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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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052289
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05228900.033
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1990-09-17
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NATION, Page 39American NotesHOUSINGIt's Who You Knew at HUD
If you can't kill a Government program, why not milk it? That,
it seems, was the attitude of some officials who had failed to
persuade Congress to stop spending some $200 million a year on
fixing up run-down apartments and making them available to the poor
with the help of federal rent subsidies. A report by Paul Adams,
inspector general of Housing and Urban Development, suggests that
the most effective way to get a housing project approved under
President Reagan's HUD Secretary, Samuel Pierce, was for the
developer to hire a prominent Republican as a "consultant" and pay
him a substantial fee.
The most notable example was that of James Watt, former
Interior Secretary and bete noire of environmentalists everywhere.
He got $300,000 to help a developer get 312 units of such housing
started in Essex, Md., in 1986. His "minimal" role, according to
the report, was "to convince the right people that the projects
were good and were needed."
Others who got high consulting fees included Richard Nixon's
Attorney General, John Mitchell, who has since died; former
Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke; former Kentucky Governor Louie
Nunn; Philip Winn, current U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland; and
Frederick Bush, a close associate, but no relative, of President
Bush's. Jack Kemp, the President's new HUD Secretary, has ordered
the program stopped until recent grants are reviewed and new
approval procedures created.