American Notes HOUSING

If you can't kill a Government program, why not milk it? That, it seems, was the attitude of some officials who had failed to persuade Congress to stop spending some $200 million a year on fixing up run-down apartments and making them available to the poor with the help of federal rent subsidies. A report by Paul Adams, inspector general of Housing and Urban Development, suggests that the most effective way to get a housing project approved under President Reagan's HUD Secretary, Samuel Pierce, was for the developer to hire a prominent Republican as a "consultant" and pay him a substantial fee.

The most notable example was that of James Watt, former Interior Secretary and bete noire of environmentalists everywhere. He got $300,000 to help a developer get 312 units of such housing started in Essex, Md., in 1986. His "minimal" role, according to the report, was "to convince the right people that the projects were good and were needed."

Others who got high consulting fees included Richard Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, who has since died; former Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke; former Kentucky Governor Louie Nunn; Philip Winn, current U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland; and Frederick Bush, a close associate, but no relative, of President Bush's. Jack Kemp, the President's new HUD Secretary, has ordered the program stopped until recent grants are reviewed and new approval procedures created.