Tom Coburn: “We are talking about housing. For years we have spent a tremendous amount of money on homelessness in this country. What…”

“We are talking about housing. For years we have spent a tremendous amount of money on homelessness in this country. What this amendment would do, frankly, is help us know what to do on homelessness. It would cause us to take an in-depth look at our current state of homelessness in hopes of providing constructive solutions to that problem. We have spent billions of dollars every year for Federal housing programs, but homelessness rates have remained constant for decades. In other words, it doesn't matter how much money we have spent, we have not seen a decline in homelessness. We ought to be about asking the question: What is wrong? We continue to spend more money. Yet we make no impact on the rate of homelessness. A number of reviews have found Federal housing programs are ineffective and misspend too much money on nonhousing assistance, are not sufficiently allocated or distributed, and are subject to tens of millions of dollars of waste and fraud. The waste and fraud actually has been documented. HUD's ability to effectively carry out its mission is so impaired that these shortcomings should be addressed if we ever hope to eliminate homelessness in our country.”