In a closed-door Florida fundraiser for donors tonight, Mitt Romney offered a rare glimpse into his policy plans if elected President. And, as NBC reports, he got quite trigger-happy:
"I'm going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I'm probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go," Romney said. "Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later. But I'm not going to actually go through these one by one. What I can tell you is, we've got far too many bureaucrats. I will send a lot of what happens in Washington back to the states."
He also hinted at axing the Department of Education. But it's the HUD elimination that's particularly fascinating. For one: as I've documented before, not only was his father, George, the head of HUD but an aggressive one at that---his sweeping policy proposals, particularly for racial integration, were almost certainly what pushed him out of the Nixon Administration.
And two: as Governor, the younger Romney actually championed a lot of the new urbanist policies that HUD now preaches. Here's Alec MacGillis documenting the smart growth-touting Massachusetts chief:
Romney and Foy wasted little time in putting smart-growth policies to work. The state, they declared, would take a “fix-it-first” approach to highway spending—repairing existing roads instead of building new ones. They also pledged to cut the number of SUVs in the state fleet. In addition, the state put out a new highway-design manual intended to make towns more pedestrian-friendly, with narrower streets designed for slower driving speeds. “It was all really woolly, totally green, new-urbanist stuff—and it was state policy,” says Anthony Flint, who covered land-use issues for The Boston Globe and went on to join Foy’s office in 2005. The biggest move came in 2004, when Romney signed legislation, dubbed Chapter 40R, providing funds to towns and cities that agreed to allow more high-density, multi-family housing. “It was fundamentally anti-sprawl. It was saying that the days of having a developer buy a Christmas tree farm and throw up a bunch of single-family homes on half-acre lots were over,” Flint recalls. “It was a real awakening.”
Eight years later, when it comes to city policies, still very few state executives are like the Romney of 2004.
If he wanted to, Romney could probably marshal some solid evidence on his bureaucracy claim. A 2011 GAO report found that HUD's work needlessly overlaps all the type. It doubles up with four other agencies on 52 programs that fall under "entrepreneurial efforts" alone.
Now to get states to take charge of efficient city policies in a HUD-less world, President Romney could start by pointing to his old record. Or---and this one's more likely---he would take another several steps back in his awkward, evasive dance with his younger self.
