When President Trump set out last month to eviscerate a tiny agency that coordinates federal efforts to reduce homelessness, he was not just clearing bureaucratic brush.
He was escalating a conservative war on how billions in federal aid gets spent, a fight that could have life-altering stakes for the record number of people sleeping on the streets.
The obscure focus of Mr. Trump’s ire, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, is smaller than many Boy Scout troops. His larger target appears to be the policy that dominates homelessness work, an approach called Housing First.
Once the product of bipartisan consensus, Housing First programs, which the council promotes, provide apartments to chronically homeless people without requiring them to accept services like drug treatment or mental health care. Supporters say the policy saves lives by getting treatment-wary people safely indoors, where some go on to accept services. Proponents have credited it for a signature success, the decline by more than half in the number of homeless veterans.
But critics say the approach has become a stifling orthodoxy that has failed to stem the broader rise in homelessness and may abet it. Giving people long-term housing without addressing underlying problems like substance abuse or mental illness leaves them prone to homelessness again, opponents of the policy say. Detractors also say that by favoring Housing First, federal grants unfairly exclude groups like rescue missions that emphasize sobriety.
The sooner the council vanishes, critics say, the faster Mr. Trump can steer a new course.
“It’s an ideological and propagandist arm for failed Housing First policies,” said Devon Kurtz, a policy analyst at the conservative Cicero Institute, an Austin-based research and advocacy group. “It would have been undercutting the work of the Trump administration right off the bat.”
Beyond homelessness, Mr. Trump’s attack on a bureaucratic cranny provides a study in the growing force and sophistication of his governing style.
For most of his first term, Mr. Trump accepted the status quo in homelessness policy. He retained a director of the homeless council who was appointed by his Democratic predecessor. His housing secretary, Ben Carson, cited “a mountain of data” showing that the “Housing First approach works.”
Late in his first term, as homelessness rose, Mr. Trump took a more polarizing approach, blaming Democrats for what he called permissive policies and placing a vocal Housing First critic in charge of the council. Now he seeks not to commandeer the council but to extinguish it, ending the risk of covert dissent.
“There was a lot of learning that happened in the first Trump administration,” said Kevin Corinth, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute and a Housing First skeptic who worked at the Council of Economic Advisers in Mr. Trump’s first term. “You’re seeing much more understanding of the way the different agencies work and how you can change something much more quickly.”
In targeting the Interagency Council on Homelessness, Mr. Trump’s executive order last month gave no reason beyond “the reduction of the federal bureaucracy.” The agency’s defenders say his ire is misplaced since the council advances his stated goal of government efficiency.
In coordinating the homelessness work of 19 federal agencies, the council seeks to eliminate duplication and make Washington more accessible to local organizations. Eliminating its annual budget, $4 million, would save about as much as the government spends every 18 seconds.
“It’s ironic to do something like this in the name of government efficiency, because the council was designed with efficiency in mind,” said Jeff Olivet, its director during the Biden administration. “For such a modest investment, the agency achieves great things.”
Mr. Olivet cited the council’s work in Long Beach, Calif., where homelessness rose more than 60 percent during the pandemic and a new mayor, Rex Richardson, declared an emergency after taking office in late 2022. Working with Mr. Olivet, he convened a summit last year on youth homelessness that included four levels of government (city, county, state and federal) and private groups to discuss strategy.
Since then, three new youth shelters have opened or are being built — one by the city and two by private agencies. The city also opened a youth training center and at Mr. Olivet’s suggestion established a youth advisory board, which allows it to apply for more federal aid. Youth homelessness in Long Beach last year fell by nearly half.
“Our strategy was developed 100 percent in partnership with the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness,” said Mr. Richardson, a Democrat. “They make our work more efficient, and we’ve seen the results.”
Congress created the council in 1987 amid concerns that the federal government had been slow to fight homelessness. By convening agencies as dissimilar as the Pentagon and post office, the council was meant to spur the government into action. The unusual specificity of its duties reflected the grass-roots view that Washington would act only if forced: Legally, the council must publish a newsletter, hold quarterly meetings and appoint at least five regional advisers.
The council rose to prominence under President George W. Bush when an entrepreneurial director, Philip Mangano, helped lead an initiative that reduced chronic homelessness by more than a third. The effort combined a well-financed expansion of rental subsidies with Mr. Mangano’s vocal support of Housing First principles: Programs offered drug and mental health treatment but did not require it, with proponents reasoning in part that services worked better after people were stably housed.
President Barack Obama used a similar approach to cut veterans’ homelessness, and the support of presidents from both parties gave Housing First a bipartisan imprimatur. Since 2009, homelessness among veterans has fallen about 55 percent, with the council aiding the work. Along the way, Congress wrote rules favoring Housing First programs for grants that now distribute about $3.5 billion a year. Amid pledges to “end” homelessness, what started as a policy became a movement.
But as homelessness overall began rising in the late 2010s, a backlash followed. While progressives blamed rising rents and called for more aid, conservatives questioned studies that claimed Housing First worked. Treatment-first groups sought funding parity.
Some conservatives said the Biden-era council overemphasized race and gender. Its strategic plan used variations of the word “equity” nearly 100 times and endorsed “culturally appropriate and gender-affirming housing resources” — language that critics called “woke.”
As a new front opened in the culture wars. Mr. Carson, the former housing secretary who once touted Housing First, used Project 2025, a conservative policy guide, to label it a “far-left idea” and fault the council for promoting it.
Supporters continue to see the council’s work as pragmatic problem-solving. After Mike Johnston was elected mayor of Denver in 2023 on a pledge to move 1,000 people off the streets, the city became one of seven sites where the council embedded a federal adviser to tackle unsheltered homelessness.
The adviser, from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, helped Denver secure a federal waiver that made rental aid easier to use.
By raising the amount the government could pay landlords, the waiver expanded the pool of apartments for which unhoused people could apply. And by offering “presumptive eligibility,” it let them move in while they assembled documents like earnings records and ID cards, a process that often takes months. Some people die on the streets in the midst of pending paperwork.
Mr. Johnston, a Democrat, exceeded his goal, and unsheltered homelessness in Denver fell more than 10 percent in his first year in office, while it rose nearly a quarter in the surrounding area. The council “was an incredible partner,” he said. “It could have taken years to get that kind of waiver approved — we might be waiting on it now.”
Mr. Trump’s order does not abolish the council, whose existence is required by law, but cuts it by “the maximum extent” allowed. Unless Congress renews its legal authorization, the council expires in 2028.
Mr. Kurtz of the Cicero Institute called the order “a step in the right direction” but said the bigger goal for Housing First critics is to get Congress to change the rules that favor the approach in federal grants.
Not every critic of the council wants it to go. The Citygate Network represents more than 300 rescue missions and other faith-based groups, many of which run treatment-focused programs excluded from federal aid. Tom De Vries, the group’s chief executive officer, would move policy away from Housing First to allow for a greater emphasis on sobriety and mental health care.
But he calls for preserving the council’s existence, for the same reason given nearly four decades ago at its founding: Homelessness needs Washington’s attention.
“Under new leadership, you can use it as a tool for good,” he said. “Homelessness is one of the biggest humanitarian crises we face as a society. There’s a benefit to having one agency focused on it.”