Barack To HUD Employees: “No More Roy Bernardi Appointments.”

Prior to the election, Barack Obama sent letters to career federal employees in seven key agencies to outline how his administration would roll back the policies of the Bush Administration. Obama sent the letters at the behest of John Gage, President of the 600,000 strong American Federation of Government Employees. The letters were signed by Obama and stated forcefully his intention to reverse the policy of the Bush Administration to cut funding for enforcement, hire political cronies and politicize agency’s missions.

The best line cited in the article came in Barack’s letter to HUD employees:
“I am committed to appointing a Secretary, Deputy and Assistant Secretaries who are committed to HUD’s mission and capable of executing it.”

In other words: No more Roy Bernardi-types, the former mayor of Syracuse who rose to the number two spot at HUD due to his political connections, despite having no discernible management skills and a record of mismanaging Syracuse’s HUD-funded programs while Mayor.

Disaster Averted, Roy Bernardi Passed Over As New HUD Secretary

OH, THANK GOD! Roy Bernardi, currently Assistant Secretary at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, has been sidestepped by the Bush Administration for the top job. GW announced today that Steve Preston, director of the Small Business Administrationhas been named to succeed the disgraced and retiring Alphonso Jackson as the next Secretary at HUD.

Preston is evidently competent, working diligently to remake the SBA. Most governmental agencies run by Bush appointees feature a steel cage match between incompetence and corruption to determine standard operating procedure. Preston apparently prizes competence and results. The signature accomplishment of his tenure at SBA was cutting through the languishing backlog of assistance requests at SBA for small businesses wiped out by Hurricane Katrina. Preston pushed $6 billion in aid out the door in a matter of months.

Our nation has been spared the incompetence of Roy Bernardi, a political hack whose signature accomplishment as mayor of Syracuse was mismanaging the Finance Department so badly that the city had no idea what its accounts receivable balance was on any given day. This led to charges of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission because when the city issued a bond, the information provided to investors on the city’s finances was just a guess.

A Bernardi-directed HUD would be unable to tackle the pressing problems facing our country in the mortgage foreclosure/credit crunch/undefinable derivative financial product /Wall St. land grab (take your pick) crisis. Wow, it is certainly a new day in Bushland–competence over cronyism.

Roy’s Our Boy, But A Cabinet Secretary?

Update:
Rep. Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services committee released a statement today asking President Bush to appoint an acting Secretary with the authority to: “work with us in making the decisions we need to deal with the housing finance crisis.”

Roy’s not your boy, Barney.

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson resigned today. The resignation doesn’t become official until April 18th and he has pledged to help in the transition. Holy mother of god, this could mean Roy Bernardi, currently the number two guy at HUD, may be picked to become the next Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Deveopment.

Roy served 20 years as auditor of the city of Syracuse and seven and one-half years as Mayor. The highlights of his career in Syracuse include investigation for drunken sexual assault on a young lady (no charges were brought), eviscerating the city’s finance department staff to the extent that the city couldn’t accurately track it’s revenues and expenses (resulting in the SEC citing the city for making up financial figures in a bond issue it floated) and making reckless economic development loans that left the city repaying HUD over $20 million with money that otherwise would have gone to help low income folks repair their houses.

HUD has been working with Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the costs of the subprime mortgage crisis for homeowners threatened with foreclosure. Sports Illustrated used to have a weekly feature, a dubious sports highlight that was evidence “The Apocalypse Is Upon Us.” Roy Bernardi sitting at the table in a U.S. President’s cabinet is just such an event. May the good lord help us all. (The band may now start playing “Nearer My God To Thee”)