May 13, 2016
"to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life." --Abraham Lincoln
Chairman's Note: No National Zoning Board
The Obama economy has been tough on America’s working families. Just this week Pew Research Center reported that in the last 15 years “the middle class lost ground in nearly nine-in-ten U.S. metropolitan areas.”
One cause of this 15-year squeeze of hardworking Americans? Rising housing prices.
While household income has largely been flat during the Obama recovery – the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression – housing prices have continued to sky rocket, in large part because government regulations artificially inflate the cost of building new units. In fact, regulatory fees on home builders have increased a whopping 30 percent since 2011, as reported in The Wall Street Journal last week.
And yet the Obama administration wants to make this problem even worse by implementing its “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule, which was issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) last year. According to HUD officials, this rule is needed because “increasing a neighborhood’s appeal to families with different income and ethnic profiles can encourage a more diversified population and reduce isolation.”
In other words, this new regulation is designed to give unelected, anonymous bureaucrats in Washington the power to pick and choose who your new next-door neighbor will be. If they don’t believe your neighborhood is “diverse” enough, they will seize control of local zoning decisions – choosing what should be built, where, and who should pay for it – in order to make your neighborhood look more like they want it to.
HUD has this power because far too many communities have become accustomed to relying on the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which gives federal dollars to local communities for projects designed to reduce poverty and housing segregation.
But a recent study by the Reason Foundation demonstrated that while the CDBG program has been a boon for special interests and channeling taxpayer dollars to politically connected groups, it has been entirely unsuccessful in actually reducing poverty or housing segregation.
The so-called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule would only continue CDBG’s well-established track record of failure. Instead of helping all American families by lowering housing costs, the AFFH rule would only add yet another layer of bureaucratic red tape on developers, making it less likely – not more – that they will find it worthwhile to build more housing units.
Next week, the Senate will have a chance to fight back against this misguided power grab, by adopting an amendment to this year’s Transportation and Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill that would prohibit HUD officials from spending any money to implement the new rule.
Americans are indeed suffering from high housing prices. But the answer is not a top down National Zoning Board in Washington.
Issue in Focus: Reallocate Ebola Funds to Address Zika Threat
With the warm, muggy weather of summer fast approaching and the spread of the Zika virus continuing to ascend northward from South America, many Americans are worried that mosquito-borne transmission of Zika may become a reality in the continental United States. And there is good reason for concern: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa have already seen cases of Zika transmitted by local mosquitoes, and there have been several travel-associated cases of Zika in the 50 states.
Although the virus has relatively mild symptoms and is rarely fatal, infection during pregnancy may cause severe birth defects and neurological conditions, making Zika a major threat to pregnant women and their unborn children. That’s why several states have called on the federal government to provide emergency funds to help them marshal the public-health resources they need to protect their citizens from the potential spread of Zika.
Next week the Senate will debate these requests and will likely consider several measures, as amendments to an appropriations bill, that take dramatically different approaches to paying for the resources needed to prevent an emerging Zika crisis at home.
Two of the amendments take the discredited “spend now, pay later” approach that the American people have repeatedly rejected. Both Senator Nelson’s amendment and Senators Blunt and Murray’s amendment fail to specify how Congress would pay for the $1.9 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively, that they authorize for Zika-related prevention and treatment. With our national debt quickly approaching $20 trillion, we simply cannot afford to continue to spend money the government doesn’t have.
A more fiscally responsible approach is taken in Senator Cornyn’s amendment, which would use a portion of an Obamacare slush fund, the Prevention and Public Health Fund, to pay for $1.1 billion of Zika funding. While this is a much smarter use of taxpayer dollars, Senate Democrats, who remain committed to defending every last feature of Obamacare, will likely prevent the amendment from receiving the support it needs to pass.
But this doesn’t mean the Senate is out of options. There are other ways to help fight Zika without driving the country further into debt. Indeed, with an annual federal budget of approximately $4 trillion, there are trillions of ways Congress can provide the money we need to prevent an outbreak of Zika without adding a dime to the deficit.
The most obvious place to find the money we need for emergency Zika-response efforts is the account Congress established back in 2014 to combat the Ebola epidemic, which currently has more than $2 billion in unused federal funds – more than enough to cover Zika-related expenses.
Taking money that was authorized to address a foreign threat that no longer exists and bringing it back home to fight a new and emerging mosquito-borne threat that risks harming Americans may be the most logical approach, but that doesn’t mean Senate Democrats won’t find it politically expedient to block any such measure in order to perpetuate their favorite myth that Republicans are heartless obstructionists.
But of course, the Senate is not controlled by the Democratic Party. So the question is: will we let them get away with it?
------------------------------------
Sen. Lee Fights President Obama’s National Zoning Board
WASHINGTON—Today, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) took to the Senate floor to discuss the importance of passing his amendment in relation to H.R.2577, the THUD/MilConVA Appropriations bill, which would put a stop to President Obama’s national zoning board.
Remarks as prepared for deliver are available below, and can be viewed here.
Mr. President: The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule – which my amendment would defund – is equal parts condescension and willful blindness.
