Community Development Block Grants: Waste the Continuing Resolution Should Cut

Kathryn Nix / February 16, 2011

Last Friday, the House Appropriations Committee unveiled its revised spending plan for the remainder of fiscal year (FY) 2011. This continuing resolution would reduce discretionary spending by more than $100 billion compared to the spending levels requested in President Obama’s FY 2011 budget proposal.

Though enacting serious spending reductions is the only fiscally responsible way to put the nation’s fiscal house on sound footing, liberals have responded to cuts by calling them “unworkable,” “dire,” and “disturbing.” But a closer look reveals that the opposite is true.

One program that the Appropriations Committee proposes to cut is the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. Heritage’s Ronald Utt writes that the CDBG was intended to “provide housing assistance to low-income families and improve the economic environment in their communities.” But rather than solely assisting the poor as it was intended, the CDBG program has become a source of funding for wasteful pork-barrel projects since its 1974 inception, such as the Mark Twain House and Museum, the Salvador Dali Museum, and the Helen Keller Birthplace Foundation. (more…)