How a “Bipartisan” Bill Rewards Sanctuary Cities and Illegals
President Ronald Reagan vetoed the Big Dig—the massive Boston highway project sold to Congress as a modest infrastructure fix. Lawmakers overrode him anyway. What followed was a textbook Washington story: initial cost estimates ballooned from a few billion into more than $14.6 billion (plus interest), with years of delays, leaks, design failures, graft, and federal taxpayers left holding the bag. Reagan was right then. History is about to rhyme.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act now sitting on the President’s desk follows the same script. Marketed as a commonsense answer to America’s housing shortage, it is in reality a cash cow for sanctuary cities, fraudsters, and illegal aliens—and a ready-made template for the Marxist DSA’s long-term vision of decommodified, government-dominated housing once progressives regain unified power.
To be fair, the bill includes some supply-side language: modest streamlining of environmental reviews for infill projects, updates to manufactured housing rules, zoning “best practices” guidelines, and limits on large institutional investors scooping up single-family homes. These provisions aren’t meaningless. But they are marginal at best and easily blunted by local resistance in the high-cost blue metros where the crisis bites hardest. They serve mainly as political cover for the far larger payload: massive expansions of federal spending pipelines that reward the very governance failures driving the problem in the first place.
At the heart of the bill are programs most Americans have never heard of—but will end up paying for. The HOME Investment Partnerships Program, a major federal block grant used by states and localities to build, buy, or rehabilitate “affordable” housing, gets indefinite reauthorization with broader eligibility and uses. The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program, which converts traditional public housing into project-based vouchers or other subsidized models, sees its caps increased. Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds gain a standing pot for long-term recovery and mitigation. New and expanded grants for whole-home repairs, innovation, and planning pour money into nonprofits, public housing authorities, and local governments. Even the FHA small-dollar mortgage pilot explicitly authorizes direct grants to borrowers for down payments, closing costs, appraisals, and title insurance.
Crucially, the bill contains no serious guardrails. No proof-of-citizenship requirements. No meaningful restrictions on mixed-status households. No exclusion for sanctuary jurisdictions. This isn’t oversight—it’s by design. Recent federal audits have already flagged tens of thousands of illegal aliens and ineligibles benefiting from HUD-assisted housing through sloppy verification and proration loopholes. The bill does nothing to close them. It simply opens the spigot wider.
The consequences are as predictable as a Texas summer. In New York City, where DSA influence runs deep in the City Council and state legislature, the money will flood into NYCHA—the nation’s largest public housing authority and a chronic showcase of waste, fraud, and mismanagement. DSA priorities—social housing models, aggressive tenant protections, decommodified units, and expansive access that includes non-citizens—will shape how those federal dollars get deployed. Repairs and conversions will entrench a system that prizes collective control over market incentives.
The same pattern repeats elsewhere. In Atlanta, entities tied to prominent political figures have managed low-income properties amid evictions and transparency scandals. In Minnesota, nonprofit networks linked to certain migrant communities have exploited federal housing-adjacent funds for large-scale fraud. California’s homelessness spending has become a multi-billion-dollar black hole with sky-high overhead and meager results. These aren’t anomalies. They’re the predictable harvest when federal grant programs lack strict eligibility, performance clawbacks, and accountability to American citizens first.
This is precisely how the DSA transforms housing over time. They don’t need to nationalize every apartment building on day one. They simply expand the federal and nonprofit infrastructure, entrench public and “social” models, weaken market signals, and normalize access that blurs the line between citizen and non-citizen. The bill hands them the perfect vehicle. Once they control the levers again, today’s “temporary” expansions become permanent features of a more centralized system.
Reagan understood this temptation. The Big Dig was supposed to be different too—a targeted project with real oversight. Costs exploded, graft flourished, and ordinary taxpayers paid the price. Overriding his veto proved him correct. We stand on the verge of repeating the error on a national scale, this time with housing as the Trojan horse for ideological transformation.
The President should veto this bill. Not because housing affordability isn’t a genuine challenge—it is—but because this legislation fails the fundamental test of putting American citizens first. It expands spending without guardrails, subsidizes demand while supply-side reforms remain weak, and equips future DSA majorities with exactly the tools they need to reshape the sector in their image.
Americans deserve real deregulation that unleashes building, strict eligibility rules that protect citizens and legal residents, and the fiscal discipline that learns from the Big Dig rather than repeating it. This bill delivers none of those things. It’s time to send it back and demand better.
