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Karen Bass skipped Congress's homelessness fraud hearing. LAHSA bowed out the same day.

Photo: City of Los Angeles / Public domain (source)

Karen Bass Skips Congress’s $1 Billion Homelessness Hearing as LAHSA Gives Up Its Federal Role

by
M.A. Rothman

By M.A. RothmanSeptember 16, 2026 · 5 min read
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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was invited to testify before Congress on Sept. 15, 2026, about how more than $1 billion in federal homelessness money has flowed through her city’s troubled homeless agency. She didn’t come. While a House subcommittee held the hearing without her in Washington, Bass was at a groundbreaking ceremony in Pacific Palisades.

On the same day, the agency at the center of the hearing, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, voted to give up the federal roles it has held for three decades, including applying for roughly $240 million in federal homelessness funding on behalf of the region in the coming year.

The invitation she declined

Rep. Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the House Oversight subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, opened an investigation into LAHSA in early September. In a letter to Bass, he asked her to testify at the Sept. 15 hearing, titled “Fixing Fraud and Failure in Federally Funded Homelessness Services,” and to produce documents on what the committee called “corrupt contracting and grant-making” by LAHSA and self-enrichment among the nonprofits it funds.

The committee’s numbers are stark. According to its release, LAHSA has received over $1 billion in federal funds since 2021, including $220 million in 2024 alone. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general is investigating the agency’s use of federal funds, citing evidence of “repeated false statements and its irresponsible actions and failures, including its lack of financial management, internal controls, and safeguards against conflicts of interest.” In June 2026, HUD suspended further federal funding to LAHSA until it could show adequate safeguards. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter paused that suspension on Aug. 13. HUD appealed, and the week before the hearing the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily stayed Carter’s order, according to LAist.

The committee’s letter also pointed to reports that a former LAHSA CEO signed a $2.1 million contract with her husband’s employer, and that the CEO of one LAHSA-funded nonprofit received $1.6 million in total compensation over 2023 and 2024 while living in Hawaii.

Bass’s attorney, David Michaelson, told the panel the mayor was unavailable, without elaborating, according to the Los Angeles Wave. Bass called it a “politically-motivated hearing to attack L.A.”

Off the board just in time

The timing drew the most fire. Bass appointed herself to LAHSA’s governing commission in 2023, the New York Post reported, and stepped down earlier this month, after Burchett’s invitation arrived.

“Finally, just last week, after I invited her to appear at this hearing, Mayor Bass suddenly removed herself from the LAHSA board,” Burchett said at the hearing. “Mayor Bass seems intent on evading accountability, but she knows we will not let her off the hook.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado said Bass’s absence showed “contempt,” not a scheduling conflict. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina was blunter: “It is shameful the mayor didn’t show up today.” Mace added that no one should be surprised, since the mayor “didn’t show up when people’s homes were burning” during the Palisades Fire.

Burchett took aim at LAHSA’s own office space, pointing to reporting about its Wilshire Boulevard high-rise. “This outfit is housed in a luxury high rise in downtown LA with a private helipad and Mercedes-Maybach car service for tenants,” he said. “If you don’t know Maybach, it’s the high end of the Mercedes brand.”

What the money bought

The witnesses who did show up painted a grim picture. Journalist Jonathan Choe, a Discovery Institute senior fellow who has documented Skid Row, displayed a harm-reduction kit of the kind handed out on Los Angeles streets and walked lawmakers through its contents, which the Post reported included a meth pipe, needles, fentanyl test strips, a tourniquet and cookers.

Paul Webster, a senior fellow at the Cicero Institute and former executive director of the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, testified that Los Angeles has received roughly $2 billion in federal homelessness funding since 2005. Over that time, he said, overall homelessness has doubled since 2009 and unsheltered homelessness has climbed 130%. “There is more money than ever before, more capacity than ever before, and more and sicker people on the streets than ever before,” Webster said.

LAHSA bows out

The same day, LAHSA’s governing commission voted unanimously not to apply to keep its federal administrative roles, LAist reported. Those roles include coordinating the region’s annual federal homelessness funding application, about $240 million in the coming year, running the annual homeless count and managing HUD-mandated tracking and housing-match systems. The decision reversed a monthslong legal battle LAHSA had waged to keep those duties. The city and Los Angeles County are now applying to take them over.

The agency framed it as cooperation. “With both the City and County preparing their own applications, competing against our founding partners would only fracture regional collaboration during an already complex time,” LAHSA’s commission and leadership said.

Not everyone in Los Angeles was so diplomatic. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath called it “a fundamental change that reflects the significant performance, contracting and financial concerns that have plagued LAHSA for too long.” She added: “Officials avoiding accountability will no longer have LAHSA to hide behind.”

Bass’s answer, by press release

Bass responded with a statement rather than testimony. “Let’s call this what it is: the latest attack on Los Angeles by the Trump Administration and his allies in Congress,” she said. “This Administration tried to strip Los Angeles of the funding that helps us get people off the street, a federal judge stopped them. They lost in court, so now they’re staging a show instead.” She did not mention that the appeals court had already put that judge’s order on hold.

She also distanced herself from the agency she helped oversee for three years: “I don’t run LAHSA. It’s a joint city-county agency, and I was the first mayor in history to sit on its board.”

That is a curious defense from a mayor who made herself the first mayor on that board, and whose city supplies 73% of LAHSA’s nearly $500 million budget this year, according to LAist. Bass is running for reelection against Councilmember Nithya Raman on Nov. 3. If her record on homelessness is as strong as she says, a public hearing was the perfect stage to prove it.

She put herself on the board, left the board when Congress called, and sent a press release in her place.

Sources

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