Today, the Trump Administration began to dismantle the ineffective and costly Housing First homelessness policies, which have caused the country’s homeless problem to become even worse. The Obama-era policy resulted in a record-breaking 770,000 people to suffer on our streets during the last year of the Biden Administration. In Washington state, homelessness rose 78% since the policy was implemented 12 years ago.

The Executive Orders signed today include the following actions:

1. Redirects funding to help those who need addiction and/or mental health treatment.
2. Requires federal agencies to “prioritize grants for states and municipalities that enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use, urban camping and loitering, and urban squatting.”
3. Directs the U.S. Attorney General to make changes to federal laws to allow local governments to commit individuals who risk harm to others or themselves.
4. Allows local governments more freedom to separate sex offenders to make sure they are tracked better and that they don’t share shelter space with women and children.

The focus on addiction and mental health issues is important since more than three-fourths of those on the streets suffer from these ailments. These issues have been largely ignored under Housing First strategies, and this executive order has followed the advice of many experts by placing treatment as the top priority to help those on the street.

ChangeWA has been at the lead in exposing the inefficiencies and lack of accountability associated with our region’s Housing First policies:

• Despite spending billions annually on homelessness, the unsheltered population continues to grow every year (including in 2025) and has risen 68% since homelessness was declared an emergency in 2015.
• When current Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine was King County Executive and in charge of the county’s homelessness strategy, he was unable to provide an estimate on how much taxpayer money the county was spending on the issue.
• Half of the non-government agencies that receive taxpayer money for housing failed to provide public records on whether they helped anyone.
• King County spent $330,000+ per room to buy 15 hotels to warehouse 1366 homeless individuals with no requirement to accept treatment for addiction or mental health issues. Ongoing bureaucratic and maintenance costs will be an annual financial burden for taxpayers.
• Because nearly 80% of homeless individuals self-identified as having addiction and/or mental health problems, ChangeWA has promoted homelessness strategies that focus on treatment to help those struggling to become self-sufficient.

Your voice will be needed in the coming weeks, as this announcement will certainly upset the special interest groups that have profited from the homeless crisis under Housing First policies. We can count on them to fight this executive order in the courts and fill the media with exaggerated accounts of how this will cause devastation.

Local and state politicians will need to make many important decisions in the coming weeks on the future of our region’s homelessness strategy.  You will need to encourage them to seek solutions that put ending the suffering first and stop prioritizing enlarging the size and power of government.

Stay tuned!