Senate investigators charged yesterday that Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo played politics and ignored his department’s own rules when he took away New York City’s ability to hand out homeless grants last year.
Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), who oversees funding of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, hinted that Cuomo targeted Mayor Giuliani just to help fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton in her Senate race.
“There were other motives at play,” Bond said yesterday. “This was a fundamental abuse of due process.”
At the time Cuomo yanked Giuliani’s power to hand out homeless grants, Giuliani was running as the GOP candidate for Senate against Clinton – and Clinton had announced that one of Cuomo’s top aides, Bill de Blasio, would become her campaign manager. Cuomo himself has repeatedly said he’s keen on running for governor of New York.
Bond’s investigators concluded Cuomo had no authority to sanction Giuliani and that his aides used repealed and irrelevant laws to justify the action.
Giuliani charged yesterday that the report showed the “federal government was being used to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
“I have no doubt that was being done … It was absolutely an incorrect way to use the federal government,” the mayor said.
Cuomo announced last December he would hand out grants directly to homeless centers in New York, rather than let the city dole out the funds. His order came a week after a federal judge ruled the city had improperly downgraded a homeless shelter, Housing Works, to keep it from getting a $2.4 million grant. The judge ruled that Housing Works should get the grant.
Cuomo’s spokeswoman, Lisa MacSpadden, said the judge’s ruling gave HUD officials the authority to revoke the city’s authority to hand out $60 million in homeless grants, but Housing officials didn’t respond to the specific charge that Cuomo’s aides justified their decision with repealed and irrelevant laws.
MacSpadden accused Bond of “playing election-year politics” and producing a “political report,” and Cuomo’s aides stressed none of the many e-mails turned over to Bond’s investigators contained any reference to the New York Senate race.
Bond’s investigators also chided Cuomo’s staff for neglecting to tell the federal judge in the Housing Works case that they had plans all along to provide enough money for the shelter, regardless of how the city ranked it.