The federal government’s largest form of rental aid for low-income families, commonly known as Section 8 assistance, could leave hundreds of thousands of households without access in the wake of a proposed budget shortfall.
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The Housing Choice Voucher Program is administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and provides rental assistance for about 2.3 million qualified households annually. The projected shortfall comes as Congress works through its appropriations process and is proposing a budgetary increase well short of what it would take to maintain current service.
$32.8B was set aside for the program during the spending bill that passed the House during the last Congress, increasing funding by $115M, Bloomberg reports.
But the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the voucher program would need an approximately $4.3B increase to maintain the same levels of service given rising costs of living and increased rent burdens.
If the House budget eventually gets approved, it would meet 90% of the program's need, and roughly 283,000 households would eventually lose voucher access, CBPP told Bloomberg.
“There’s a very realistic possibility of a shortfall,” Kim Johnson, National Low Income Housing Coalition public policy manager, told Bloomberg.
Local housing authorities also harbor concerns over HUD’s ability to administer the voucher program, according to Bloomberg. Previous reports indicate it intends to slash 50% of its workforce, and Department of Government Efficiency operatives overseeing HUD may face potential conflicts of interest.
Scott Langmack, a senior adviser to DOGE who also works as the chief operating officer of a property technology company designed to aggregate hard-to-find data, has access to some of the most critical and sensitive systems inside HUD, Wired reports. This includes a system containing records mapping billions of dollars in expenditures.
Michael Mirski is another DOGE operative who also works for TCC Management, a company that owns and operates mobile home parks across the U.S., according to Wired. Mirski is in position to input overall changes to a system that controls who has access to HUD systems, the outlet reports.
The data the pair can access includes the individual identities of every federal public housing voucher holder in the U.S. along with their financial information, according to Wired.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner launched a DOGE task force earlier this month to review how HUD is spending American taxpayer dollars.
“The DOGE task force will play a critical role in helping to identify and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse and ultimately better serve the American people,” Turner said in a release. “We have already identified over $260 million in savings and we have more to accomplish.”
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