Commentary: Government Policies are Exacerbating Evictions

Eviction Notice

Evictions are soaring, and Americans can’t pay the rent, potentially throwing hundreds of thousands of families out of their homes at a time when homeless shelters are jammed to the rafters with 10 million illegal immigrants.

It’s a useful reminder that the problem with our ruling elite isn’t just President Joe Biden’s dementia. They’ve made a very big bed we’re all going to be lying in.

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Commentary: The Federal Government Loses More Money than Could Ever Be Accounted For

Accountant working on spreadsheets

Not long after Jeremy Gober started running a sleep center, he quit treating patients for narcolepsy and sleep apnea and went full-time submitting bogus insurance claims. According to Gober’s 2022 indictment, he committed at least one especially sloppy error: One of his make-believe billings included a Medicare claim for treatment in March 2018 for a patient who’d died in December 2017. Before Gober was caught, Medicare and California’s healthcare system, Medi-Cal, ended up paying him a total of $587,000 for claims that turned out to be fiction.

The payments to Gober were part of $260 million the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spent from 2009 through 2019 to reimburse healthcare providers in 15 states and Puerto Rico for services to patients who were dead, according to the inspector general of the HHS, which administers Medicare and Medicaid — programs with combined expenditures of $1.7 trillion.

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Feds Have Showered Washington State with Tax Dollars to Fix Homelessness, but It Keeps Getting Worse

Homeless Person

A plethora of federal agencies have spent well over $200 million attempting to alleviate homelessness in Washington state over the past 17 years, only for the number of people living on the streets to keep rising.

Federal agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS), among others, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since 2007 on grants to third parties intended to mitigate homelessness in Washington, federal spending data shows. Despite the nine-figure sum of taxpayer dollars spent, the number of homeless people in Washington grew by about 20% between 2007 and 2023, according to a report produced by HUD.

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Blue States Saw Highest Homeless Rates in 2023

Homeless Person

Blue states and the District of Columbia dominated the top spots for homeless residents per capita, according to a December report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

New York and Vermont came in second and third with an estimated 103,200, or 52.4 for every 10,000, and roughly 3,295, or 50.9 per 10,000, respectively, according to rates calculated by Axios from the report. Washington, D.C., had a higher rate of homelessness than all 50 states at 73.3 per 10,000 residents, or an estimated 4,922 people.

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Sen. Joni Ernst Releases List of Federal Agencies with High Employee No-Show Rates Post-COVID

Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA)

With Christmas fast-approaching, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa put out a “naughty list” of government agencies that have high no-show rates of employees who have not returned to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic ended.

According to Ernst’s list, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Social Security Administration top the list with just 7 percent office occupancy rates.

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Commentary: Republicans Rein in Biden’s Local Zoning Scheme

In the 2024 transportation and housing appropriations bill, House Republicans are once again poised defund a bid by the federal government to take over state and local zoning laws via a Department of Housing and Urban Development regulation to condition $3.3 billion of community development block grants on changes to those zoning laws.

Appearing in section 233, the new bill, to be voted on this week by the U.S. House, updates the language to reflect the most recent regulation in whack-a-mole fashion: “None of the funds made available by this 24 Act may be used to implement, administer, or enforce the proposed rule entitled ‘Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing’ published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Federal Register on February 9, 2023 (88 Fed. Reg. 8516), or to direct a grantee to undertake specific changes to existing zoning laws as a part of carrying out the interim final rule entitled ‘Restoring Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Definitions and Certifications’ published by such Department in the Federal Register on June 10, 2021 (86 Fed. Reg. 30779).”

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Commentary: New HUD Regulation Violates Prohibition on Interfering in Local Zoning

A new proposed regulation by President Joe Biden’s Department of Housing and Urban Development would once again attempt to meddle in state and local governments’ affairs by conditioning federal funding including Community Development Block Grants on changes to local zoning laws.

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Congress Prohibits HUD Secretary Ben Carson to Implement the Race-Based, Obama-Era Zoning Regs Despite Lawsuit

Ben Carson

By Robert Romano   On May 8, the National Fair Housing Alliance filed suit in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia against the Department of Housing and Urban Development for delaying the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation until 2020 or later. This regulation allowed HUD to force more than 1,200 cities and…

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