(WASHINGTON, D.C – March 24th, 2026)

In the past month, the Trump administration has intensified its multi-agency assault on our homeless neighbors and has issued several policies and funding changes that will make homelessness worse. These policies all tie back to Trump’s anti-homeless order issued in July 2025. 

Specifically, these attacks include:  

• Deputizing attorneys from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs to strip homeless veterans of their rights and autonomy. Just last week, a VA official was forced to reverse course during a Congressional hearing after internal documents showed the VA’s true intention: to take away rights from homeless veterans to make decisions about their own lives.  

• Increasing funding from the Department of Justice for involuntary commitments and court-conditioned treatments, further targeting people who live outside. 

• Earmarking $100 million for the Department of Health and Human Services to fund forced treatment and backwards, unethical, and ineffective programming, including limiting lifesaving harm reduction services. HHS funding also includes a chilling prohibition on grantees from “promoting” undefined “anti-American values”. 

• Wasting time and money attempting to lift a common-sense injunction stopping changes to Department of Housing and Urban Development funding that would have evicted nearly 170,000 formerly homeless people from their stable housing. These changes would also have conditioned funding on states and cities that enforce laws that make it a crime to be homeless, assist ICE, and reject proven solutions to homelessness.  

• Taking over cities, specifically naming homelessness as a reason for federal takeover. This includes the ongoing military takeover of DC that has resulted in the displacement of homeless Washingtonians and ICE occupation of Minneapolis, during which three homeless members of the Oglala Sioux tribe were kidnapped.  

Tragically, none of these policies address the real solution to homelessness: ensuring that everybody has the housing and support they need.   

Also of note, we understand that the 2025 results of the Point in Time Homeless Count, conducted before Trump’s anti-homeless polices were implemented, will be released in the coming days and will show a decrease in homelessness. This shows that the pre-Trump approach of housing plus support solves homelessness. However, we expect the Trump administration to weaponize this data to further his attacks on homeless people and move us backwards.  

Taken together, these actions clearly illustrate that the Trump administration’s only plan for homelessness is to make it worse and force people into jails, institutions, and government-run detention camps. Moreover, we see a constant demonization of homeless people rooted in fearmongering, racist stereotypes, and a clear lack of understanding regarding the causes of and solutions to homelessness. None of this is an accident. It is the result of a far-right agenda funded largely by billionaires like Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and his pet project, the Cicero Institute. The same extremist forces behind Trump’s attack on homeless people are in part behind the 2024 Grants Pass ruling and the spread of anti-homeless laws at the city and state levels.  

Recently, Donald Trump told reporters, “Nobody gives a s*** about housing.” Nothing could be further from the truth, especially for the hundreds of thousands of people who sleep outside each night, and the millions of people who are one missed paycheck or sickness away from losing their home. But the Trump administration is too busy attacking homeless people and fanning the flames of the culture war to actually help people make ends meet. 

As politicians ignore the rising cost of housing, gas, and healthcare, we know that another reality is possible. In a country as wealthy as ours, we have more than enough money to ensure that everybody- regardless of what they look like, where they are from, or what they do – has a safe place to live.