Cruel Executive Order on Homelessness Is Also Ineffective Policy—Unless Goal Is to Discipline Workers and Boost Prison Industry

The Trump administration, acting as an accelerant for the long-raging inferno that is US social policy cruelty, is now coming after the unhoused.

On Thursday, the president who is embroiled in a pedophilic sex abuse ring scandal, signed an executive order pushing local authorities to disappear homeless people from the streets. Let’s unpack what this means, how it’s likely to play out, why it’s so cruel, and more.

Here is the full text of Trump’s order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” which I’ll be dissecting in this post.

When All You Have Is a Hammer…

Trump’s order frames the country’s homelessness crisis as the product solely of mental illness and drug addiction. This is wrong, and is an attempt to hide the exceptional American rapaciousness and cruelty driving the increase in the unhoused.

A study from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative last year was one of the deepest dives into California’s crisis in decades. It found that drug use and mental health problems are not the driver behind people losing housing; the primary reason is the increasing precariousness of the working poor.

The order does not mention the plethora of economic factors that are driving homelessness— low wages (between 40-60 percent of the homeless are employed)., no social safety net, and the astronomical house of housing aided by a national “information-sharing” cartel of mega landlords that dominate the market in certain cities and engage in price-fixing, homebuilder cartels constraining supply. the explosion of vacation rentals, a healthcare system in which we pay for insurance that denies us care and bankrupts the unlucky. That’s to name a few.

The study also showed how the homeless population is getting older and is often the result of just one bad break. From a Los Angeles Times write up:

“These are old people losing housing,” Dr. Margot Kushel told me. She’s the lead investigator on the study from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, done at the request of state health officials.

“They basically were ticking along very poor, and sometime after the age of 50 something happened,” Kushel said. That something — divorce, a loved one dying, an illness, even a cutback in hours on the job — sparked a downward spiral and their lives “just blew up,” as Kushel puts it.

Kushel and her team found that nearly half of single adults living on our streets are over the age of 50. And 7% of all homeless adults, single or in families, are over 65. And 41% of those older, single Californians had never been homeless — not one day in their lives — before the age of 50.

Many homeless do suffer from mental illness and drug addiction. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but in many cases these issues arose or were worsened after becoming homeless. Even the threat of losing one’s shelter—let alone it actually happening—can be an enormously stressful experience.

The UCSF study found that many succumb to drugs as a way to numb the pain of being chewed up and discarded by American society. It is also well-established that poverty and homelessness can lead to or worsen physical and mental health. For example, studies have shown PTSD is common after losing one’s home. It goes beyond just homelessness. For example, a recent study published in the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing finds that food insecurity is linked to severe mental illness.

And so, as is so often the case in the US, problems arising from inhumane social policy are dealt with as criminal justice issues. Much the same way the wars on crime and drugs shifted the focus from too few well-paying jobs to one of too many defectives among us, Trump’s order will help perform such a role with the homeless:

A reminder: framing homelessness as a problem of mental illness or addiction has been politically manufactured to divert attention from its *actual* causes—skyrocketing rents, poverty wages, gutted social supports—and to justify the removal of homeless people from public space.

— Brian Goldstone (@brian_goldstone) July 25, 2025

And for those who believe this is just a Trump problem that will go away with him, it’s worth noting that:

1. The problem predates Trump 2.0 and has grown considerably worse no matter which marketing department of the uniparty is in power.
2. The epicenter of the US homeless crisis is in California, a state with a Democrat supermajority.
3. Democrats are coalescing around an agenda of “abundance” as a solution, which they promise will deliver more housing. In reality, it shows the party rebranding its neoliberal market solutions with a heavy dose of libertarianism. And more power to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, which already dominate what passes as social planning in the US, ain’t gonna help anything aside from maybe yacht and private jet upgrades—and more vacation rentals:

WOW: New California Home Ownership Data

– Nearly 20% of homes in California are owned by investors
– Investors purchased 26.8% of all residential property sales during the first quarter of 2025
– Sierra County has a whopping 82% of single-family houses owned by investors
-… pic.twitter.com/lhAObXOlaA

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) July 25, 2025

Democrats like California Governor Gavin Newsom were out ahead of Trump on the issue. He signed an executive order a year ago calling for cities to “humanely remove encampments from public spaces.” That order, of course, also did nothing to address the systemic problems behind homelessness, including a lack of affordable housing and Social Security benefits not coming close to covering rent leading to skyrocketing numbers of homeless senior citizens. How “humane” can Newsom’s policy be?

As Deyanira Nevárez Martínez,  an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University writes, Newsom’s approach effectively turns the issue over to the criminal justice system and “leads to forced displacement that makes people without housing more likely to be arrested and experience increased instability and trauma.” That’s exactly what Trump’s does too. Bipartisanship!

