As regional homelessness numbers continue to break records, the crisis has driven the unprecedented growth in the size and cost of government in the City of Seattle, King County, and Washington State.

Moreover, nearly every department, agency, commission, council and authority at all levels of government have used the crisis to justify its budget expansion since the on-going homelessness emergency has an extremely broad impact.

This wide distribution of homeless responsibilities is important since 1) it is an inefficient structure to tackle an “emergency” problem, and 2) it will be tougher to dismantle the homeless bureaucratic organizations (and reduce price to taxpayers) if costs are spread wide throughout the different layers of government. Thus, as the crisis continues the more likely taxpayers will need to keep paying “emergency” level costs long after the crisis has subsided.

On November 2, 2015, King County Executive Dow Constantine and then Seattle Mayor Ed Murray stood before the local media to declare homelessness an emergency and that a significant increase in public funds were going to be spent to combat the problem.

In 2015 the City of Seattle operated on a $4 billion budget. Nine years later progressive city council members passed a $7.8 billion package for 2024 (a 95% increase). During the same years, King County’s biannual budget grew from $9 billion to $16.2 billion (an 80% increase). Washington state’s budget ballooned from $38.3 billion in 2015 to $65.8 billion this fiscal year (a 72 percent increase).

For each of these governments, these are the largest budget increases in their history over a nine-year span. And while government spending has dramatically increased it has not had the promised impact of reducing the number of individuals suffering on our streets. In fact, the number of homeless individuals in King County has climbed 63.1% from 10,047 in 2015 to 16,385 today.

While we can view budget documents and media reports to determine the growth rates of each level of government, it is nearly impossible to figure out how much of the increase is due to the homeless problem, for the additional costs are spread out among multiple departments’ budgets.

For example, at the State of Washington, there are 24 agencies represented in the governor’s executive cabinet. It is obvious that the Department of Social and Health Services, the Washington State Patrol, and the Department of Children, Youth, and Families would all have budget items directly related the homeless issue, yet so do nearly all of the cabinet agencies, such as the Department of Transportation (to clean up encampments on WSDOT property), Department of Agriculture, (food assistance  programs), and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (to assist veterans seeking shelter).

A similar bureaucratic expansion is being duplicated at the city and county levels where the homeless crisis has increased the budgets of not only social services and housing departments, but also the fire departments, police departments, utilities, parks departments, libraries, building permits, transportation, courts, and others.

If everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible, and there is no accountability. Agencies can merely shrug and blame their lack of success on insufficient funding. So, the problem progressively becomes worse – and more expensive.

The longer the homeless emergency continues, the more success big government advocates will have in achieving their goals to make the government bureaucracy larger and more powerful. Worst of all, not only are the people in most desperate need of help not getting it, but their numbers grow by the day.