WASHINGTON – Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) released the following statement Thursday after introducing the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act,” a bill which denies all federal funding for implementing the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s new “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Final Rule.”

“Every American should be free to choose where to live, and every community should be free to zone its neighborhoods and compete for new residents according to its distinct values,” Lee said. “The diversity of America’s neighborhoods – from dense cities to wide-open rural communities to suburbs in between – is a treasure that we need to preserve. We don’t need a National Zoning Board. Washington should let Americans ‘govern local.’”

“A better debate would be about how Americans could better spend the money that is wasted every year by the dysfunctional Community Development Block Grant Program,” Lee added.

A study by the Reason Foundation found examples showing how this program contributes to cronyism by channeling taxpayer dollars to politically connected groups while doing absolutely nothing to combat poverty or housing segregation.

The Local Zoning Decisions Act would restrict any federal funding from being used to implement, administer, or enforce HUD’s new housing rule. The bill also prohibits any funds from being used for HUD’s “Fair Housing” database which could be used to further the administration’s radical pursuit of using “disparate impact theory” to punish communities that are not as demographically diverse as the administration would like.

Senators David Vitter (R-LA), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Mike Enzi (R-WY), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), and Marco Rubio (R-FL) have all co-sponsored the bill.