Even if we accept Trump’s premise that it’s all crazies and drug addicts, what of all the future homeless?

The number one problem for those on the front lines trying to get people into housing is that even when one person gets shelter, three more arrive to take their place on the streets. That is part of the reason that despite all the money thrown at the problem, it keeps getting worse. Of course to turn off the tap of people losing housing, the US would have to rethink its entire economic model that treats people as vessels of profit to be bled dry and discarded.

According to Fran Quigley who directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law, there are nine million US households that are behind on their rent right now. Will they all be deemed mentally ill and drug addicts once they can no longer keep up with the great American hamster wheel?

Even if we accepted Trump’s premise that homelessness is being driven by mental illness and drug addiction, the US isn’t equipped to offer effective help.

From the Vera Institute:

In the United States, people must wait an average of 48 days to access mental health or substance use services, and many struggle to afford needed services that are inaccessible without insurance.

While waiting lists for community-based psychiatric and mental health services grow longer, jails and prisons fill up with people experiencing treatable mental health conditions. Nonviolent behaviors associated with mental illness that could be avoided with adequate support—like loitering, disorderly conduct, and trespassing—are criminalized, resulting in the incarceration of people who need treatment, not punishment.

And so jails and prisons end up as the destination with the Los Angeles County jail system the largest “mental health care provider” in the country. Those who profit off the police state are more than happy to market themselves as mental health providers, as the Prison Policy Initiative explains:

Jails and prisons are often described as de facto mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, and corrections officials increasingly frame their missions around offering healthcare.  But the reality is quite the opposite: people with serious health needs are warehoused with severely inadequate healthcare and limited treatment options. Instead, jails and prisons rely heavily on punishment, while the most effective and evidence-based forms of healthcare are often the least available.

This unsurprisingly results in an endless cycle of arrest for homeless people who use drugs and/or are mentally ill. The UCSF study found that roughly 20 percent of the state’s unhoused population entered homelessness from an institutional setting, such as jail and prison stays. And criminalization only makes the problem worse. From Governing: 

The collateral consequences of even short-term jailing — such as loss of employment, separation from families, and fines and fees — increase the likelihood of future arrest while exposing arrested individuals to health risks and unsanitary conditions associated with jails.

And Trump’s order comes on the heels of that “Big, Beautiful Bill” that took a wrecking ball to Medicaid, the number one payer for addiction and mental health services. Even if the US had the capacity to forcibly treat people as Trump’s plan prescribes, studies show that coerced treatment is not effective. A recent study, “Use of Coercive Measures during Involuntary Psychiatric Admission and Treatment Outcomes: Data from a Prospective Study across 10 European Countries,” found that “all coercive measures were associated with patients staying longer in the hospital.”

So this order is cruel, ineffective, and deflects from the primary causes, i.e., unchecked American capitalism. But it gets even worse.

Trump’s Order Ends Housing First —the ONE Thing the US Is Doing Right.

From the order:

The Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shall take appropriate actions to increase accountability in their provision of, and grants awarded for, homelessness assistance and transitional living programs.  These actions shall include, to the extent permitted by law, ending support for “housing first” policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency; increasing competition among grantees through broadening the applicant pool; and holding grantees to higher standards of effectiveness in reducing homelessness and increasing public safety.

This provision, as well as the order’s overall hostility to the entire concept of “housing first” would appear to endanger one effective national program—as well as local ones.

The US has actually been finding success cutting the number of homeless veterans. The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced in November that veteran homelessness rates dropped to a record low since detailed counting began in 2009. Officials counted 32,882 homeless veterans, down significantly from recent years and a 55.6 percent decrease from 2010.

While the overall number is still soberingly high, and the program is imperfect since it doesn’t address underlying economic causes that will continue to see vets cast onto the streets, it is progress. How did they do it?

Using a Housing First approach, which prioritizes getting a homeless individual into housing and then assists with access to health care and other support. Notably, the VA program  does not try to determine who is “housing ready” or demand mental health or addiction treatment prior to housing. The Housing First model says that housing is a fundamental right and that housing programs should identify and address the needs of the people it serves from the people’s perspective. The VA is doing that by providing immediate access to permanent, subsidized, independent housing without treatment participation or sobriety prerequisites.

For this fiscal year—Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025—the VA budget for Veteran homelessness programs is $3.2 billion. That’s less than what the US has been spending per month on Ukraine since Feb. 2022.

It’s an example of what a real effort to get homeless off the streets in a humane way would look like. Instead, the US is now going in the opposite direction.

Where Is This Heading?

The trendline is obvious—and it’s accelerating.

We’ve now had years of homelessness increasing, followed by its criminalization, and now Trump ending what little effective policy there was.

