Homeless Rate Could Skyrocket
New Executive Order enables cities to remove homeless individuals from streets.
The annual count of homeless people in the US last year showed more than 770,000 people living in shelters or outside, up 18% from the year before.
Now, a new Executive Order, Ending Vagrancy and Restoring Order, enables cities and states to remove homeless individuals from streets. This order calls for ending support for Housing First policies that don’t promote “treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency.”
The order builds on a March directive to clear homeless encampments and graffiti from federal lands. The White House action also seeks to shift federal funding away from longtime policies that sought to get homeless people into housing first, and then offer treatment. Instead, it calls for prioritizing money for programs that require sobriety and treatment, and for cities that enforce homeless camping bans.
As cities struggle to balance affordable housing shortages with laws against public camping, where are all these people supposed to go? Nearly half of all renters are considered cost-burdened. A massive shortage of affordable housing is a key driver of homelessness.
“Institutionalizing people with mental illness, including those experiencing homelessness, is not a dignified, safe, or evidence-based way to serve people’s needs,” Ann Oliva with the National Alliance to End Homelessness said in a statement.
Trump’s order also calls on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to defund addiction programs that include “harm reduction.” This is certain to disrupt frontline health care programs that work to reduce overdoses from fentanyl and other street drugs.
The conservative Project 2025 agenda also called for ending Housing First policies. Earlier this year, the Trump administration gutted the US Interagency Council on Homelessness—the small agency that had coordinated homeless policy across the government and had been an advocate for housing first policies.
“At a time when housing costs and homelessness are on a historic rise, we need an all-hands-on-deck approach to ensuring every American has a safe and stable place to rest their head at night,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri said in a statement to NPR. “Unfortunately, attacks on the [agency], along with damaging cuts to federal housing programs and staff, and the President’s tumultuous tariffs, will only exacerbate this country’s housing and homelessness crisis.”
We will never arrest our way out of homelessness. Be a part of the movement to solve homelessness with housing, not handcuffs. Join the Housing, Not Handcuffs campaign.
View a complete list of Presidential actions and executive orders at www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-orders.
