Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday said she supports Ben Carson, President Trump’s nominee for Housing and Urban Development secretary, despite touting her long list of concerns regarding his policy views.
“Although I continue to have concerns about Dr. Carson’s inexperience in the field and his comments on poverty and government dependency, he has pledged to ‘look for ways to expand affordable housing options for everyone,’ to ‘aggressively defend the fair housing rights of all Americans’ — including by applying the Fair Housing Act’s disparate impact standard — to ‘strongly support’ existing initiatives to combat homelessness, to enforce, ‘without hesitation,’ equal access rules for LGBTQ Americans, to work with the Banking Committee to ensure that HUD funds are not improperly directed to the president’s businesses, to ‘recruit a bipartisan list of strong housing practitioners’ to serve with him at HUD, and to work with me to address the unacceptable levels of lead in public housing units,” Warren said in a statement following the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee’s hearing.
“In light of these promises, I support Dr. Carson’s nomination, and look forward to working with him to ensure that he follows through on his commitments,” Warren said.
The committee approved Carson’s nomination in a voice vote on Tuesday evening. Carson received bipartisan support from committee members, including Warren’s, a progressive Democrat.
