GAO Recommendations on Housing

Via Ezra Klein, I learned that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report on how the government can improve its efficiency by removing duplicative, overlapping, or fragmented programs.

I took a look to see what their recommendations were on housing.  Most housing programs are under the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  It does discuss some military housing, but I'll ignore that for now. 

• In addition to fragmented programs possibly duplicative of other programs in other Departments, the GAO also had criticism of Section 108, which is a loan guarantee provision of Community Development Block Grant program.  Apparently HUD has no way to track long-term performance outcomes for this program, so its effectiveness is unclear.
• GAO recommended that HUD, the Department of Education, and Health &  Human Services develop a more consistent vocabulary to better coordinate services and programs for the homeless population.  GAO notes that the Departments have agreed and have already begun to take some steps. 
• GAO discovered that "in July 2010 that at least seven federal agencies administered more than 20 programs that provide some type of shelter or housing assistance. Similarly, five agencies administered programs that deliver food and nutrition services, and four agencies administered programs that provide health services including mental health services and substance abuse treatment. This range of programs has resulted in a fragmented service system. "  While the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) was created to deal with this (with the goal of ending homelessness within the decade), significant barriers still exist.  The USICH is also attempting to use a common data standard and to have consistent performance measurements.
• GAO noted that transportation is fragmented, with HUD having 11 programs that have allocated money to transportation programs (bus tokens, transit vouchers, etc.) to assist low-income persons with trips to medical appointments, job-training, etc.).  Recommended better coordination among agencies on transportation issues, but recognized this is a difficult area to coordinate on.
• GAO believes that some taxes are not being paid as should be on certain forgiven mortgage debts, which results in lost revenue.  While forgiven mortgage debts on principal residences are not taxed, GAO feels that some mortgages (such as on non-primary residence, etc.) are not being properly taxed.  GAO is urging IRS to change some forms to help them better determine the amount of lost revenue on this.  IRS is being resistant, not believing that the gained revenue will be worth the effort to develop new procedures & processes for tracking this.

This seems to be a new ongoing process as agencies have already begun to respond to the issues discussed within, with more analysis being done by GAO. 

This is exactly the sort of process that I support to make the government more effective, rather than randomly picking a number to cut as many politicans tend to do.  As Ezra Klein states:

People will argue, of course, whether every item in here really is waste, fraud or abuse. But the GAO is considered pretty good at its job, and I think it's safe to say that most of this stuff is low-hanging fruit in terms of saving or raising money and making the bureaucracy work a little bit better. It won't solve our budget problems -- we need to get health-care costs under control to do that -- but it'd do some good. And that should be enough.