More than $1 billion in federal homelessness funding flowed through Los Angeles while the city’s homelessness crisis continued to defy the promises made by the politicians running the system.

Now Congress wants answers.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was asked on September 3 to appear before a House Oversight subcommittee and testify about alleged waste, fraud and abuse involving federal homelessness dollars funneled through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA.

Her response?

She won’t be there.

Bass has agreed to provide documents requested by the committee, including communications involving her office, LAHSA and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors dating back to 2020. But when it comes to sitting down before Congress and answering questions directly, the mayor is declining the invitation.

That leaves one very simple question hanging over City Hall:

Where did all the money go?

The issue is not some obscure accounting dispute. The federal government has poured more than $1 billion into Los Angeles homelessness programs, yet the city continues to struggle with a crisis that has become one of the most visible failures of progressive urban governance in America.

And now the Trump administration has already taken action.

In June, federal officials pulled funding from LAHSA after the Department of Housing and Urban Development accused the agency of “obvious fraud” and “wanton mismanagement.”

Those are not minor words.

They demand scrutiny.

Congress is now trying to determine what happened to the money, how it was administered and whether taxpayers received anything remotely resembling the results they were promised.

Bass could have walked into the hearing room, answered the questions and put her side of the story on the record.

Instead, Congress gets documents.

Apparently, transparency has its limits.

The mayor’s reluctance to testify also brings renewed attention to her record of crisis management. Bass was famously outside the country attending a presidential inauguration in Ghana when devastating wildfires erupted across Los Angeles, eventually destroying neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades and Malibu.

She had been warned that conditions were ripe for a catastrophic fire: extreme dryness, heat and powerful winds were converging.

The fires became a devastating test of leadership.

Now another crisis—this one involving billions of dollars in public resources—is demanding answers.

The stakes are bigger than Karen Bass personally.

Los Angeles taxpayers and federal taxpayers alike deserve to know whether homelessness spending is actually helping people escape the streets or merely sustaining an enormous bureaucratic ecosystem around the problem.

That distinction matters.

Government programs should be judged by results, not by how much money they consume.

And if more than $1 billion can disappear into a sprawling network of agencies while the underlying crisis remains so severe that it is impossible to miss, Congress has every right to ask hard questions.

There is also a political problem waiting for Los Angeles voters.

If Bass is removed from office, the alternative on the November ballot is Councilwoman Nithya Raman, a Democratic Socialist of America-backed candidate whose own policy record offers little reason for conservatives to expect a dramatic change in direction.

Raman has pushed proposals including restrictions on backyard barbecues during high fire-danger days.

That is quite a response to California’s wildfire problem: make ordinary, law-abiding residents surrender another little piece of normal life.

Meanwhile, the deeper questions about government accountability remain.

Los Angeles does not need another grand promise, another task force or another expensive bureaucracy explaining why the previous bureaucracy failed.

It needs accountability.

It needs transparency.

And above all, it needs leaders willing to stand before the public and answer for the money they control.

Karen Bass has been given an opportunity to do exactly that before Congress.

She chose not to.

So the questions remain—and taxpayers have every right to keep asking them until somebody finally provides the answers.