Trump Admin Has A New Prescription For Homelessness

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is overhauling how the federal government addresses homelessness, tying billions of dollars in Housing and Urban Development funding to treatment, recovery, and measurable outcomes rather than approaches officials say have enabled addiction and failed to solve the problem.

The Housing and Urban Development Department announced a new $4.04 billion Notice of Funding Opportunity on Monday through its Continuum of Care (CoC) homelessness assistance program.

“The status quo on homelessness is not working,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said on a call with reporters. “In a country as prosperous as ours, it is unacceptable that hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans are sleeping on the streets, struggling with drug addiction, suffering from mental illness, and trapped in cycles that federal policy has too often failed to address.” 

The funding notice represents what Turner called a “fundamental shift” in how HUD evaluates homeless programs and allocates federal dollars.

“Instead of enablement, we will focus on treatment and recovery,” he said. “We will fund projects based on merit and outcomes, not warehousing the homeless and government dependent. We will define success by how many Americans achieve self-sufficiency, not by dollars spent or units filled.” 

HUD officials stressed that under President Joe Biden’s administration, billions of dollars were spent on the homelessness problem, yet homelessness simultaneously spiked. One reason for this, the officials told reporters, is that HUD was funding programs that were enabling the use of illicit drugs and distribution of paraphernalia. 

“We should be making this easy to get treatment and hard to get high, but our policies in the prior Biden and Obama administrations have basically made it easy to get high and hard to get treatment,” a HUD official explained to The Daily Wire.

HUD’s 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report informed Congress that 745,652 people in the United States were homeless, including 266,320 people living on the street on a single night in January 2025. The figure is a 3% decrease since 2024, which the Trump administration has attributed to decreases in homelessness in sanctuary cities.

Between 2013 and 2025, homelessness increased 27%, unsheltered homelessness by 36%, chronic homelessness climbed 81%, and taxpayer-funded beds increased by 151%. Continuum of Care spending had also increased 111%, according to HUD.

Officials stressed that those trends demonstrate the need for a new approach.

Under the revised framework, HUD says it will prioritize programs that produce measurable improvements in treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency rather than simply increasing the number of beds or housing units.

Officials also accused some federally funded homelessness providers of tolerating or facilitating drug use.

“Under the Biden administration, HUD turned a blind eye to and ignored the reality of illicit drug use and trafficking inside of DOC funded, HUD funded housing for the homeless, and the result is devastating,” one HUD official explained to The Daily Wire. 

“We’ve seen countless lives lost to overdose inside of HUD funded housing for the homeless because of this, and even worse, we’ve also seen COC funded providers distributing needles, crack pipes, foil, drug paraphernalia to use deadly drugs inside of housing.”

Officials also pointed to the federal “Crack House Law,” slang for the Controlled Substances Act, which makes it illegal to knowingly open or run a place that is being used for drug manufacturing or distribution.

“We basically had programs totally ignoring the federal law, as well as local and state laws,” explained a second HUD official, “and what you’re seeing is a lot of mayors are really leading the effort now to fight back in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Austin, Houston, Portland.”

“Somebody experiencing homelessness should not get a get out of jail card for distribution use, on the street,” the official added.