By Sarah Cammarata 08/09/2020 11:16 AM EDT
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s executive order on evictions unveiled Saturday will put a full stop to tenants being evicted, an assertion disputed by CNN host Dana Bash.
“The health secretary has the authority, working with the CDC to declare it an emergency. And, therefore, there will be no evictions,” Kudlow said.
“It absolutely will” put a freeze on evictions, Kudlow continued in an awkward interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding the directive sets up “a process. A mechanism. I can’t predict the future all together. All the federally financed, single families and multi-families will be covered as they have been.”
Bash argued the executive order does not explicitly protect people from evictions, and fails to say that a landlord cannot evict a tenant. Bash also pressed that the memo uses language like “consider, identify, promote and review.”
Kudlow responded that if “HHS declares emergencies, then evictions will be stopped.”
A four-month federal moratorium on evictions that protected millions of tenants from losing their homes in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic expired July 24. Some states have adopted specific measures of their own.
“We don’t want people being evicted, and the bill I’m signing will solve that problem largely, hopefully completely,” Trump told supporters in an address Saturday at Bedminster, N.J.
However, housing advocates say that even if the federal ban is extended, most tenants will still be left in peril .
