WASHINGTON -- President Bush nominated Steven Preston as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a move likely to set off a skirmish between the White House and Congress as both grapple with responses to rising foreclosures and souring mortgages.
Mr. Preston, who joined the Bush administration as head of the Small Business Administration in 2006, has won high marks from Republicans and some Democrats as an effective administrator. But he has little housing experience, an issue Democrats seized upon Friday.
Before entering government, Mr. Preston, 47 years old, was chief financial officer at ServiceMaster Co., which owns home-service companies such as Terminix and Merry Maids. Prior to that, he was a senior vice president and treasurer of First Data Corp. and an investment banker at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
"Steve Preston is an experienced manager who knows what to do," Mr. Bush said. "He knows how to tackle a problem, devise a solution and get results. That's exactly the kind of leadership I was looking for."
Mr. Preston must be confirmed by Senate Democrats before he can take over at HUD, an agency at the center of the Bush administration's response to the housing turmoil.
If confirmed, Mr. Preston would leave behind an agency that spent $1.2 billion in fiscal 2007, and take over one of the government's larger bureaucracies, which spent roughly 40 times as much that year. Roy A. Bernardi, the second-in-command at HUD, will serve as acting secretary until Mr. Preston is confirmed. He succeeds Alphonso Jackson, whose rocky tenure at HUD ended Friday.
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