WASHINGTON – The Treasury Department's Community DevelopmentFinancial Institution's fund survived to make more grants in 2005,mounting an effective lobbying and political effort among itsfriends in Congress which kept it from being largely shut down andits appropriations divided up among a block grant program thatwould have been administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce.The only thing that would remain at the Treasury was the New MarketTax Credits side of the CDFI Fund, a program which has not yetbenefited many credit unions The Bush administration maintainedthat taking this approach would allow the federal government toconsolidate its different community development efforts under oneroof and would introduce greater local control and accountability,but community development credit unions and other CDFIs said theproposal misses the mark when it comes to their work and in the endwould only hurt their efforts. In 2004, the fund spread $7 millionamong 10 CDCUs and credit union organizations from its Small andEmerging CDFI component. Credit unions have also been helped underthe fund's Technical Assistance program and were instrumental inhelping the fund get started and growing. Fund supporters notedthat currently, CDCUs only have to compete with other CDCUs andother small CDFIs for resources from the fund's Small and EmergingCDFI program. But under a block grant program administered by theCommerce Department, CDCUs will have to first compete with otherlocal development initiatives to be part of a local block grantrequest and then hope their community's block grant request issufficiently strong to compete with requests from other localareas. CDFI supporters attacked the idea of closing down the fundby turning to both Democratic and Republican supporters of theprogram and managed to not only keep the fund's appropriation forfiscal year 2006 at the same level as it had been in 2005, $55million, but kept any legislation formally proposing the CDFIclosure from being introduced.