Empower Missouri strongly condemns President Trump’s Executive Order (EO) on “Ending Crime & Disorder on America’s Streets.” The order is riddled with misleading statements, prejudicial language, and outright lies about our neighbors who are unhoused. We seek to correct this misinformation and encourage our partners to stand ready to mitigate, and then be prepared to address, the disastrous outcomes that this policy will cause.
This is longer than our typical blog post, so I’ll provide a quick “TLDR” version for those who don’t care to read the whole thing. It basically boils down to four points:
- The language in the EO is inflammatory, disingenuous, and, if adopted by folks charged with implementing this policy, is ripe to increase negative bias against our neighbors who are unhoused.
- Crime in our cities is at near-record lows. The vast majority of individuals forced to live in their cars or on our streets do not have a mental illness, nor do they pose a significant risk to public safety.
- While the EO suggests that individuals living on the streets should be moved to treatment centers or other facilities, we know that there is a massive shortage of treatment beds for those needing treatment for mental illness, addiction, or both. We strongly believe that the end result of this order will be mass incarceration of the homeless.
- The EO upends decades of successful programs centered around the “Housing First” model of homeless services. Instead, it will attempt to force service providers into using antiquated, ineffective “stair step” programs by the withholding of federal funds from agencies using the proven model.
Ready for the long version? Let’s go.
For those without intimate knowledge of both homelessness and the network of service providers who seek to address the issue, the EO might seem positive. But, for those of us who are working in this space, it is easy to spot the disinformation and fear-mongering that this EO presents as factual information. For example, the EO states that, “The Order redirects funding to ensure that individuals camping on streets and causing public disorder and that are suffering from serious mental illness or addiction are moved into treatment centers, assisted outpatient treatment, or other facilities.”
Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, there are two major problems here. First of all, a very small number of individuals who are unhoused are “causing public disorder.” While we have likely all seen some media coverage of disturbing images and behavior from certain individuals experiencing homelessness, the data shows us that unhoused individuals are actually more likely to be a victim of a crime rather than the perpetrator of one. Unfortunately, stories of violence against the homeless are unlikely to receive significant media attention, which has contributed to a skewed perception of individuals experiencing homelessness. The White House furthers this narrative in the EO, stating that “endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe” and “President Trump is taking a new approach focused on protecting public safety because surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor to other citizens.”
This sort of fear-mongering is shameful and harmful to our sense of community. Nationally, violent crime is near record lows, and property crime has dropped by nearly 60% since 1993. So why do Americans think that crime is up? Because leaders like President Trump choose to stoke fear amongst their constituents because it benefits them at the ballot box. Recent surveys show that American voters trust Republicans over Democrats to deal with crime by a wide margin; in order to benefit from that public perception, it is imperative that voters believe that cities are in peril and they need Republican leaders to save them. Don’t be fooled.
Second, while we agree that individuals who are suffering from serious mental illness or addiction deserve treatment, we are also painfully aware that there are simply not enough spots available in mental health and drug treatment facilities to meet societal demand. According to the National Institute for Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Drug Abuse, “…demand exceeds treatment capacity. In 2022, nearly 49 million people in the U.S. had at least one substance use disorder, though only around a quarter (13 million people) received treatment in the past year.”
A similar trend exists in mental health. According to a 2007 study by the NIH, the number of inpatient psychiatric beds nationwide dropped an astounding 60 percent between 1970 and 2002, from around 525,000 to approximately 211,000. According to KFF, that number has continued to plummet over the last two decades, with only 88,434 beds residential and/or inpatient beds available nationwide in 2023.
This begs the question– where, exactly, does the Trump administration intend to move these people when they are forcibly removed from the streets? Does the administration intend to ask Congress to appropriate an enormous sum to fund new treatment facilities for those struggling with addiction and serious mental health conditions? If so, we would celebrate that necessary investment in our nation’s healthcare infrastructure. However, this feels highly unlikely given that Republicans already had to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion to accommodate the extension of tax cuts for the rich. We’re supposed to expect that now Congress is going to add to that debt with billions of dollars in new spending for treatment facilities? There’s just no way. (Congress: prove me wrong!)
Any social worker or nonprofit professional reading this already knows where we’re going to move these folks: we’ll send them to jail, America’s evergreen solution for dealing with every population that we find inconvenient. In fact, the EO doesn’t even attempt to hide that this is the plan, directing key members of his cabinet to assess their grant programs and determine where they can prioritize funding for states and municipalities who “enforce prohibitions on urban camping and loitering.” This, along with the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in The City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson, will pave the way for more cities and states to arrest people simply for sleeping outside, even when there are no alternatives. Empower Missouri has written extensively about this issue and has been a leader in preventing this type of legislation from being passed in Missouri up until this point, but we expect that this EO will be used as leverage for lawmakers who wish to reintroduce this type of legislation in Missouri.
