HUD: Biden-Era Rental Assistance Payments Went to Deceased Tenants, Noncitizens
The agency accused the Biden administration of pushing out the funds “with minimal oversight” and just trusting the people who received the money.
A Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) report revealed that over $5 billion of Biden-era rental assistance payments went to deceased tenants and noncitizens.
“A massive abuse of taxpayer dollars not only occurred under President [Joe] Biden’s watch, but was effectively incentivized by his administration’s failure to implement strong financial controls resulting in billions worth of potential improper payments,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner told The New York Post.
Turner added: “HUD will continue investigating the shocking results and will take appropriate action to hold bad actors accountable. Additionally, the Department is advancing efforts made under President Trump’s first administration to strengthen program integrity and ensure taxpayer-funded assistance serves the vulnerable communities it was intended for.”
The HUD FY 2025 Agency Financial Report highlighted accomplishments by HUD’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO), including efforts to weed out corruption and waste.
“HUD embraced the transformative potential of artificial intelligence by developing use cases for an AI-powered policy assessment tool, single audit automation, and fraud detection through analysis of receipts submitted via the sub-recipient reporting portal,” explained the agency. “These capabilities will enable HUD to identify and mitigate fraud, waste, and abuse more effectively, and position itself at the forefront of technological innovation, accelerating modernization and enhancing its ability to deliver on its mission.”
The AI tool helps detect fraud and waste in rental assistance programs because they have “complex regulations” and take too much time to research.
During FY 2024, HUD sent out $50 billion in federal rental assistance.
Over $16 billion went through the Project-Based Rental Assistance (PBRA) and over $33 million through the Tenant-Based Rental Assistance (TBRA), covering over four million households.
“This disbursement of funding design along with complex eligibility and program requirements, increased the risk of payment errors and highlights the necessity for more robust monitoring and verification tools for the rental assistance programs,” according to the report.
The agency accused the Biden administration of pushing out the funds “with minimal oversight” and just trusting the people who received the money.
Yeah, that went over well: “For the first time, HUD evaluated all 4+ million tenant records and the registration status of more than 21,000 recipient organizations, uncovering eligibility issues affecting more than 200,000 tenants and identifying questionable payments totaling $5.8 billion (including approximately $4.3 billion (26.4%) of PBRA payments and $1.5 billion (4.4%) of TBRA payments).”
Insanity: “The around 11% of taxpayer dollars from HUD went to more than 200,000 possibly ineligible tenants — of whom 29,715 (around 14%) were dead, 9,472 (4%) were non-citizens and 165,393 (82%) were receiving sums that exceeded the threshold for assistance in their geographic region, particularly in New Orleans and other large metro areas.”
HUD has to contact “the public housing authorities and other entities to confirm the extent of the fraud — and either pause or revoke funding.”
HUD will also send criminal referrals if needed.
“HUD is implementing processes and procedures to revoke or pause funding as part of its efforts to hold bad actors accountable,” one official told The New York Post. “Additionally, the Department could make criminal referrals and exercise other enforcement actions once it has confirmed fraud occurred.”
OMG
HUD Secretary Scott Turner says they discovered nearly $5 billion in potential fraud payments including to 30k DEAD PEOPLE and thousands of illegals
But Democrats said this is impossible and never happens and that’s why they were against DOGE… 🤔 pic.twitter.com/9QWY1k3LeY
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 30, 2025
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Comments
dead or alive doesnt matter
they pay them both cause they
get their votes
Why is the federal government paying rental assistance in the first place.!?!?!?! Shit can the program.
Why are they paying for many things?
Well yeah. That too.
Why you are at it get rid of HUD! Housing and Urban development is a local matter best paid for with local monies. Its existence is more egregious than that of a Department of Education.
That or have robust oversight/audits with automatic revocation of program eligibility, mandatory claw back of ineligible funding authorized/submitted by States (across all federal programs) and stiff mandatory minimum prison terms for malfeasance much less fraud.
I have owned and managed rental properties for nearly 37 years and the fraud I have seen got worse beginning about the time of the financial crisis. Even local housing authorities became so lax that property owners began to refuse dealing with them.
Agreed. I had one long-term rental and several short term rental properties over the years. The willingness of people to attempt scams, chisel down what they owe, lie to avoid paying in full became too much to deal with.
No just get rid of them. Why do I have to essentially pay for someone’s rent.
Projects that were supposed to be temporary living have become generational assets for a set of ungrateful grifters, And now progressive cities are placing illegal aliens there and doing it proudly. No. I don’t pay my taxes for this and I don’t vote for this,
Perhaps if the situation was different or the people were different or I was a billionaire myself I wouldn’t mind. But I do.
Every single program like this contributes to the size of government, the amount of my taxes, and the amount of the national debt. It adds virtually nothing of value.
Adding more oversight audits is another word for adding more federal employees, As if we don’t have enough.
Don’t get me started on how these programs are grifted off of as well as taken advantage of by progressive politicians and NGOs riding along the gravy train. Connected politicians make bank off of them as well as their spouses. The husband of former senator mccaskill received 131M fed dollars some for housing programs for example.
Fine by me to end it today. Realistically is that likely in the next year or even five years? IMO until we can perform audits Nationwide for the whole panoply of Federal funded/State administered ‘do gooder/welfare’ programs to demonstrate the extent of the fraud we won’t get sufficient political support to end the programs. There’s gotta be prison terms for not just the folks scamming but also for the malfeasance or deliberate/reckless indifference by State officials responsible for administering these programs and ensuring eligibility requirements are followed to a T. Start jamming up public sector union employees with lengthy prison terms and things get very ‘real’ very quick with far less malfeasance or turning a blind eye.
You are correct in that realistically it will never end. These programs never do,
Consider how feckless half our judges are I doubt we will ever get much remedy through the courts against abusers.
BTW: You know how China would treat such fraud, Perhaps we should just let them take us over and be done with it, Walz would not be very happy with how they would deal with him even if he is a Chinese asset.
I hate to tell you but this is pretty tame in terms of Federal spending wasted or even the Federal government involved in these types of things in the first place.
Until we.send people to prison for very lengthy sentences it ain’t gonna end. We have far too many irresponsible people who’ve grown dependent on Uncle Sugar; folks get the benefits, public employees who administer the programs and the virtue signaling wokiestas who demand the rest of us send higher taxes to DC to make them fell better about themselves.
The real way to stop all this crap is pretty simple. Flat tax @18% on all income no matter active, passive. Same rate for short term cap gain. Set long term cap gain at 15% but make it a five year period. No Social Security/Medicare tax put both on the books from general revenue. Do that and we immediately get some momentum for fiscal restraint b/c suddenly the deficit and national debt impact everyone directly b/c of SSA/Medicare. Sort of a backdoor balanced budget amendment. All sorts of wasteful ‘luxury leftist’ spending items will have to be ended to pay for SSA/Medicare from general revenue.
NGOs are a huge problem. How can we get rid of them and their meddling?
Stop funding them with taxpayer dollars would go a very long way towards ending the majority of NGO who’ve sprung up to take $ from gov’t to perform ‘services’ for gov’t.
Not sure. I’m no expert but it seems to me the rise of NGOs are the result of the desire by governments to outsource instead of keeping the work in house. Activists noticed this and stepped into the vacuum and were give millions and sometimes billions of dollars for their pet projects. The NGO are disinclined to actually fix anything as that reduces their source of income. Thus we have the present state.
The problems start with the programs themselves. Kill the programs kills the money. Killing the money will kill the NGOs. They will whither away. Tough killing any program though.
Dang. It’s like drinking through a fire hose.
Can the federal government be indicted as a criminal enterpise – under rico, or something – and sued to refund all tax dollars for the previous 20-30 in order to recoop the forced funding of all this fraud?
Asking for 200 million tax payers…
It’ll take a very long time for everything to come fully into the light but in the end we’ll discover that Joe Biden was (I use the past tense because there’s 0% chance of him living long enough to be prosecuted) the most nakedly corrupt politician in American history.
For those young enough to be held to account for the trillions (yes, trillions) in fraud there is simply no punishment severe enough for them.
Looting the Republic
My view is Sundowner was picked like a brain dead CEO so the company could steal everything
Five billion here.
At least that in Minnesota and Ohio in the Somali fraud schemes.
How many tens of billions in Laficornia?
People have started to say that perhaps our entire federal deficit is made up of fraudulent payments. I’m starting to believe it.
I’m pretty certain that if federal budgets had to be balanced, the system would police and prevent much of the overt fraud. Unlimited deficit spending negates any discipline or restraint on spending.
What if our entire annual deficit is made up of mostly fraud….
“$5 billion in potential fraud payments including to 30k DEAD PEOPLE”
But that’s what THEY voted for, and they won that election.
Joe Biden is bound and determined to collect his 10% whether he is dead or alive,
The easiest audit is to stop paying and require that anyone who wants to reinstate has to prove their eligibility. If dead people show up, arrest them.
For Democrats, fraud is a feature – not a bug.
Biden had a black DEI lady running HUD. What could go wrong? Her stated priority was wealth equity so she was just handing out the cash.
You’d think a DEAD PERSON’S SS# would trigger an IMMEDIATE cut off of ANY FUNDING! I know when my Dad and my Mom died it wasn’t long before SS sent a letter about their “overpayments” for the portion of the month in which they died! OH, and that whopping FUNERAL ALLOWANCE of $255.00!! That’s just for the FIRST one to die!
You’d think with our massive and sophisticated computerized Government that once a person was issued a DEATH CERTIFICATE (that SHOULD include their SS#) every system would tie into a “Death Registry” to flag payments and VOTER REGISTRATION! We’re missing something on a LOT of levels!