The condescension of the rule and its proponents is that local governments and Public Housing Authorities across America can’t figure out how to provide fair and affordable housing to their communities without the help of federal bureaucrats.
This is the epitome of the paternalism that informs so much of what happens in Washington, D.C. today.
I don’t doubt – as Senator Collins has said repeatedly – that local governments would like “better guidance” from the Department of Housing and Urban Development here in Washington.
But this is a problem that was created by HUD – with its onerous requirements and vague mandates – not the result of local governments being unable or unwilling to provide adequate low-cost housing for their neighbors in need.
And this brings us to the “willful blindness” part of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule.
Proponents of the rule claim that HUD officials consulted closely with local governments and Public Housing Authorities when drafting and finalizing the AFFH rule.
In their telling, local housing agencies across the country are welcoming the AFFH rule with open arms.
But this ignores what local officials have actually said about AFFH.
I’ll let these local officials speak for themselves.
Roger Partridge, the County Commissioner of Douglas County Colorado, had this to say about AFFH, the closed process that produced it, and the immense burdens it will place on local governments.
In an email he wrote:
“Douglas County believes that the Assessment of Fair Housing tool as it now stands is an unfunded mandate that will create an administrative nightmare for jurisdictions who want to further fair housing and implement community programs with HUD grants.”
Commissioner Partridge continues:
“HUD headquarters has repeatedly ignored the local practitioners responsible for AFFH and implementing the AFH and in our communities.”
“In fact, HUD headquarters staff was in Denver for a Public AFFH roundtable on April 21st, during [the AFFH rule] comment period. They ignored the opportunity to inform Region VIII Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO) staff or the local practitioners attending the roundtable. No notice from the HUD EXCHANGE to the grantee list serve was found. The local governments who were asked to comment on the publication were shut out of the process.”
Likewise, this is what we’ve heard from Salt Lake County officials.
“The administrative burden imposed by this tool is excessive. Resources that could be put into housing related tasks are being funneled into completing the tool and its associated administrative tasks.”
“Additionally, although HUD claims that this tool can be completed without the use of a consultant, the assessment is complex enough to warrant considering a consultant. The rule imposes a jurisdictional and regional analysis that is too complex to be effectively completed by staff without specific statistical and mapping knowledge. As housing providers, most staff at PHAs have comparative advantages that lie in providing affordable housing services, but not providing complex statistical data analysis. Forcing PHA staff to do this analysis is an inefficient use of their scarce time.”
“The AFH does not recognize the zero-sum nature of a PHA’s resource allocation. By allocating resources to complete this process, PHAs are not allocating resources somewhere else. Those resources could be used to provide additional housing assistance.”
Mr. President, instead of ignoring the words and experiences of our local officials – and instead of condescending to them – we should listen to and learn from them.
We should stop this disastrous new housing rule from causing more problems than it already has.
I yield the floor.
----------------------
Leashing Leviathan: The Case for a Congressional Regulatory Budget
WASHINGTON – On Wednesday, May 25 at 10 AM EST, Sen. Lee (R-UT) will be joined by Reps. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Mark Walker (R-NC) to discuss the Article I Project’s Regulatory Budget Act.
The Regulatory Budget Act would, for the first time, require Congress to vote on the total regulatory burden each federal agency may impose on the American people each year – a budget for federal regulatory costs to mirror Congress’s annual budget for taxes and spending.
Just as Congress binds the federal government to a spending budget every year, it has the power – and we believe the obligation – to maintain an annual regulatory budget, so that the American people know, and can determine, the cost of the rules and regulations with which they must comply.
--------------------------
Senators Commit to Oversight of Consolidation in Agri-Chem Industry
WASHINGTON—Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Amy Klobuchar (R-MN), and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) today issued the following statements in response to press reports of a potential merger between Bayer and Monsanto. The $62 billion deal, which would combine two of the largest companies in crop sciences and agricultural chemicals, comes in the wake of proposed mergers between Dow and DuPont and ChemChina and Syngenta.
“The accelerating trend of consolidation in the agricultural space should be of deep concern to American consumers, touching as it does on the competitiveness of the industry that provides most of our nation’s food,” said Lee. “As Chairman of the Antitrust Subcommittee, I will be undertaking close oversight of these deals and the antitrust enforcement agencies’ review of them to ensure that competition remains vibrant in one of the largest and most important sectors of the American economy.”
“The current wave of consolidations across our economy raises many concerns for American consumers and why I have fought—and will continue to fight— hard to promote competition across all sectors and industries,” said Klobuchar. “As Ranking Member of the Antitrust Subcommittee, I take seriously my responsibility to provide oversight over potential consolidations and to ensure that antitrust laws are vigorously enforced to protect competition.”
“For some time, concerns have been raised that the recent proposed seed company mergers could create a domino effect and consolidate the industry,” said Grassley. “The Bayer-Monsanto talks only heighten the possibility that the industry, farmers and consumers could be adversely impacted by this consolidation trend. The Justice Department’s role to ensure a competitive marketplace is even more critical as it studies how these proposed deals play into the big picture in the seed and chemical industry. I’ll be watching closely for any developments that may negatively impact Iowa farmers and consumers
---------------
