On Thursday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order demanding that states intensify efforts to criminalize poverty and homelessness and to institutionalize people suffering from mental health issues and drug addiction.
The order, titled “Ending crime and disorder on America’s streets,” casts the estimated 770,000 people in the US without a home as violent public safety threats. “Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe,” the order begins.
It states, “Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine or opioids… the Federal Government and the States have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness… leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.”
The EO matches language Trump used on the campaign trail. “Our once great cities have become unlivable unsanitary nightmares surrendered to the homeless,” Trump said in a 2023 campaign video. In the video and in speeches around the country, Trump promised to end homelessness by creating “tent cities where the homeless can be relocated.”
Earlier this week it was reported that the US government will be building massive tent concentration camps on US military bases throughout the country. The administration claims these are for housing immigrants, but there is no doubt they and other concentration camps will be used to detain homeless people, alleged drug addicts and other “undesirables” the US government wants to disappear.
In furtherance of this goal, the executive order encourages the criminalization of homeless people and directs the Justice Department to expand the indefinite forced treatment of people suffering form mental health issues or substance abuse addictions. These matters have historically and constitutionally been allocated to states to decide.
In order to force states to acquiesce to the will of the aspiring dictator, the order threatens to withhold federal grants from states that do not adopt the administration’s punitive policies. It does not outline any additional funding mechanisms to assist states.
Instead, funding will be cut for states and municipalities that practice “harm reduction” or “safe consumption” efforts. These include cities that allow supervised injection sites and consumption of what are currently illicit drugs as part of treatment programs overseen by medical professionals.
Even though several studies have found that access to harm reduction and safe consumption treatment reduces overdose deaths and leads to an uptake in treatment acceptance, the EO falsely claims these efforts “only facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm.”
Underscoring that the order has nothing to do with ending homelessness, but rather expanding the police state, the order also directs Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner to end funding for “housing first” policies, and instead promote “accountability” programs.
“Housing first” policies begin with the fact that shelter is a basic human need and should be available to everyone regardless of job status, mental health or addiction. By ending support for these types of programs, the Trump administration is shifting government support only to programs that require that recipients already be employed or submit to and complete treatment programs before being granted access to housing.
The order directs the attorney general, the secretary of health and human services, the secretary of housing and urban development and the secretary of transportation to withhold grants to states and municipalities that don’t enforce prohibitions on “illicit drug use,” “urban camping and loitering” and “urban squatting.”
Many states, including those run by Democrats, have already embraced Trump’s crackdown against the unhoused. In July 2024, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order targeting homeless encampments, ordering state agencies to remove them from public areas. Newsom followed that up with an even more draconian order this past May directing cities to adopt anti-camping ordinances that mandate unhoused individuals to relocate every 72 hours.
The bipartisan efforts to criminalize homelessness are aimed at masking the fact that more than enough money exists to provide homes, mental health and drug addiction treatment for everyone in the US and internationally. Under capitalism, the wealth created by the working class, the vast majority of society, is stolen and hoarded by a tiny parasitic few.
The financial oligarchy uses this unearned wealth to protect itself and its historically outdated system, instead of providing for the benefit of all of humanity.
The 2025 Wealth Report by Knight Frank found that the fortunes of the wealthy ($10 million+), ultra-wealthy ($100 million+) and billionaires improved throughout the world in 2024.
The number of people “worth” over $10 million grew by 4.4 percent globally, with the highest number in North America at 5.2 percent. This was followed by Asia at 5.0 percent and Africa at 4.7 percent. Europe was last with only 1.4 percent.
The same report found just over 104,000 people, defined in the report as “ultra-wealthy,” control over $100 million individually. There are 44,218 such individuals in North America, followed by 33,084 in Asia and 16,268 in Europe. Over 905,000 people in the US individually control between $10 and $99 million. This figure represents nearly 39 percent of “wealthy individuals” in the world.
Above the “ultra-wealthy” are the billionaires, of which Forbes and the Knight Frank Report estimate there are over 2,700. In 2024, billionaires in the US controlled $5.7 trillion.
A recent estimate from Scioto Analysis found it would cost between $11 billion and $30 billion to house every person in America. Assuming it costs $30 billion, the wealth currently hoarded by the billionaires could end homelessness about 190 times over.
Put differently, less than 1 percent of billionaire wealth (0.5 percent) could end homelessness for a year.
If the American working class embarked on a housing construction program aimed at providing 770,000 housing units at the cost of $500,000 per unit, an extremely high estimate, this would still only cost $385 billion. This would leave over $5 trillion to be directed towards other pressing social needs, such as healthcare for all and high-quality public education.