U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree is calling on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to expedite a set of critical waivers for Maine’s affordable housing developers.

Pingree, D-1st District, sent a letter to HUD secretary Scott Turner on Friday, in response to a Portland Press Herald analysis of the impact of the Build America Buy America program on affordable housing development in Maine.

In her letter, Pingree stressed the need for “predictable schedules” for Maine’s housing pipeline.

The Build America Buy America Act, signed by President Joe Biden in late 2021 as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, requires all building projects using certain government funds to source 95% of their construction materials from the United States.

But some products critical to housing developments — including many heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems (like heat pumps) or their components — are not available from American manufacturers.

So developers have to request a waiver from HUD that the department has said will take at least six months to process — a wait time that developers say is preventing them from breaking ground on more than 400 units of desperately needed affordable housing.

“When BABA waivers remain pending for extended periods, projects face cost escalations, stalled procurement, and in some cases the risk of losing financing altogether,” Pingree said. “These delays directly affect low-income households, seniors, and families who are already waiting months or years for safe, stable, and affordable homes.”

Efforts to amend BABA have so far been blocked.

In a phone interview Friday, Pingree criticized the administration for sweeping cuts to HUD’s workforce that she said have made it and other departments “dysfunctional.”

“I don’t think there’s a real ideological divide about this,” she said, adding that the need for heat pumps and the lack of availability for them domestically is a “clear-cut issue” that should not take months to confirm.

“It’s appalling that they’re not capable of managing the process of constructing housing and getting money out to the entities that need it,” she said of HUD.