Congress has already made a grave mistake by passing the so-called ROAD to Housing Act with veto-proof majorities. Now President Trump is refusing to sign it—and Republicans on Capitol Hill ought to let him have his way. Instead of scheming to override a potential veto, GOP lawmakers should stand down and allow this bloated, destructive piece of progressive social engineering to die.
Let’s be honest about what this bill actually does. It masquerades as a bipartisan effort to make housing more affordable, but in reality it is a massive expansion of federal power into local communities. The bill shovels billions in new spending toward Housing and Urban Development bureaucrats, attaching strings that force suburban towns to dramatically densify neighborhoods, accept high-rise apartment complexes, and cater to a Washington-driven vision of “equitable” development. If you like your neighborhood’s character, too bad. HUD knows better.
It’s no surprise that the animating force behind this legislative disaster is Senator Elizabeth Warren, a politician who has parlayed the art of government failure into a lucrative side career as a memoirist. Warren fancies herself a champion of the working class, yet every policy she authors seems to end the same way: with more federal power, more academic theories imposed on middle-class neighborhoods, and another hardcover book advance to explain why everything went wrong. As the driving intellectual architect of this housing package, she has once again applied her signature formula—diagnosing a crisis largely created by the very regulations she supports, then prescribing an even bigger dose of Washington control as the cure. The former Harvard professor no doubt already has a sequel to *A Fighting Chance* in the works, one that will undoubtedly mourn the housing affordability catastrophe this bill will deepen while carefully omitting her own name from the list of authors who caused it.
And that’s before we get to the immigration problem. You don’t need an economics degree to understand supply and demand. American cities are already bursting at the seams because Washington has spent decades importing millions of low-skilled immigrants with no plan for where they will live, work, or send their kids to school. The result is sky-high rents and unaffordable home prices for the Americans who are already here. Rather than addressing the obvious—namely, reducing the demand pressure through immigration enforcement and lower legal quotas—this bill tries to solve the problem by flooding the zone with subsidized housing and government vouchers. It effectively guarantees there will never be any political pressure to reduce immigration, because federal housing programs will simply pick up the slack.
Then there are the catch-and-release social policy riders tucked inside. Affirmative action contracting rules for builders. Preferred hiring quotas masked as “community benefits agreements.” Census-driven redistribution formulas that punish red states for sound governance while rewarding blue jurisdictions for the very zoning laws and regulations that created their crises in the first place. This is not a housing bill. It is a Democratic wish list with siding and a shingled roof.
President Trump is right to hold this legislation hostage. In fact, he should go further and veto it outright. The Republican Study Committee and conservative members should refuse to support any override vote. A true conservative housing agenda would look radically different: cut illegal immigration, scrap disparate-impact rules that make building costly, remove barriers to cheaper construction materials, get the federal government out of local zoning decisions, and let Americans keep more of their own money instead of laundering it through HUD.
Congress has the power to stop this. All it takes is courage. Let the clock run out. Let the president veto it. And let this awful bill go down in flames before it permanently transforms the American neighborhood.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer
