In the year since President Trump signed an executive order aimed at moving homeless people off the streets, federal agencies have given states a green light to expand the use of civil commitment for homeless individuals with mental illness or substance abuse problems.
Pending a court challenge, the primary system of funding for organizations combating homelessness could be transformed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to comply with Mr. Trump’s executive order.
The president’s order argues that past policies neglected “root causes” of homelessness and created a public safety risk.
Opponents say that the administration would strain the limited number of state treatment centers, criminalize the homeless population and would be an unnecessary shift away from “Housing First” policies. Housing First is an approach that promotes non-conditional access to housing — that is, without requiring sobriety, compliance with treatment or making other demands of recipients.
Civil commitments
Mr. Trump’s order prompted the Justice and Health and Human Services Departments to prioritize funding for states that carry out involuntary psychiatric treatment — or “maximally flexible civil commitment” of individuals with mental illness who “pose a danger to others or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves.”
His order argued that “public order” would be restored by committing homeless people to “long-term institutional settings for humane treatment.”
It called on the Justice Department to reverse any consent decrees that would impede these civil commitments. The order also prioritized funding for states and cities that ban urban camping, urban squatting and open illicit drug use.
About 30% of those experiencing chronic homelessness have a serious mental illness, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Meanwhile, two-thirds have a substance use disorder or other chronic health condition.
The call for a tougher law-and-order approach has prompted multiple Republican states to pass laws that penalize homeless encampments or expand the facilitation of involuntary institutionalizations.
Utah recently approved more than $43 million in spending earlier this year in part to target “high utilizers,” those who repeatedly cycle through homeless shelters and jail. It is reinforced by a new law that allows these individuals to be put under the supervision of Utah’s Division of Adult Probation and Parole.
Both Indiana and Louisiana passed bills this year that make it a crime to sleep overnight or camp on public property. Louisiana’s HB 211, called the “Streets to Success Act,” punishes first-time violators with fines up to $500. To avoid spending up to six months in jail, eligible individuals may sign up for a new “Homelessness Court Program.”
The program would supervise participants for a year and give them access to substance abuse treatment, mental health services, job training and housing assistance. Those who complete the program could have their conviction erased. Those who don’t risk a jail sentence.
Participants “may be confined in a treatment facility” or released on a probationary basis, the state law says. The court could also impose rehabilitation conditions on participants.
The National Homelessness Law Center called it “one of the cruelest, most extreme anti-homeless bills.” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry defended the homeless courts, arguing they’d help “start removing the homeless off of our streets and into the places that they belong.”
Shaina Bessonet, a dental hygienist in Louisiana who experienced homelessness from January 2022 to March 2026, testified against the bill before the state legislature.
“Just because someone is homeless, because they don’t have a place to sleep, doesn’t give anybody the right to take them and punish them just for not having a place to go. It’s not fixing the problem, it’s making it worse,” she told CBS News.
Devon Kurtz, a policy director at the Cicero Institute, said the executive order and a June Justice Department legal opinion, gives states “considerably more discretion” on their psychiatric care. That opinion made it easier for states to keep those with mental illness institutionalized, rather than provide them with in-home or community-based care.
The Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank that was established by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, advised the White House on the crafting of the executive order.
“This executive order was really a signal to those agencies that they have to revisit all of these key touch points that are creating these unnecessary burdens and ceilings on state experimentation with policy,” Kurtz said.
He argued that the Housing First approach and similar ideas have “been rewarding the places that have done the worst.”
But Jennifer Mathis, deputy director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health, said civil commitment could be more expensive than providing long-term housing and should be “a last resort.”
Mathis, a Biden-era official in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said the executive order “created an environment where states felt either pressured or permitted to focus on more coercive strategies, to focus less on housing as a solution.”
“The basic notion behind the executive order seems to be that these people who are unhoused don’t deserve housing,” she said. “They’re either criminals or they’re problem people, and we should basically be forcing them into treatment because it’s just their own fault.”
It’s “just wrong at its core,” she said.
Funding changes stuck in the courts
Administration officials claim Mr. Trump’s order has resulted in $700 million in HHS funding aimed at helping people with addiction and mental illness, as well as homelessness, though there are limits on the funding being used on Housing First or “harm reduction” policies.
But the administration’s vision of how HUD can “increase accountability” in the over $4 billion in grants proposed for homelessness assistance has been stuck in litigation.
Housing First policies have been used by HUD and other federal agencies to address homelessness since 2013. Housing First was initially adopted as a national federal strategy by President George W. Bush’s administration in 2004.
The department’s report on homelessness in 2025 claimed there’s been a roughly 27% increase in homelessness since 2013.
HUD’s 2026 budget cut the available funds for permanent, supportive housing funding from about $3 billion to $2.4 billion, compared to 2024. And the 2026 HUD budget shifts a greater portion of funding — $1.3 billion — to new transitional, temporary housing programs, compared to the approximately $600,000 allocated in the 2024 budget.
A recent lawsuit cites a claim by the National Alliance to End Homelessness that the shift towards temporary, transitional housing could kick 97,000 people out of permanent supportive housing.
Attorneys general from 21 states and the National Alliance to End Homelessness sued HUD in July over the latest plan for funding. A legal challenge to stop HUD’s 2025 plan for funding was successful in April.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner said the 97,000 figure was “fear-mongering” and said it was “absurd” that litigation was blocking “long-overdue changes.”
“No one is being kicked out on the streets,” Turner said, arguing in a statement that the HUD plan would provide “more funding than ever before” and give homeless advocates and groups “greater flexibility to invest in the housing and services their neighborhoods need.”
Ann Oliva, the CEO of NAEH, defended Housing First policies and called the administration’s opposition “disingenuous” and lacking context regarding how the increase in housing costs over the last decade “funnel[ed] people into homelessness.”
“It’s like they’re saying the emergency room is causing cancer. So we should just get rid of emergency rooms? Because cancer is still happening? That’s short-sighted,” she said.
