For years, PJ Media has shared the stories of homeless people camping out on the streets of West Coast cities and the policies adopted by cities and states that make problems even worse. Now, President Donald Trump is taking steps to stop this endless insanity. He’s signed an executive order to end what has become the “homeless industrial complex.”
Trump has signed an executive order to change some of the worst aspects of these “X Years to Stop Homelessness” programs cluttering the portfolios of lawmakers and enriching the wallets of non-profits while doing next to nothing to end the problem.
On Thursday, the president announced his Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets executive order, targeting “endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe.”
The number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration — 274,224 — was the highest ever recorded. The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both. Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes. An equally large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions.
Cities have gone to so-called “harm reduction” policies that provide addicted lost souls with clean needles, safe places to shoot up, and crack pipes. San Francisco and Seattle are even mulling over becoming crack brokers to offer “safe supplies” to their drug-addled sidewalk-dwellers.
Related: West Coast, Messed Coast™– Holy Environy! Newsom Desperately Tries to Sell Refinery He Helped Close
When San Francisco moved to a “housing first” effort to put these homeless tweakers and fentanyl addicts in apartments, they just moved the problems inside. Instead of dying of an overdose on a sidewalk, they moved addicts to tiny apartments where they could die from overdoses with a roof over their heads. Yet, “housing first” is the ardent hope of California homeless advocates. Some of these homes cost $800,000 apiece to build. Others, as in Washington, create tiny home villages in urban areas.
California has sunk billions of dollars into these programs and can’t account for all of the spending.
Progressives who think it’s moral to enable these addictions think addicts are responsible enough to take drugs, but not responsible enough to follow the law. That’s about to end.
Trump’s EO defunds “harm reduction” programs that enslave people to their addictions instead of helping them get clean.
[E]nsure that discretionary grants issued by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for substance use disorder prevention, treatment, and recovery fund evidence-based programs and do not fund programs that fail to achieve adequate outcomes, including so-called “harm reduction” or “safe consumption” efforts that only facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm…”
Bravo.
The executive order asks the attorney general to deconstruct the policies and consent decrees that “impede the United States’ policy of encouraging civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.”
This is obviously controversial. The White House plan, however, calls for “the identification, adoption, and implementation of maximally flexible civil commitment, institutional treatment, and “step-down” treatment standards that allow for the appropriate commitment and treatment of individuals with mental illness who pose a danger to others or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves.” [emphasis added]
Related: LA’s Worst Problems Just Collided to Put Fire Victims Into a NEW Ring of Hell
The EO calls for ending “support for ‘housing first’ policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency; increasing competition among grantees through broadening the applicant pool; and holding grantees to higher standards of effectiveness in reducing homelessness and increasing public safety. “
This means California has been put on blast. I’ve seen first-hand the switch from requiring responsibility and self-sufficiency to “housing first” without any strings, and it has been disastrous.
Kevin Dahlgren, who has been helping homeless people for years, is ecstatic with this EO, which he believes will empower rather than enable the homeless.
My response to Trump’s executive order that basically dismantles the Housing First model and reallocates that money towards recovery type programs. Translation.: This is a pivot from enabling a person to empowering them. He’s going to help pic.twitter.com/dAzM9Fw9f4
— Kevin Dahlgren 🥾 🥾 (@kevinvdahlgren) July 25, 2025
I wrote this in a piece last year:
Something in our societal structure switched off in the last 20 years or so, making anti-social behavior acceptable — a life choice with all of its externalities that the rest of society must tolerate. We used to try to dissuade or punish behavior such as drug taking on the street. Now law-abiding citizens are asked to conform or risk being called intolerant.
But tolerating bad behavior is bad for society. It’s bad for the individual to be hopelessly addicted and without hope—that is not the natural or metaphysical state of things. Without hope, you are nothing but a vessel.
…When homeless outreach was done by the religious community, its emphasis was on healing people from their addictions and their estrangement from their family and community.
Now that it’s a governmental cash cannon that has been aimed at the problem there’s a distortion in the response. The government has made the homeless industrial complex a money-making bonanza for NGOs. Where’s the incentive to solve the problem when the problem is a cash cow?
Trump’s done a lot of huge things in his first six months. Next to enforcing our borders, this might be his biggest.
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