Trip Gabriel

Ben Carson, who took Donald Trump on a tour of blighted neighborhoods in Detroit during the presidential campaign, including his boyhood home, has been chosen by President-elect Trump to oversee one of the government’s main efforts to lift American cities as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, was an early endorser of Trump after ending his own presidential bid. With no experience in government or running a large bureaucracy, Carson, 65, publicly waffled over whether to join the administration. He will oversee an agency with a $47 billion budget, bringing to the job a philosophical opposition to government programs that encourage what he calls “dependency” and engage in “social engineering.” He has no expertise in housing policy, but he did spend part of his childhood in public housing, said a close friend, Armstrong Williams.