Civil Rights News: Super Committee Fails, College Preparedness, Congress Cuts Housing & Urban Dev

Panel Fails to Reach Deal on Plan for Deficit Reduction
Jennifer Steinhauer, Robert Pear and Helene Cooper, The New York Times

Congressional leaders conceded today that talks on a sweeping deficit agreement failed and braced for recriminations over their inability to reach a deal. By law, the special Congressional committee’s inability to reach an agreement will trigger $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over 10 years to the military and domestic programs, to start in 2013. Civil rights groups say that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

Learning to Play the Game to Get Into College
Michael Winerip, The New York Times

Nathaly Lopera, a low-income high school senior, gets help from Let’s Get Ready, a free program that helps low-income teenagers throughout the northeast prepare for college by helping them with applications, preparing them for the SAT, and practicing interviews with them.

Congress Slashes HUD’s Construction Fund for the Poor
Debbie Cenziper, The Washington Post

Lawmakers on Thursday cut funding for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s construction fund for the poor and demanded that the agency introduce a series of measures to root out stalled housing projects. While the government argues that HUD has been wasting money on construction projects that are often not completed, HUD defends its HOME program, saying that most of the projects are completed, and that they have provided over 1 million units of housing. Congress wants to see HUD make improvements in management before providing more funding to the program.

Compiled by Emily Hammer, a Fall 2011 intern