Page 1 GAO-25-108045
St. N.W.
Comptroller General
of the United States
May 20, 2025
The Honorable Scott Turner
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
451 7th Street, SW
Washington, DC 20410
Priority Open Recommendations: Department of Housing and Urban Development
Dear Secretary Turner:
Congratulations on your appointment. The purpose of this letter is to call your personal attention
to two areas based on GAO’s past work and nine priority recommendations, which are
enclosed.
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Additionally, there are 91 other GAO open recommendations that we will continue to
work with your staff to address.
We are highlighting the following areas that warrant your timely and focused attention.
Specifically:
Reducing fraud risk in federal funding for disaster recovery. Community Development
Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) remains vulnerable to numerous fraud risks,
including grantee, contractor, and applicant fraud. In response to a historic string of U.S. natural
disasters, Congress appropriated about $39.5 billion in CDBG-DR grant funds from 2017
through 2019.
To address fraud risks, we recommended in August 2023 that the Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD) identify ways to collect and combine contractor and subcontractor
data across grantees and subrecipients to facilitate risk analyses. We also recommended that
HUD develop and implement guidance for grant recipients and subrecipients to facilitate
identification of contractor and cross-cutting fraud risks. By implementing these
recommendations, HUD and grantees could better understand the risk environment for grants
and help support the ability of grantees and subrecipients to determine contractor eligibility.
Additionally, we recommended that HUD comprehensively assess CDBG-DR for fraud risk. By
doing so, HUD could better understand the wide-ranging fraud risks facing CDBG-DR and its
grantees and prevent potential fraud, waste, and abuse.
Addressing challenges in federal disaster recovery efforts. HUD faces challenges in
managing the billions of dollars used to support community recovery after natural disasters. In
fiscal years 2022 and 2023, we recommended that HUD develop and implement an interagency
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GAO considers a recommendation to be a priority if, when implemented, it may significantly improve government
operations—for example, by realizing large dollar savings; eliminating mismanagement, fraud, and abuse; or making
progress toward addressing a high-risk or duplication issue.
