The U.S. House of Representatives voted this week to give the Department of Housing and Urban Development an 18% increase in funding for information technology.
The Transportation, Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill, which was lumped in with five other bills, would set aside $73 billion in gross appropriations for the department. That is $12.6 billion more than the department’s 2022 final budget, and $1.1 billion more than President Joe Biden requested for 2023.
The measure passed in a 220 to 207 vote Wednesday afternoon. Further negotiations in Congress, however, will likely eat away at that figure. The U.S. Senate is set to deliberate its version of an appropriations bill in the weeks to come.
The House bill would allocate $383 million for HUD’s information technology fund, an increase of $60 million from 2022. The bill would set aside $16.7 million specifically for “development, modernization, and enhancement projects.”
The FHA has made an effort in recent years to update its decades-old single-family IT infrastructure. The Mortgage Bankers Association, in a letter to lawmakers ahead of the vote, argued that the bill should designate part of that $16.7 million for FHA Catalyst, FHA’s flagship IT modernization project.
The MBA wrote that FHA Catalyst is a “crucial project” to modernize FHA’s IT infrastructure, and “provide cloud-based platforms to reduce costs, risk, and fraud.”
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The Federal Housing Administration, the office within HUD that oversees the $1.2 trillion single-family portfolio, would see no increase in its budget. The House proposal would give the FHA $150 million.
The appropriations bill would allocate $1.09 billion for salaries and expenses for HUD’s programs, a year-over-year increase of $125 million. Of that amount, $488 million would go to the Office of Housing and $286 million to the Office of Public and Indian Housing.
A Congressional watchdog in June recommended Ginnie Mae address “staffing-related challenges,” including its heavy reliance on contractors for many functions. But lawmakers decided not to increase Ginnie Mae‘s $33.5 million budget for salaries and expenses. Salaries and expenses for HUD’s Office of Inspector General would also remain unchanged from 2022, at $140 million.
Lawmakers would put $31.03 billion toward the housing choice voucher program, which pays rental assistance to landlords. That funding would renew existing assistance and expand the program’s reach to an additional 140,000 vouchers.
The House proposal also looks to increase funding for homeless assistance grants from 2022 levels by more than $361 million to $3.6 billion. According to HUD’s annual count, just before the pandemic, 580,000 people experienced homelessness on a given night. The department’s 2021 count dwindled to just 326,000, in part due to “pandemic-related disruptions to counts of unsheltered homeless people.”
The House bill would also give $5.3 billion in grants to states, counties and cities for a range of community development activities, an increase of $458 million. A program that distributes grants to build, buy or rehabilitate affordable housing for rent or homeownership would see a $175 million increase to $1.67 billion.
Fair housing programs would see a modest $1 million increase from 2022 to $86 million. The House bill would allocate $160 million to policy and research, a $15 million increase from 2022.
Additionally, the bill includes $70 million for housing counseling, $12.5 million more than the prior year, and $4 million more than Biden requested.
