A 1984 audit turned up evidence that island park, n.y., officials rigged a program that was supposed to award hud houses to the poor so as to favor the politically connected and exclude blacks. The department of housing and urban development (hud) under the reagan administration hatched a scheme to funnel money to contributors to reagan’s campaign by rigging housing bids in their favor. But hud reform was a low priority of the reagan administration, and that disregard contributed to the major scandals that enveloped the department in 1980s Those scandals owe a lot to the mismanagement and corruption of samuel pierce, reagan's only hud secretary. Washington — he endured eight years in a government post he never wanted, then suffered through five years as the target of an independent counsel who never charged him with a crime During eight quiet years as housing and urban development secretary, samuel r
He drastically curtailed the agency's massive grant programs and. Strauss, (r) special assistant to the secretary of hud, convicted for accepting payments to favor puerto rican land developers in receiving hud funding. Housing department employees used to do much of the work themselves, but their duties were farmed out to private agents as part of the reagan administration's privatization campaign.
OPEN
