Josh Brecheen: “My amendment would reduce spending by bringing the Department of Housing and Urban Development's funding for the fair…”

“My amendment would reduce spending by bringing the Department of Housing and Urban Development's funding for the fair housing activities back to the fiscal year 2019 levels, which would be a cut of $19.7 million. Cutting funding back to pre-COVID 19 levels across the board for nondefense discretionary funding can right-size a discretionary budget that has grown 30 percent larger since the pandemic. We must return nondefense discretionary spending back to the 2019 spending levels if we are ever to have hope on the discretionary side of getting our fiscal house in order. To accomplish that for this program--this is a modest cut of 0.022 percent of the total funding of this bill. I want to repeat that. It is a 0.022 percent cut, that is a cut of one-fifth of 1 percent. Allowing the data to speak for itself, according to HUD's own statistics, there were 11,741 housing discrimination complaints filed to the Department in 2022. According to HUD, in fiscal year 2022, there were 15 cases of housing discrimination that were referred to the Department of Justice, of those cases, 14 were closed out by DOJ, meaning there was only one case out of over 11,000 that led to a charge of housing discrimination. While many housing discrimination complaints are settled, most cases are found to be without cause or closed entirely.…”