A scathing federal audit of the D.C. Housing Authority found that the agency is failing in some of its most basic tasks, from maintaining public housing units in habitable condition to ensuring that every usable unit is actually offered to the thousands of low-income residents who have waited for years for a place to live.

The 72-page audit by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which was first reported on by The Washington Post on Friday evening, prompted calls for reform over the weekend, with one lawmaker indicating she will introduce legislation to overhaul the agency and Attorney General Karl Racine calling for the chairwoman of the D.C. Council’s housing committee to be removed.

In an interview on Monday morning, D.C. Housing Authority executive director Brenda Donald said many of the issues raised by the audit existed before she came on board last year and will take time to fix. “These things didn’t happen overnight and they can’t get fixed overnight,” she said. “I just got here a little over a year ago, and I’m moving in on all fronts.”

The audit paints a damning picture of the federally funded Housing Authority, which manages more than 8,000 units of public housing in 60 developments across the city. The concerns run from small to big: the agency hasn’t updated its policy on residents having pet ownership comply with federal regulations, it fails to collect rent payments from roughly half the residents occupying its units, and “crime is not being adequately prevented in public housing.”

But some of the most shocking determinations involve the housing units themselves, which are supposed to serve the city’s lowest-income residents. HUD says the agency is “not maintaining units in decent, safe, and sanitary condition,” it cannot properly account for how many vacant units it actually has available or move quickly to fill them, and it is not properly maintaining or updating the list of residents waiting for housing. (There are some 40,000 people on the waitlist, which was closed to new applicants almost a decade ago.) That, says the federal agency, has resulted in a situation where many units are simply vacant — even with the large number of people on the waitlist.

“DCHA has 8,084 units of public housing of which 1,628 units are currently vacant,” says the audit. “As of June 13, 2022, DCHA’s occupancy rate is 76.44%, which the lowest [public housing] occupancy rate of any large [public housing agency] in the country.”

The audit places some of the blame on the housing authority’s 13-member board of directors, seven of which are appointed by or serve Mayor Muriel Bowser. The audit accuses those members of voting as a group “without individual review of the action requested,” and recommends that all members undergo extensive training on public housing management. Much the same is said of Donald, who was initially appointed by Bowser to lead the agency in an interim capacity in 2021 before being given a two-year contract.

The audit’s findings spurred immediate critiques and calls for reform from a number of elected officials.

“I can’t be reading this right,” tweeted Councilmember Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4). “That’s 2,000 deeply affordable public housing [units] sitting vacant in our city.”

“DCHA is an agency in chaos. The council must hold a hearing on this report immediately,” said Councilmember Robert White (D-At Large) in a statement. Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At Large) said the agency needs an “overhaul,” Councilmember Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2) said the audit exposed “extraordinary deficiencies and failures” at the housing authority, and Councilmember Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) said the HUD audit is “waving a big, red flag at us.”

Racine, who as attorney general has sued the housing authority over failures to address drugs and guns at its properties and for allegedly discriminating against residents with disabilities, went one step further, calling on Council Chairman Phil Mendelson to remove Councilmember Anita Bonds (D-At Large) from her chairmanship of the council’s housing committee. Bonds, he tweeted, has “failed on her core duty to properly oversee DCHA.”

Bonds did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did Bowser’s office or the office of Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development John Falcicchio, a member of the housing authority’s board who did not meet with HUD auditors.

Donald formerly led the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency and served as a deputy mayor under Bowser, and she was chosen to lead the housing authority after past director Tyrone Garrett was removed last year after a turbulent five-year tenure. Donald concedes that the report “is not pretty” but also says its conclusions were not unexpected. She says that when she came onboard last year she saw basic elements of running a large housing agency were missing, like a master database to track housing units and conditions.

“About three years ago, the agency decided to move to a new data management system. I’ve done that in a number of agencies. Those things take careful planning. Several years before you convert to a new system you’ve got to do data integrity. You’ve got to train people. There there are a number of steps to ensuring a smooth conversion. Well, those steps didn’t happen here,” she said. “This is an example of having to rebuild something that should have been built properly in the first place.”

Donald says that over the summer the housing authority managed to address 10,000 backlogged work orders for repairs and updates to housing units and facilities, and that the agency is actually stable from a budgetary perspective. But she says she recognizes that an audit will place additional pressure on her, and the agency more broadly, to respond to HUD’s criticisms and recommendations.

“Our focus now over the next few weeks is to develop a corrective action plan to demonstrate what we’ve already done, and then to make sure that we deliver on all of the commitments over the next six months. So I think that’s what everybody should hold us accountable for,” she said.

It remains to be seen if the council will have any such patience. Silverman’s office says she will soon introduce legislation to overhaul the housing authority’s board, institute new training requirements, and grant it more independence from the mayor; her bill would also “recommit DCHA to its core purpose of assisting our lowest-income residents” and ensure that D.C. funds are spent appropriately. Similarly, White called on Bowser and his colleagues to “reconstitute the Board of Commissioners and appoint a Director with housing experience.”

“The cost of inaction is homelessness and displacement of seniors, and harming children who deserve a fighting chance and families in our city who are struggling the most,” he said. “The District must be resolute enough to do what is clearly necessary here.”