bright on June 7 to be president of HUD’s Government National Mortgage Association. The Senate banking committee approved Bright by a bipartisan voice vote Aug. 23.
Bright previously served as director for financial markets at the Milken Institute, and as a senior financial policy adviser to Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee.
While the NBC story asserted that HUD isn’t operating properly, it didn’t mention that Trump nominated Rae Oliver Davis to be HUD’s inspector general on June 25. Although Davis was unanimously approved by the committee Aug. 23, her status has been in limbo because of cloture votes.
Davis, now acting assistant inspector general for HUD’s Office of Special Inquiry, worked for about 10 years in inspectors general offices. She was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of Tennessee and an assistant attorney general for Tennessee. She also worked on Capitol Hill as a staffer for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Under the Trump administration, the number of HUD apartments cited for unsafe, unhealthy, and physically deteriorating living conditions has been on the rise,” NBC reported. “An NBC News investigation has found that more than 1,000 out of HUD’s nearly 28,000 federally subsidized multifamily properties failed their most recent inspection — a failure rate that is more than 30 percent higher than in 2016, according to an analysis of HUD records.”
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut was critical of the administration.
“Whether it’s indifference or incompetence, the Trump administration’s failures in Connecticut and around the country cannot be excused,” Murphy told NBC News. “Someone must be held accountable. Secretary Carson owes it to these families to present a concrete plan for how he will make this better, and how he’ll make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”
The NBC story should prompt the Senate to move to confirm the HUD nominees, said Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government.
“Incredibly, Senate Democrats have blocked the Trump administration nominee for assistant secretary of public housing, Hunter Kurtz, who would oversee this critical public safety and health area within HUD,” Manning said in a public statement.
“If anything, the NBC report highlights the importance of confirming the president’s nominees to put the Trump agenda into place and enforce housing law,” Manning said. “The Democrats think it’s funny when they play politics with Trump’s nominees, when in reality hamstringing attempts to improve the lives of those who need housing assistance is anything but.”
Carson, in charge of HUD since March 2, 2017, said he is “deeply concerned” about conditions in federally subsidized housing properties. But he notes the problem isn’t new.
“This is a long-term problem that needs a long-term solution, and one we are very committed to fixing,” Carson said in a statement regarding the NBC News report. “For decades, people have been applying band-aids instead of treating the wound. We are in discussions with our acting inspector general to address this problem. These families deserve an all-hands-on-deck approach across local, state and federal government.
“We need Congress to eliminate the cap on RAD (Rental Assistance Demonstration) so we can expand this effort. We need support from all PHAs (public housing authorities) so we can work seamlessly to meet the needs of our fellow Americans, and we need the Senate to finally confirm our assistant secretary for public and Indian housing. Ultimately, we all need to start working together.”
HUD’s Real Estate Assessment Center inspects whether taxpayer-subsidized housing units meet safety and sanitary standards for getting federal funding. Developments that score well get fewer inspections. Those that score poorly get more inspections.
After becoming HUD secretary, Carson directed a wholesale re-examination of how the department conducts inspections.
HUD asserted that NBC News left viewers with a “false narrative” on several fronts. The department noted that 96 percent of HUD-contracted multifamily properties meet current inspection standards.
Failing properties include those that are being rehabilitated, sold, or have rental assistance contracts in the process of being terminated.
Although NBC blamed most of the staffing problems on Carson and the Trump administration, HUD contends staff reductions and consolidations have been going on since 2010. The number of HUD employees decreased from 9,339 to less than 7,000 in the past eight years, the agency says.
The Obama administration reorganized HUD’s Office of Multifamily Housing and closed 16 field offices in 2013 in New Jersey, New York, Florida, California, Texas, Washington state, and Michigan.
Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal.
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Helen and Moe Lauzier
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