Lawmakers, responding to what critics say is Ben Carson’s failure to make much headway, unveiled a bill that will require HUD to conduct more rigorous lead paint assessments of hundreds of thousands of homes where HUD-assisted children live. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Finance & Tax Carson's struggle to solve lead paint peril spurs lawmakers to act

When Ben Carson took over as HUD secretary, he vowed to tackle the decades-old danger of children’s exposure to lead paint in housing. Now, more than two years later, a bipartisan group of senators is aiming to hold him to his word.

The lawmakers, responding to what critics say is Carson’s failure to make much headway, unveiled a bill Tuesday to require the agency to conduct more rigorous lead paint assessments of hundreds of thousands of homes where HUD-assisted children live. The legislation would also force landlords to disclose the presence of any lead in homes and enable families to relocate on an emergency basis without losing assistance.


Seven senators have signed on as co-sponsors, including three Republicans — Tim Scott of South Carolina, Rob Portman of Ohio and Todd Young of Indiana. Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate Democrats' chief vote-counter, is among his party's sponsors.

Some lawmakers say they felt let down by Carson over his response to the issue.

“I voted for him, because I knew he had an understanding because of his medical work, his neurological work, and he has been very disappointing,” Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the top-ranking Democrat on the committee that oversees HUD, told POLITICO. “He’s put no special effort in it that I can see. I hope I’m wrong, but I haven’t seen it."

The criticism of Carson — a renowned former neurosurgeon — over this issue is striking because he has talked with rare passion about the perils of lead -paint exposure, perhaps more than any other subject, since he took charge of the sprawling agency in the early months of the Trump presidency.

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Carson has treated audiences to long, unprompted discussions of the brain and stories about how he sometimes kept young patients in the hospital for an extra day rather than sending them home to an unhealthy environment.

He expounded again on the topic during a congressional hearing on Tuesday: “Lead poisoning for a child is devastating — not only acutely, but it has a lifelong impact,” he said. “And not only does it decrease their abilities, but it is very costly to society in terms of their potential.”

Yet there’s not much to show for HUD’s efforts to limit the exposure of children in subsidized housing to lead, which even at the lowest levels can cause permanent brain damage, reduced IQ and behavioral problems. Critics say that while some pockets of the country have seen an improvement, there’s been no real change in strategy or results at the national level, prompting the lawmakers to step in.

The root of the problem, according to advocates, is money — they peg the cost of eliminating lead exposure in housing at $12.5 billion. HUD has also been lax in its oversight of compliance by public housing authorities, according to reports from the department's inspector general and the Government Accountability Office in June 2018.

A department spokesperson defended Carson's record.

“HUD is committed to ridding homes of lead hazards,” Raffi Williams said in an email. “Since Secretary Carson was sworn in, every year HUD has increased its budget for Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes. This funding allows countless communities to put their time and resources into preventing lead hazards.“

The department has also “streamlined the process that states and local governments use to apply for HUD healthy homes grants, set aside funding for new applicants to help them get grants and, if successful, become repeat grantees, and extended the lead hazards control grant periods from three years to three and a half years,“ Williams said.

A 2011 HUD survey found that more than 37 million homes in the country have lead-based paint, with 23 million of those containing “significant” lead hazards. HUD estimated in 2016 that 450,000 housing units receiving federal aid and occupied by children under six were built before 1978, when the federal government banned the use of lead-based paint.

While the inspector general and GAO audits found that the agency generally does a poor job of tracking lead cases in public housing, the department has conceded that “a considerable number of children under age six currently reside in HUD-assisted housing units that contain lead-based paint.”

HUD currently does the more rigorous inspections — testing samples of paint chips and surface dust — on public housing developments but not on the private properties rented by voucher-holders. The department estimated in 2016 that 210,000 households with kids receiving tenant-based assistance were built before 1978 and that 27,000 of those likely have “lead-based paint hazards,” in which deteriorating paint makes exposure more likely.

Advocates say the numbers are almost certainly higher.

The Centers for Disease Control reported in 2014 that 4.1 percent of children in the country tested positive for a blood lead level above 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. Applying that percentage to the number of children in the Housing Choice Voucher program — who are more likely than those not on assistance to live in deteriorating housing — would mean over 90,400 of those children are currently lead-poisoned, according to Emily Benfer, a Columbia Law School associate professor who testified before Congress last year on lead in housing.

In voucher cases, HUD relies on a “visual inspection,” even though the department itself acknowledges in its lead-paint guidelines that “small dust particles are not visible to the naked eye.”

Because the visual inspections often miss easily ingested lead dust, according to health advocates, that means HUD waits for a child to show elevated lead blood levels before taking action — despite a medical consensus that no level of lead in a child’s blood is safe and that the consequences appear to be irreversible.

The CDC calls for a public health intervention when a child exhibits a blood lead level of 5 micrograms or above — a standard HUD adopted in January 2017 under former Secretary Julian Castro after years of using a higher threshold.

Yet even at 5 micrograms, children are 30 percent more likely to fail third-grade reading and math tests, according to one study. At four micrograms, below the HUD threshold, three-year-olds are more likely to be classified as learning-disabled.

The GAO recommended in June that HUD ask Congress for authority to use the more rigorous tests in the voucher program. But the department declined, saying it would first need “to conduct and evaluate the results of a statistically rigorous study” on the new standard’s “impact on leasing times and availability of housing for extremely low-income families.”

Advocates say that’s not good enough. “We’ve been studying this issue for decades — we know how to find the hazards, we know how to protect children, and it’s just a matter of doing it,” Benfer said. “We don’t need any more studies, we need to act.“

GAO in April said its three priority recommendations for HUD on lead paint remain open.

And while Carson has asked for a record $290 million for HUD’s Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes — $11 million over the current level — the Trump administration’s fiscal 2020 budget dramatically cuts two public housing funds that are used to renovate and repair housing, including by removing lead.

The proposal eliminates the $2.8 billion public housing capital fund and slashes the $4.7 billion public housing operating fund by nearly 40 percent.

House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) scolded Carson for the trade-off in a hearing in April.

“You’re giving with one hand, taking away with the other,” Lowey said.

An interagency federal action plan the Trump administration rolled out in December, meanwhile, is full of “fakery,” according to David Jacobs, the chief scientist at the National Center for Healthy Housing and former director of HUD’s lead hazard-control office. Jacobs said he mostly faulted the Environmental Protection Agency for the weakness of the 24-page strategy document.

“Ben Carson, he’s a physician, so he gets the issue,” Jacobs said.

“HUD can only do so much with the resources it has,” he added. “Even though the appropriations have increased, it’s not nearly enough to solve the problem," he said. "This is something we know how to fix. If we continue to drag this out, we’ll just continue to pay the costs of poisoned kids in schools and medical care.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said at a recent hearing that over 800 children under six living in the New York City Housing Authority tested positive for high levels of lead between 2012 and 2016.

“It was completely unnecessary for these kids to get lead in their blood,” she said, adding that Congress since 2012 had “exploded” the military budget and voted to provide tax cuts to corporations.

“Yet at the same time folks have the audacity to say that there’s no money for public housing and that we can’t afford for children to have clean blood,” she said. “I mean, this is morally wrong and it’s also fiscally unnecessary.”