Every U.S. county carries a predicted childhood lead-exposure risk, validated against measured blood lead in eleven states. Set that against $2.6 billion in federal HUD lead-based paint grants from 2011 to 2024, and a pattern shows up. The money is public. It roughly follows risk from one state to the next. And it reaches almost none of the places that carry the risk.
This map costs nothing to build, run, or refresh. Every input is public: Census housing and poverty data, federal blood-lead surveillance, and the federal spending record. There is no license, no paywall, and no records request.
The problem it points at is not cheap. Controlling lead-paint hazards returns an estimated $17 to $221 for every dollar spent (Gould, 2009). Remediation itself runs about $14,000 per home, and roughly 21.9 million homes carry a dust-lead hazard today (HUD, 2021). A free map that decides which homes get the $14,000 first is the highest-value dollar in the chain, and it was the one nobody was spending.
Lead does not pass through a child and leave. It settles into the developing brain and stays, quietly reshaping intelligence, behavior, and the arc of a life. More than half of everyone alive in America today carried unsafe lead in their blood as children. These are the numbers behind that sentence.
824 million
IQ points erased from the living U.S. population by leaded gasoline alone. More than 170 million Americans, over half, were exposed as children.
McFarland, Hauer and Reuben, PNAS, 2022
No safe level
There is no amount of lead in a child's blood known to be safe. The harm has no floor, and none of it reverses.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
40%
Of childhood lead's pull toward downward economic mobility runs through lost IQ. Children with more lead grew up to earn less and slip below the status they were born into.
Reuben et al., JAMA, 2017 (Dunedin cohort)
+4%
Adult earnings gained by cutting childhood lead exposure, in a natural experiment following 800,000 children. One of the cleanest causal estimates we have.
Gronqvist, Nilsson and Robling, Journal of Political Economy, 2020
Higher
Rates of school suspension, juvenile detention, aggression, and teen pregnancy have all been linked to childhood lead. The size of the link is debated, the direction is not.
Associated with lead. Aizer and Currie 2019; Reyes 2015
$50.9 billion
Lost every year to lead-attributable reduced productivity, before counting crime, special education, or health care.
Trasande and Liu, Health Affairs, 2011
None of this comes back. A lost IQ point does not return, and a brain shaped by lead at age two stays shaped. The damage is permanent, so catching the lead before it reaches the child is the only real fix.
Every HUD lead-based paint grant is on the public record at USASpending.gov: who received it, how much, where, and when. No FOIA is needed to see it. The dollars do land more often in the older-housing Northeast and Midwest, but not because anyone aimed them there.
There is no national lead office pointing this money at the risk, no countrywide triage, no one in charge of aiming it. It grew bottom-up instead. Individual cities and states stood up their own programs and applied for funding one at a time, and a place gets money only if it has the staff to write the application and somewhere to start. The faint link between dollars and risk is incidental, not design: the old-housing cities that carry the most lead are also the ones with health departments big enough to compete for grants. The next section shows who got the money, and who got none.
With no layer to aim by, the thing that finds the lead is a child. A blood-lead test only registers exposure after it has already happened, and it cannot be undone. In a system with no map to target, children are the test kits.
This is not a new charge. The Government Accountability Office found in 2018 that HUD's award process is not sufficiently data-driven and does not ensure grants reach the areas most at risk (GAO-18-394). A free, validated, national risk surface is the starting point that has been missing, the layer a program could actually aim by. HUD has asked for exactly that (below).
See the validated risk map →Over fourteen years (FY2011 through FY2024), HUD's lead-based paint hazard control grants moved $2.59 billion to 512 distinct grantees. That sounds wide until you map it: only about 9 percent of U.S. counties ever received a single dollar.
Across states the money roughly tracks risk (a rank correlation of about +0.48), but that link is incidental, not aim. No one targeted it. The problem is not which states win, it is reach and resolution. These grants are competed for, which means a place gets funded if it has the staff to write the application. Three states received exactly $0 over the full fourteen years: Arkansas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Top 12 recipients, FY2011 through FY2024 (total dollars received)
Twelve grantees, mostly single cities, account for a large slice of a national program. Big-city health and housing departments have grant-writing offices. Most counties do not.
The size of the mismatch
Federal grants make roughly 25,000 homes lead-safe per year. About 21.9 million U.S. homes carry a dust-lead hazard (HUD American Healthy Homes Survey II). Clearing them at about $14,000 per home runs on the order of $300 billion, roughly a thousand times the annual appropriation.
In September 2024, HUD published a formal Request for Information on allocating its lead hazard control grants through a need-based formula instead of a pure competition. The notice asked the public a direct question: which published lead-exposure risk index or model should HUD use to target the money where children are most likely to be exposed. A free, validated, national risk surface is precisely the input a formula like that has to stand on.
Honest status, as of mid-2026: it has stalled. The comment period closed with 34 public comments, but no proposed rule or final rule ever followed. HUD cannot make the switch on its own, because the grants are required by statute to be awarded competitively, and the authority it asked Congress for was not adopted. The FY2026 budget went the other way and requested zero new money for the program before Congress restored level funding at roughly $296 million. So the argument has been made and documented, and it is waiting on authority and a risk model. It is not moving, and it is not formally dead.
How the formula question has moved, and stopped
This is a screening layer, not a diagnosis. It ranks where lead exposure is most likely from housing age and poverty; it does not measure lead in any home or child. The right response to a high-risk area is a home inspection and a blood-lead test, not alarm.
The funding shown is HUD lead-based paint hazard control grants only (assistance listings 14.900, 14.905, 14.920 and related). Multi-hazard healthy-homes grants and EPA lead-in-water money are separate channels and are not counted here. County-level dollar attribution follows the grantee's headquarters, so funding is held at the reliable state level; risk is shown at the county level.
