WASHINGTON — The White House is considering deep cuts to federal housing programs, including a sweeping overhaul of aid to low-income families, in a reconfiguration that could jeopardize millions of Americans’ continued access to rental assistance funds.
The potential changes primarily concern federal housing vouchers, including those more commonly known as Section 8. The aid generally helps the poorest tenants cover the monthly costs of apartments, town homes, and single-family residences.
Administration officials recently discussed cutting or canceling out the vouchers and other rental assistance programs and potentially replacing them with a more limited system of housing grants, perhaps sent to states, according to three people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential discussions. The overhaul would be included in President Trump’s new budget, which is expected to be sent to Capitol Hill in the coming weeks.
The exact design and cost of the retooled program is unclear, and any such change is likely to require approval from Congress, as White House budgets on their own do not carry the force of law.
But people familiar with the administration’s thinking said the expected overhaul would most likely amount to more than just a technical change, resulting in fewer federal dollars for low-income families on top of additional cuts planned for the rest of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. On Thursday, the Trump administration took the first steps toward potentially selling the agency’s headquarters in Washington.
Federal voucher programs currently provide assistance to about 2.3 million low-income families, according to the government’s estimates, who enroll through their local public housing authorities. The aid is part of a broader universe of rental assistance programs that are set to exceed $54 billion this fiscal year. But the annual demand for these subsidies is far greater than the available funds, creating a sizable waitlist as rents are rising nationally.
New York Times
Education Dept. cuts plan to raise loan payments for some
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is walking back a plan to change how it treats married student loan borrowers in income-driven repayment plans, sparing millions of people from skyrocketing bills.
The decision arrives days after the Education Department’s acting under secretary, James Bergeron, said the agency would calculate payments for married student loan borrowers enrolled in any income-driven plan based on combined earnings, regardless of their tax filing status. The move would have violated federal statutes that give married borrowers the choice of excluding spousal income by filing their taxes separately. It also would have saddled borrowers with higher monthly payments.
Bergeron announced the department’s plans in a court declaration stemming from a lawsuit filed by the American Federation of Teachers. The labor union sued the Trump administration last month for closing applications for income-driven repayment plans, which cap monthly student loan payments at a percentage of earnings with the promise of loan forgiveness after 20 to 25 years. The Education Department had shut down an application for all income-driven repayment plans in February after the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit expanded an injunction blocking President Joe Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education program, commonly known as Save.
At the time, the Trump administration said closing the application for income-driven repayment was necessary to comply with the court order, which said the 1993 statute underpinning Save and two other income-driven plans — Income-Contingent Repayment and Pay as You Earn — did not authorize loan forgiveness. But the order did not direct the department to bar borrowers from accessing the two plans or Income-Based Repayment, which Congress created under a separate statute.
And the teachers union argued that the administration was illegally preventing borrowers from accessing the most affordable repayment plans.
Late last month, the department agreed to reopen the application, but it did not provide a timeline for processing the form. Then last week, the agency told the court that student loan servicers, the contractors the government pays to manage its $1.6 trillion portfolio, would resume processing forms no later than May 10.
Washington Post
Trump appointee asked IRS to review MyPillow CEO audit
A Trump administration official in March asked the IRS to review an audit of MyPillow chief executive and conservative political personality Mike Lindell, according to two people familiar with the request and records obtained by The Washington Post.
David Eisner, a political appointee at the Treasury Department, wrote to senior IRS staff that Lindell, whom he called a “high profile friend of the president,’’ had received his second audit letter in two years and “he is concerned he may have been inappropriately targeted.’’
The IRS referred the inquiry to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the agency’s independent watchdog, said one of the people, who like others in this report spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Tax experts say the outreach on behalf of a Trump political ally is highly unusual and represents a sea change in how political appointees engage with the nonpolitical tax agency.
“That’s so inappropriate,’’ said Nina Olson, who served as the national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019. “In my 18 years as the national taxpayer advocate with over 4 million cases that came into the Taxpayer Advocate Service, in that time with taxpayers experiencing significant problems with the IRS, I have never had a Treasury official write me about a case.’’
In an interview, Lindell said the Treasury Department had “misconstrued’’ his request. Lindell said he sought help from the IRS to resolve a problem with the employee retention credit his company claimed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Congress authorized a tax credit for employers that kept staffers on their payrolls during the economic downturn caused by the pandemic.
Lindell and the IRS disagree about which year his company should claim for the credit, he said. After he emailed the IRS several weeks ago criticizing the program, the tax agency referred him to the Treasury Department, he said.
Lindell also faces a separate proceeding with the IRS over losses he wishes to claim after $10 million of a substance he claimed would cure COVID-19 expired while sitting in a Minnesota warehouse, he said. That is also an issue of timing, he said.
Washington Post
Santos ‘unrepentant’ as he faces prison, prosecutors say
NEW YORK — Disgraced former US representative George Santos “remains unrepentant’’ as he faces years in federal prison for fraud and identity theft, federal prosecutors say, citing a tirade of his social media posts in recent days.
Prosecutors, in a legal filing Thursday, bolstered their arguments for a stiff sentence, saying the 36-year-old New York Republican has disparaged the US Department of Justice as a “cabal of pedophiles’’ and cast himself as a victim of prosecutorial overreach in multiple posts on the social platform X.
“This conduct is antithetical to the ‘genuine remorse’ claimed by Santos’s attorneys,’’ prosecutors wrote. “His actions speak louder than any words, and they cry out for a significant carceral sentence in this case.’’
Lawyers for Santos didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The social media blitz started April 4 after prosecutors and Santos’ lawyers submitted their sentencing memos to a judge for consideration during his April 25 sentencing in Long Island federal court.
“No matter how hard the DOJ comes for me, they are mad because they will NEVER break my spirit,’’ Santos wrote in one post.
In another exchange on X, he denied using campaign contributions to buy luxury goods from Hermès, which prosecutors note is conduct specifically mentioned in court documents.
“Even at this late stage, he simply refuses to fully own up to his actions,’’ they wrote in their Thursday filing, which included screenshots of the social media posts.
Prosecutors are seeking a seven-year prison sentence for Santos, saying his “unparalleled crimes’’ had “made a mockery’’ of the country’s election system.
Associated Press
