Don't Like Bush? Lose Government Contract

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted May 11, 2006.

Last month, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson told a minority business group in Texas that he had retracted a HUD contract after learning it had been awarded to a qualified vendor who happened to be critical of the Bush administration.

"He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years," Jackson said, according to the Dallas Business Journal. "He made a heck of a proposal … so we selected him." Later, Jackson recounted, "he came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said … 'I have a problem with your president.'"

Apparently, that's all it takes to make the Bush administration's enemy's list. The contract was retracted. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president?" Jackson said.

Rewarding one's political allies is nothing new in Washington, but it is illegal to discriminate based on politics. Admitting such an act to a crowd -- with reporters present -- shows how deeply ingrained the Republicans' sense of entitlement is. As blogger Duncan Black commented, "Jackson boasted that he ran HUD like the worst of city patronage machines."

Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Barney Frank, D-Mass., called for an investigation into Jackson, and Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., asked for his resignation. Now Jackson is backpedaling furiously; according to ThinkProgress, the secretary's press flack first confirmed the story and said that Jackson had been referring to "an advertising contract with a minority publication." Later, that same spokesperson denied the story altogether, saying that Jackson had made the whole thing up.

Jackson's office is already taking heat for awarding a recent HUD contract to Shirlington Limousine, the shady company that defense contractor Brent Wilkes --embroiled in the Duke Cunningham case -- used to "transport congressmen, CIA officials and perhaps prostitutes to his Washington parties," according to Harpers. ThinkProgress reports that Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., has requested copies of all records pertaining to the contract and may push for an investigation.

Jackson, a former president of the Austin-based American Electric Power Co., is another in a long line of Bush cronies. Then-Governor Bush first appointed Jackson to the Texas Southern University Board of Regents. He joined HUD in 2001 as deputy secretary and got the top job months after the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Jackson had fired a HUD whistleblower, Richard Mallory, who had gone public with his accusations of "a 'coverup' of fiscal improprieties that was allegedly engineered by a powerful Republican official in Washington, D.C."

There's a pattern here; Mallory replaced another senior HUD official, John Phillips, who was himself demoted "after he complained that his agency was being lax on corruption and mismanagement in the San Francisco Housing Authority," according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Phillips had criticized the agency in a letter to then-Deputy Secretary Alphonso Jackson.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »