DOJ rejected the unsubstantiated claims in 2023 within 48 hours, fake politically motivated claims remain unsupported by evidence
AUSTIN – Today, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, M.D., and the Texas General Land Office sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice urging it to once again reject unsubstantiated findings issued by former U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) political appointees in the final days of the Biden Administration. The politically motivated and false claims date back to 2021 and have been successfully disputed for years. The same claims were previously sent to the DOJ nearly two years ago and were rejected for lacking substance – in less than 48 hours.
Commissioner Dawn Buckingham released the following statement:
While the Biden Administration has now lost its bully pulpit it used for political stunts like this, we now call on the DOJ to say what it said before, this is fake news.
The GLO developed the plan for its mitigation funding following HUD’s instructions and then implemented the plan HUD approved – five years ago. The GLO is not at fault because HUD’s political appointees and the liberal advocates who controlled them wanted to hand pick who should get funding and who should not.
More than a million minorities – accounting for two thirds of the total – are beneficiaries of this funding, a fact HUD and most reporters have ignored in this case. The time has come to dismiss these false and ridiculous claims of discrimination.
Read the GLO’s letter to the DOJ here.
Biden’s Failed Burden of Proof
In 2019, during the GLO administration of Commissioner George P. Bush, the agency worked hand in hand with HUD to develop a process for deciding how to allocate the mitigation funds. HUD directives drove the development of the plan. At the time, HUD communicated that the funds could not be awarded to local communities simply based on damage from Hurricane Harvey or other disaster events that qualified the communities to be potentially eligible for the funds. HUD thoroughly vetted GLO’s action plan and issued its written approval on March 31, 2020. In issuing its approval, HUD verified that the contents of GLO’s Action Plan complied with the requirements of federal law.