After much speculation and spinning, Henry G. Cisneros has apparently saved the Department of Housing and Urban Development from extinction. He did it by promising to get rid of dozens of programs and to make radical cuts at HUD. "Many aspects of this department are simply indefensible," he said at a news conference Dec. 19 with Vice President Al Gore.
It's an extraordinary conversion for Mr. Cisneros. The man who less than two years ago committed himself to "reinventing" HUD with bold new programs, now seems to be throwing his old ideas overboard.
A few weeks ago, before the urgency of HUD's situation was made public, he told the Associated Press that the agency needs "a ground-up, clean-slate analysis." The war on homelessness, which Mr. Cisneros declared to be HUD's No. 1 priority, no longer tops the agency's list. Byron York is a Washington-based TV producer and free-lance writer. Home ownership, certain to be popular with the new Republican majority in Congress, is now a major concern. Moving to Opportunity, HUD's controversial program to place public housing residents in more affluent neighborhoods, is out. Dependency-inducing public housing is out. "All the assumptions are out," Mr. Cisneros explained.
The promised changes have saved HUD from the administration's ax, but they have not stopped talk on Capitol Hill of the agency's demise. The reason: Mr. Cisneros faces far more than a momentary political crisis. As he scrambles to save HUD, he's up against fundamental, bipartisan, and long-standing questions about the usefulness of his department.
The doubts surfaced most dramatically last August in the form of a study by the National Academy of Public Administration. Commissioned by the Democratic Congress, (at the behest of Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat who was then chairwoman of the Senate HUD/VA Appropriations Subcommittee), the report outlines decades of mismanagement, recommends major reforms, and concludes: "If, after five years, HUD is not operating . . . in an effective, accountable manner, the president and Congress should seriously consider dismantling [HUD] and moving its core programs elsewhere."
How did HUD get into such a fix? Many observers point to the devastating scandals of the Reagan years, but the study bucks conventional wisdom by laying most of the blame on the meddling of Congress, which over the years has imposed dozens of new programs onto an already-overburdened HUD.
The 1980s battleground
The meddling was most intense during the 1980s, when HUD was one of the roughest battlegrounds between the Democratic Congress and the Republican administration. "Reagan, Stockman, and Miller all wanted to cut, cut, cut," says Joseph Ventrone, deputy staff director of the House Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, referring to David A. Stockman and James C. Miller III, President Reagan's budget directors. "The Democrats wanted to create, create, create." They both got their ways. During the Eighties HUD's staff and budget actually decreased, from $35 billion to $25 billion. But at the same time Congress created scores of new programs and forced them onto the department.
In 1980, HUD administered 54 congressionally mandated programs. By 1992, the number had risen to more than 200. This is just some of the legislation from those years:
* Housing and Urban-Rural Recovery Act of 1983
* Housing and Community Development Act of 1987
* Emergency Low Income Housing Preservation Act of 1987
* Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987
* Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988
* Fair Housing Amendments of 1988
* Department of Housing and Urban Development Reform Act of 1989
* Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act of 1990
* Housing and Community Development Act of 1992
Each gave HUD new jobs to do, but few provided any ne money with which to do them. As a result, some programs were badly administered while others simply lay around the agency, unfunded and ignored. The stream of legislation forced HUD into a condition known in bureaucratic circles as "program overload."
Housing experts say a succession of HUD secretaries also shares the blame. When a new administration arrives, the new chief wants new programs to "put up in lights," says Mr. Ventrone. But the old programs don't go away, and overload worsens. Mr. Cisneros' FY 1995 budget included 18 new programs.
The NAPA study also questions some of Mr. Cisneros' priorities in his campaign to "reinvent" HUD. Last year, the secretary declared that HUD's main goal would be the elimination of homelessness. He doubled spending on homelessness and began implementing what is known as a "continuum of care" approach, going far beyond the simple provision of housing to address the various social needs of homeless people. The NAPA report doubts the wisdom of that strategy. "For many people," the authors note, "homelessness is less often a housing issue than an income support or mental health issue. . . . HUD may have established an unachievable goal that is becoming a driving force behind many of its programs."
And the trend extends beyond homelessness. In recent years HUD has begun to address other social programs as well, including drug abuse, teen pregnancy, crime, care for the elderly, and others. Here are a few of the recent programs identified by NAPA as having a major social element:
* Drug Elimination Grant Program for Low-Income Housing
* Public/Indian Housing Youth Sports Program
* Congregate Housing Services Program
* Family Self-Sufficiency Program
* Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS
The last program illustrates the problem. Begun in the Jac Kemp years as a plan to give housing assistance to needy HIV-positive people, Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS now spends $185 million a year. Yet recently, Mr. Cisneros created a new Office of AIDS Housing with an unspecified mission. The office has no funding; resources for it will have to be taken from elsewhere in the department. And now it appears the original Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS is on the chopping block.
Too much work
What to do? By all accounts, HUD does not have enough people or money to do all the work that Congress and various secretaries have invented for it. (HUD is, by federal standards, a fairly small bureaucracy: It employs about 12,800 workers, fewer than, say, Apple Computer, which has nearly 15,000. In contrast, the Department of Health and Human Services employs about 127,000). HUD should either do far less and do it far better or be given billions of new dollars to do what Congress has ordered it to do -- a wholly unlikely scenario.
Or could it be done away with? Cut through the hundreds of programs, take a few of the essentials, move them elsewhere, and turn out the lights at HUD headquarters? Although the president has rejected that possibility for now, some experts have devoted extensive thought to how it might take place.
For example, should the federal government be involved in the mortgage business? "There are a lot of people who think not, a lot of people who think the federal government should be only involved where the private sector isn't," says Mr. Ventrone. Thus the Federal Housing Administration could be eliminated (the new administration plan calls for it to become a government-owned corporation). "Community Planning and Development could go into the Economic Development Administration; public housing you could do away with totally," he continues, adding that some planners want HUD to hold a "grand liquidation sale" of public units. Finally, "the housing assistance aspect of public housing could go to HHS."
The Cisneros plan
Some of the ideas are incorporated into Mr. Cisneros' new plan to save HUD. On Dec. 19, he indirectly acknowledged the program overload crisis by pledging to consolidate 60 current programs into just three by 1998. He wants to give local communities the freedom to spend federal dollars as they see fit, and bring about a "dramatic transformation in public housing as we know it in America today." But there is a danger in Mr. Cisneros' plan: If HUD's program cuts are more than matched by budget cuts, the agency will still be left with more programs than money. The program crisis is not media-sexy, and thus has attracted far less notice than some of HUD's other missteps, like abuses of housing subsidies. But program overload is essentially the sum of all HUD follies and it has undermined the department's ability to get anything done. Given that history, the new Congress -- and the newly centrist president -- might do well to go beyond Mr. Cisneros' plans and follow NAPA's advice.
Byron York is a Washington-based TV producer and free-lance writer.