This was a vote on an amendment by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) that would have required the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to announce on its web site of the termination of a federal program which provided a maximum of $50,000 in subsidized loans to homeowners who were at least three months delinquent on their home mortgages as a result of unemployment. The amendment also required HUD to instruct the public to contact their members of Congress for assistance if they were unable to pay their home mortgages.

This amendment was offered to a bill that eliminated the subsidized loan program for struggling homeowners described above.

Waters urged support for her amendment: “…We need transparency in what we do and in the public policy that we make. We need to be able to communicate better and clearly with our constituents. And so they have been told and started to get involved with this program that would assist unemployed homeowners to be able to stay in their homes. As you know, this program was specifically developed so that it could deal with the high unemployment rates and the fact that people who had been working--some of them all of their lives--are now unemployed or underemployed or have medical conditions that cause them not to be able to pay their bills in the way that they had been paying them in the past. And so now that we are coming along just since this program has started and saying, oh, sorry, the program is eliminated, we need to be able to communicate that, and this is what this amendment would do. American homeowners deserve our assistance and they deserve our help.”

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) argued that since HUD had not yet implemented this program, announcing its termination would only confuse the public: “…It seems ambiguous here to have the federal government go through a process here where we're going to notify homeowners of a program that never was instituted, never was used, that it does not exist anymore. That seems a little wasteful and I think in many ways could be misleading….the American taxpayers are really kind of tired of…the government out there misrepresenting or creating confusion to homeowners that may be seeking assistance. So I would just say that at this particular time this is not necessary and that we should not put a confusing piece of information out there on the web site.”

The House rejected this amendment by a vote of 185-237. Voting “yea” were 176 Democrats and 9 Republicans. 228 Republicans and 9 Democrats voted “nay.” As a result, the House rejected an amendment that would have required the Department of Housing and Urban Development to announce on its web site of the termination of a federal program which provided a maximum of $50,000 in subsidized loans to homeowners who were at least three months delinquent on their home mortgages as a result of unemployment—and would also have required HUD to instruct the public to contact their members of Congress for assistance if they were unable to pay their home mortgages.