GOVERNMENT’S HESITANT DEFENDER

WITH THREE DAUGHTERS AND AN OLD HOUSE FULL OF FLAKING paint, Michele Stewart and her husband couldn’t afford to protect their children from lead poisoning. But then help arrived in the form of a $19,433 grant from the federal government for new windows, doors and trim. It was followed, one sunny June morning, by a visit from the nation’s most famous former brain surgeon, who arrived at Stewart’s Baltimore house with reporters in tow. “It was my house, but now it’s my home,” Stewart, a dental-hygienist student, told the assembled crowd.

Ben Carson, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), had come to trumpet the roughly $100 million his agency sets aside each year to remove toxic lead-based paints (outlawed in U.S. construction since 1978) from the homes of lower-income residents who can’t afford to do so themselves. The spending is worthy, he assured the reporters. As a pediatric neurosurgeon, Carson often felt frustrated when he released his patients from the hospital knowing they would return to homes that could make them sick. “I spent a lot of time working extremely hard [operating] on children from Baltimore,” said Carson, who