Will taxpayer funding for ACORN never go away?

Seriously. Didn’t Congress pass a law to defund this group? The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now still receives taxpayer funding through an offshoot group, The Daily Caller reports.


Legal watchdog group Judicial Watch discovered that the Obama administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a $79,819 grant to an ACORN offshoot, Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA). …

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told The Daily Caller this newly discovered grant appears to be in violation of an October 2009 law President Obama signed banning all funding of “ACORN and any ACORN-related affiliate.” …

“If President Obama is serious about the ACORN funding ban he signed in 2009, he’ll try to get to the bottom of this,” Fitton said, adding that Congress can withhold HUD’s funding and conduct oversight investigations into these new discoveries. “I think many members of Congress will be interested in this new development.”

Corrupt and discredited, ACORN still manages to snag taxpayer dollars? It’s possible HUD administration officials thought they were doing nothing wrong, of course. A controversial Government Accountability Office advisory opinion issued in September 2009 stated it considers AHCOA an entity sufficiently removed from ACORN to technically be able to escape the funding ban. But it seems HUD officials considered AHCOA to just be ACORN by another name: The HUD website referred to AHCOA as ‘ACORN HOUSING CORPORATION, INC.”

Really, though, what’s most dejecting about this is that administration officials would even flirt with the technicality. Whatever happened to avoiding “the narrow occasion of sin,” to wanting to avoid even the appearance of corruption? Taxpayers don’t want their hard-earned cash to go to ACORN’s causes, regardless of whether they are labeled as such, and government officials should respect that, not try to skirt the law.

It’s also dejecting to think Obama is highly unlikely to heed Fitton’s advice. What motivation does he have to follow up on this? Maybe he doesn’t want to be tainted with ACORN ties, but you can bet taxpayer bucks he hopes community organizers will “get out the vote” for him in whatever way possible.