The Tammany Hall political machine that ran New York City for more than a century ended in a massive corruption investigation that eventually ensnared the city’s Democratic mayor, James J. Walker, for having a slush fund from favor-currying and for personally accepting $1 million in bribes.
The investigation was ordered by the governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
A Democratic governor who was running for president broke up a corrupt political machine run by his own political party in a major city. And then he was elected to the presidency four times.
Currently there’s an investigation into corruption in Los Angeles, but it was not ordered by the Democratic governor, last seen fly fishing on a cable news network and musing that mistakes were made during Covid.
The investigation in Los Angeles is coming from the Republican president’s Department of Justice and the Republican-majority Congress.
That could be politically helpful to Mayor Karen Bass, who is frantically running for re-election on a record the San Andreas Fault would envy. Bass refused to appear before a congressional committee investigating fraud in federal homelessness spending managed by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA.
In a September 4th letter, the mayor’s city-paid attorney, David Michaelson, informed the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency that Bass was unavailable to appear at the “Fixing Fraud and Failure in Federally Funded Homelessness Services” hearing on September 15.
Michaelson wrote that the mayor’s office was “commencing the collection and review of records in response to the Subcommittee’s request,” cautioning that it would “take some time” given that the records requested covered a six-year period.
The mayor’s lawyer also emphasized that Bass “does not control LAHSA’s operation, budget or administration,” which is a stretch since the mayor had appointed herself to the governing board of LAHSA in 2023 and appointed four more of its ten members.
Then Michaelson took a snarky victory lap, reminding the committee that although the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is investigating LAHSA and suspended its federal funding, a federal judge had issued a preliminary injunction that forced HUD to keep paying.
That’s some victory.
As if to leave the scene of the crime before Scotland Yard arrived with Sherlock Holmes, Bass stepped down from the board of LAHSA on September 9. She said she was so very busy, and she didn’t have time for it. Then, on the day of the congressional hearing, she blamed Trump. “Let’s call this what it is,” she wrote in an online post, “the latest attack on Los Angeles by Donald Trump to punish our city and distract from his administration’s corruption.”
That might have worked for her, except for all the arrests. On Wednesday, three people in the L.A. area were charged in three separate federal cases with committing fraud to loot millions of dollars from homelessness programs and spend it on the good life. The founder of a nonprofit in Culver City allegedly took $7.5 million of public money and used some of it to pay for the construction of a nightclub and bingo hall in Inglewood.
In another case, an employee of a service referral agency was charged with accepting more than $180,000 in bribes from a service provider to refer nonexistent people for billable services. That service provider was already arrested, back in January. Six people have been arrested so far in the federal investigation into homelessness service providers in Los Angeles.
There will be more, prosecutors said.
In addition to LAHSA, which is a joint city-county agency, the city of Los Angeles runs its own homelessness program, “Inside Safe.” It has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and there’s little to show for that spending. Bass, who created Inside Safe, has refused to allow the city controller to audit it.
A court-ordered independent report found $2.3 billion out the door for city homelessness programs, but the auditors said they could not “completely quantify the total amount spent” because of a lack of recordkeeping.
After seeing similar results in a county audit of LAHSA, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted in April 2025 to pull the county’s roughly $300 million in annual funding out of the city-county entity and run homelessness programs from the county directly.
LAHSA’s federal funding may be gone, too. Although the mayor’s lawyer bragged that a federal judge ordered HUD to resume payments, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed that order. HUD’s June letter to LAHSA, informing the agency its federal funding is suspended while the Office of Inspector General investigates “wanton mismanagement of public funds,” is back in force.
LAHSA was formed in 1993 and made responsible for accepting and disbursing funding for homelessness services. Thanks to tax increases and COVID spending, LAHSA’s annual budget grew from about $62 million in 2015 to $352 million in 2020, and then to $814 million in 2025, before the county pulled its funds out.
For decades, LAHSA has been the lead agency for the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, overseeing the annual request for federal funding, the Homeless Management Information System, the annual homeless “point-in-time” count and the coordinated-entry system, which connects people to housing and services.
But on Tuesday, LAHSA’s governing board voted not to seek that role again. It wasn’t entirely their choice, because HUD’s suspension means LAHSA could face “permanent debarment” at the conclusion of the inspector general’s investigation, making the agency ineligible to receive federal funds.
In June, HUD said it “uncovered evidence of LAHSA’s repeated false statements and its irresponsible actions and failures, including its lack of financial management, internal controls, and safeguards against conflicts of interest.”
That could turn out to be minor compared with the federal criminal investigation into fraud in homelessness programs. Prosecutors can draw on the resources of the U.S. Treasury Department, including the IRS Criminal Investigation Division, to see where the money went.
LAHSA’s problems could mark the end of the investigation. Or it could be just the beginning.
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