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Next "waste, fraud, and abuse" target: Section 8? [1]

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Date: 2025-07-24

I didn’t see anything about this here yet; this is going to be fairly short (probably not as well researched as I intended) as I wanted to get it posted and mea culpa if it ends up being a duplicate story somehow. Just heard about it today in the break room (a lot of my coworkers receive Section 8).

Krasnov/DOGE’s next target for “waste, fraud, and abuse” is the Section 8 voucher program, as reported by PBS. The website Section8Facts also has an explanation of what’s going on.

In February, Reuters fact-checked a claim (verdict: false) made on social media then that an EO had been signed. The wording in that claim referred only to an inauguration-day directive to "lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply"...no reference to public housing at all, but now they appear to be going after it in the name WFA (I kinda saw this coming then, although I didn’t know it at the time).

If enacted, the two-year limit will only exacerbate the housing/homelessness crisis...which is likely exactly what they want. The first step toward the company towns/camps, maybe?

Work requirements: so they’re planning to kick the unemployed/fully disabled off the rolls, or institute similar requirements to unemployment (prove that at a minimum one applied for work, and of course DOGE has and will have everyone’s info so it would be easy to verify...will someone be booted if they don’t have a ‘worthy’ job?). Section 8 vouchers are currently subject to annual recertification and subsequent recalculation of a tenant’s rent share, but the numbers used by HUD can be erroneously inflated depending on multiple factors. So in effect there already are “work requirements” in that if you’re working your share is higher/the local authority pays less. Work “too much”, however, and your assistance is cut anyway/you need to jump through a dozen flaming hoops (typically involving ‘lost’ paperwork or claiming non-submission of something they never said they needed or wanted) to demonstrate continuing need.

This proposal to limit assistance to two years does nothing to address the fact that the program is broken in a way that doesn’t let renters actually ‘move up’ and out of it should they want to.

At a June congressional budget hearing, HUD Secretary Scott Turner argued reforms like time limits will fix waste and fraud in public housing and Section 8 voucher programs while motivating low-income families to work toward self-sufficiency. “It’s broken and deviated from its original purpose, which is to temporarily help Americans in need,” Turner said. “HUD assistance is not supposed to be permanent.

Okay, so I’m willing to say that there is some abuse (tenants being awful and driving landlords out of the program/bringing suspicion and higher hurdles on all voucher holders because of the assholes, landlords deciding to raise rents past the program maximum), but probably not what he thinks. The reason that it’s become permanent for many is out-of-control housing costs. How are arbitrary time limits going to change that? It’s very hard to “work toward self-sufficiency” if you have to be careful not to go over a certain numbers of hours /pay amount per week (can’t save up because they see every dollar) or the jobs just aren’t there.

The study cited by PBS touches on existing experiments on time-limiting assistance, which concluded that these efforts may work locally, but doing so nationwide would be a disaster due to wildly different housing costs (and stable job availability).

Yes, the program is broken, but this is not the way to actually fix it...at least not “fix” in a way that helps the country as a whole.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/24/2335042/-Next-waste-fraud-and-abuse-target-Section-8?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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