Barney Frank: “To give the gentleman from Iowa his due, he has an alternative argument, which is once there is a vote of Federal funds…”

“To give the gentleman from Iowa his due, he has an alternative argument, which is once there is a vote of Federal funds to a local government, then the unfunded mandate issue disappears. His argument is that because the local governments have the theoretical right to refuse all public housing funds, any condition we impose on them which increases their cost is not an unfunded mandate. As I said, that is the great gotcha. What it means is that you can give money to a local government, they incur ongoing operations, and the way they can get around it, the gentleman from Iowa says, is, "It's not an unfunded mandate, you can abandon public housing altogether, and if you don't, we gotcha."”