While members of the press gradually filled their designated seats at the back of the hearing room where Dr. Ben Carson would undergo uncommonly friendly questioning about his plans to lead the federal department of Housing and Urban Development, members of the Carson family linked up in the hallway. One of his sons could be heard kindly coaching a relative over the phone about how to find the room. He has his father’s same signature tone, an understated steadiness (or what some might call an overstated drowsiness).
That temperament served Dr. Carson well on Thursday during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. The panel was generally kind to Carson, one of Trump’s least contested nominees. The biggest doubt about his fitness to serve since Trump announced the nomination in early December has been whether Carson, a retired neurosurgeon turned pundit and presidential candidate, is really qualified to lead the nation’s public housing policy.
He preempted the prevailing skepticism in his opening statement.
“There’s an assumption that you can only do one thing—and that we have these very limited brains and we’re incapable of learning anything else,” he said. “I find that kind of humorous, particularly knowing what the human brain is capable of.”
As if to illustrate his point, the committee member who most directly called his qualifications into question, North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp, walked back her own criticism. “There’s a lot of people who sort of scratched their head when you were nominated,” she said at first. But she’d given his status as a world-renowned neurosurgeon some thought and determined that he must know—as well as anyone, perhaps—how poverty afflicts Americans, not just spiritually and physically but neurologically.
“I thought about you as a neurosurgeon, and I thought about you as a man who understands brain function—and I thought, you know, you might just be the right guy if you focus on why people are in poverty.” His fresh perspective and self-described holistic outlook, committee Democrats generally agreed, may very well prove a great asset.
The answer to what ails the nation’s neediest, Dr. Carson told the committee, will come from a policy focused more on ends than means, more on individuals’ best paths to achieving independence—and developed more in consultation with the people themselves than with politicians and bureaucrats. He plans a listening tour to meet residents of America’s poorest communities. Government can’t do everything, he said, and when it tries to, it grossly undermines citizens’ innate capacities.
Carson’s personal experience of the steep road from poverty to success will help shape his plans for HUD. Joining forces with other federal agencies, listening to low-income Americans, lessening the regulatory constraints on grant money, and taking on homelessness with Jack Kempian resolve, he wants to get government out of the way, but also use as it an instrument of “true compassion” where appropriate.
That is, “Not keeping people in a situation where we can feel good about what we’re doing. True compassion is putting them in a situation where they can feel good about what they’re going.”
Carson has a history of surpassing expectations. For one thing, his business manager told Reuters days after the election that a cabinet seat was not in the cards: “His life has not prepared him to be a cabinet secretary.” Not two months later, Carson would be testifying the exact opposite, that his upbringing and achievements have uniquely prepared him to reform public policy with a “big picture” approach.
But Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren had her own image of potential conflicts Carson might have to address in his capacity as HUD secretary. She challenged him on the hypothetical misuse of his position, in which he could theoretically frame the department’s policy to favor the Trump family business. The president-elect said he plans to entrust the business to his sons, despite protests from both parties that only a fully blind trust could prevent his unethical use of the presidency for business gains.
Carson took the question as an opportunity to pledge a higher commitment. “It will not be my intention to benefit any American in particular. It’s for all Americans, everything that we do,” he said.
“If there happens to be an extraordinarily good program that’s working for millions of people, and it turns out that someone that you’re targeting is going to gain ten dollars from it, am I going to say, ‘No, the rest of you Americans can’t have it’?”
Warren’s criticisms were eventually resolved by ranking member Sherrod Brown. When it comes to big bad business conflicts, the two men agreed that soon-to-be Secretary Carson will report any brushes between HUD and Trump properties to the Committee, according to forthcoming guidelines that committee members and HUD will decide together.
