Adding to the barrage of criticism of prominent Baltimore Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), President Donald Trump recently said “billions and billions” in federal assistance to the city has been “stolen.”
Plenty of federal dollars flow to Baltimore every year, but what happens to all of it is hard to determine, since the city has long had a problem tracking its dollars.
Plenty of Cash
In 2018 alone, $16 billion in federal money went to Cummings’s 7th Congressional District, said Lynne Patton, regional director for Housing and Urban Development, during a July 30 Fox News interview. The district includes West Baltimore, parts of the city’s north and downtown, as well as some surrounding towns and suburbs.Bad Accounts
The city government has long failed to account for how it spends state and federal grant money. A 2014 audit revealed bookkeeping so deficient, it wasn’t possible to track what $40 million in grants from federal, state, and other sources was spent on.Baltimore auditor Audrey Askew, who came a year earlier from a private auditing firm, warned the city could lose access to grants, which make up about a sixth of its $2.8 billion budget. A year later, however, Askew abruptly resigned, offering only a cryptic explanation.
“I am a person of integrity, and I am honest. Anything that alters that, I don’t do.”
A source told the news website that Askew was getting incorrect or unsubstantiated numbers from the city’s Finance Department and was pressed to “write-off” some federal grant money to balance the books.
Mayor Out
Two months later, on April 25, the FBI and IRS raided offices in the City Hall and the home of then-Mayor Catherine Pugh. She was already on an indefinite leave of absence for about three weeks amid a self-dealing scandal.Baltimore Woes
Baltimore is one of the most troubled cities in the United States; it’s America’s most violent city with a population over 500,000 and there’s no sign of improvement. So far this year, there have been some 200 homicides, a 22 percent increase from the same period last year. Shootings are up as well, by 30 percent, the city’s police union said in a July 29 tweet.Meanwhile, the city has more than 13,500 employees, with a total payroll over $821 million annually, according to Open the Books, a federal spending watchdog. That’s about twice as many public servants than employed by Oklahoma City, a metropole of somewhat higher population.
“The deteriorating conditions in Baltimore serve as a great case example,” said Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books founder and chief executive, in an email.
“People need to take individual responsibility for their own lives. More and more government spending isn’t the answer.”