The EO seems to attempt to justify this brutal treatment of those experiencing homelessness by falsely stating that “the overwhelming majority of these individuals” living on the streets “are addicted to drugs, have a mental health disorder, or both.” I cannot emphasize enough how false this statement is. A 2023 ABC News analysis of data from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development showed that approximately 20% of people experiencing homelessness have a severe mental illness. This is certainly significantly higher than the general population (approximately 5%), but far from an “overwhelming majority.” Similarly, a recent study from UC San Francisco found that in a survey of 3,200 individuals experiencing homelessness (the largest study in three decades), 37% reported regular drug use in the previous six months. Again, this is troubling, but far from an “overwhelming majority.” It is also important to note that 23% of respondents indicated that they hadn’t abused drugs until after they became homeless, meaning that a significant number of these individuals could have avoided needing addiction treatment if we would have prevented them from becoming homeless in the first place.
And this brings us to our final, and perhaps most alarming, components of the EO. The Order states that “federal and state governments have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.” First of all– the primary causes of homelessness are 1) a lack of affordable housing options and 2) incomes that haven’t kept up with the high cost of housing, leading to increased poverty. Over the last few months, we have published a four-part series on the nation’s severe housing shortage, what has exacerbated the crisis, and how we can solve it. I’ve also written recently about the growing wealth gap in our country, including noting that, according to data tracked by the Economic Policy Institute on the nation’s 350 largest companies, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was an eye-popping 399-to-1 in 2021, up substantially from 59-to-1 in 1989 and 20-to-1 in 1965. Greed seems to be top value driving America these days, and has certainly heavily contributed to the housing and homelessness crises in our country.
So, is President Trump going to attempt to address these root causes? Of course not. He is trying to convince Americans that mental health and substance abuse are the root causes of homelessness, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. Has America actually wasted tens of billions of dollars on failed programs to address homelessness? Of course not.
In the early 1990s, a new model for addressing homelessness emerged, generally referred to as “Housing First.” The model does exactly that– provides housing for individuals experiencing homelessness before requiring them to meet any other requirements. Previous models, often referred to as “stair step” programs, required individuals to complete mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, or other programming requirements (while still living on the streets or in a group setting, like a shelter) before being provided with housing. The stair step model was ineffective. As you can imagine, individuals who have been homeless for any length of time have likely experienced substantial trauma and are typically not physically, mentally, or emotionally prepared to undergo these types of treatment programs. The Housing First approach landed on the key to success– stabilizing individuals in safe, secure housing and then working with them to get the additional help that they need. Individuals in Housing First programs have case workers who check on them regularly and supervise ongoing treatment and program requirements. Housing First has been shown to be 88% more effective than “stair step” programs, and the data continues to support its success.
Despite decades of research that shows that this is the best possible approach to serving the homeless, President Trump is about to blow it up, while falsely claiming that it is a failure. The EO directs the Secretaries of HHS and HUD to “end support for ‘housing first’ policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency,” and “increase requirements that persons… who suffer from substance use disorder or serious mental illness use substance abuse treatment or mental health services as a condition of participation.” So, essentially, the Trump administration is returning to the failed “stair step” model of homeless services. The only basis for claiming that Housing First is a “failure” is that homelessness continues to rise in the country. But the problem isn’t that Housing First doesn’t work– it works extremely well for people who can access the services. The problem is that more people are experiencing homelessness for the first time faster than services can be funded and provided. An analysis by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies shows that federal housing programs are serving 6% fewer people than they were in 2004, while eligible households without aid have grown by 25% in the same time period. We have been chronically underfunding federal housing programs for decades, and this underinvestment, combined with a growing homeless population driven by a massive housing shortage and a historic wealth gap, has pushed us to the brink of disaster.
The policies outlined in this Executive Order will increase negative bias towards our unhoused neighbors, cause our jail populations to swell unsustainably, and massively increase homelessness. Every person in this country deserves a safe place to live. These policies move us further from, not closer to, that goal. Stay tuned in the weeks ahead for ways to advocate against the implementation of these policies.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to get involved and advocate for policies that can truly help solve the root causes of homelessness, along with other anti-poverty policies, explore these resources:
English 
Spanish