The Hardest Hit Fund is a small part of TARP, which was established in 2009 with the aim of pumping $700 billion into the banking and housing markets in order to keep both from imploding. Since its inception, though, TARP has been beset by criticism that the Treasury Department, which oversees the program, has favored the interests of banks over homeowners. The most scathing critiques of the program have come from the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or SIGTARP, the government watchdog appointed to oversee Treasury's handling of the program.
Most of the federal bailout money pledged through the Hardest Hit Fund, a program meant to help ailing homeowners in states especially battered by the housing crisis, has gone unspent, according to a report released Wednesday by a government watchdog. And most of that was used for unemployment assistance, not refinancing mortgages.
"The program has had a stunningly slow start," Christy Romero, the inspector general of the watchdog agency with oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, said in an interview with The Huffington Post. "They are still not getting money out to homeowners."
As of June 30, state housing agencies had drawn down just $1.1 billion of the $7.6 billion allocated for the program since 2010, according to the report. Of that sum, $351 million had been spent to assist just 43,580 homeowners -- mostly with unemployment aid, not home loan modifications.
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