What this will mean is a huge influx of individuals into the already-exceptional US carcarel state. We wrote back in December about the possibilities of what comes next, primarily how by deflecting attention away from the crimes of American capitalism while simultaneously expanding the reach of the carceral state — which weakens “free” labor — the criminalization of homelessness is a win-win for American plutocrats. That is now closer as we’re speeding down the dystopian superhighway (utopia to the accelerationists running the country). We see yet again why Trump and Project 2025 became favorite of the billionaire tech fascist crowd, which draws inspiration from the Zionists and their genocidal project in Palestine.

At its core homelessness and a police state response to it represents a fascistic disciplining of the workforce—another version of this honest take from Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner last year calling for a 40-50 percent rise in unemployment and “pain” in the economy to remind laborers that “they work for the employer.

Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.” https://t.co/lcX3CCxGuj pic.twitter.com/f9HK2YZRRE

— Financial Review (@FinancialReview) September 12, 2023

The threat of imprisonment should one lose their job and housing offers quite the reminder. For decades the US has been moving towards removing restrictions on prisoner work and expanding the system — even if it puts forced labor in competition with “free” labor.

Back in 1929 the Supreme Court upheld a law that restricted the interstate sales of prisoner-produced goods, explaining that “free labor, properly compensated, cannot compete successfully with the enforced and unpaid or underpaid convict labor of the prison.”

That began to change in the 1970s, however. As neoliberalism took hold, Congress started to ease restrictions on private companies using prison labor. They were allowed to use it, but required to pay prevailing wages, most of which can be diverted to fund prisoners own imprisonment or otherwise stolen. Prison labor has steadily grown and it has numerous benefits for the plutocrats.

Gurner might be an Australian “apartment wunderkind,” but his beliefs aren’t confined to the Lucky Country. Indeed, such forms of coercion are precisely what capital likes about imprisoned workers. From Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment:

….the defining feature across all these forms of prison labor is the infliction of punishment, or the threat of punishment, to secure compliance. When incarcerated workers do not obey a command from the corrections officers who oversee their labor, they can be fined a week’s wages, put on “keeplock” (confined to one’s own cell), and put in solitary confinement. Because of these punishments, moreover, incarcerated people can lose opportunities for parole. The risks of noncompliance for incarcerated workers thus include losing crucial connections with friends and family, losing access to essential food, amenities, recreation, and freedom of movement (however constrained), and, for some, losing the possibility of future freedom.

The following is from the Urban Institute in 2003, but as Gurner’s comments demonstrate, there’s little reason to suspect such opinions have changed:

Employers strongly spoke of the quality of the inmate workforce in responses to the question of what they liked best about employing inmates. Responses of workforce “quality and productivity” far outweighed “lower costs” 53% to 7%. Additionally, employers rated inmates as somewhat more productive than a domestic workforce might be, and 92% said they “recommend” the inmate workforce to business associates. As one employer explains: “Inmates learn that the success of our company depends on the satisfaction of our customers with our product. Quality, service and price have to meet expectations. Our futures are intertwined…”

This data provides supporting evidence that in today’s environment, employers consider inmate workers to be productive workers—“more productive” than the domestic workforce— in a variety of manufacturing, assembly and services production settings.

Just how much does the US rely on prison labor?[1]

The American economy pic.twitter.com/CHHOHDBFq7

— inhumans of capitalism (Ojibwa )☭ (@Inhumansoflate1) October 27, 2024

He might be slightly overstating the case out of self interest but not by much. Imprisoned Arizonans, like most people on the outside, are forced to sell their labor for at least 40 hours a week. Many of the ones in official captivity earn just 10 cents an hour for their work, however.

Arizona, like many states, contracts with The GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies. If that name sounds familiar, that’s because it was in the news recently due to its stock soaring following Trump’s victory and his promise to crack down on crime and illegal immigration.

The details of the contracts a state like Arizona signs with The GEO Group are telling. At Florence West prison, for example, Arizona guarantees GEO a 90% occupancy rate. The state must pay a per diem rate for 675 prisoners, regardless of how many people are actually incarcerated there, although the state is incentivized to make sure it’s at or near capacity. That’s because, as Arizona Department of Corrections Director David Shinn explains, prisoners are forced to provide labor “to city, county, local jurisdictions, that simply can’t be quantified at a rate that most jurisdictions could ever afford. If you were to remove these folks from that equation, things would collapse in many of your counties, for your constituents.”

So what amounts to slave labor helps keep taxes low on one end. And then there’s the profit motive on the other, as explained by Arizona Rep. John Kavanagh:

“You have to guarantee that they’re going to have people there, and they’re going to have a profit that they make, they’re going to have income,” Kavanagh said. “No one’s going to enter into a contract when you can’t guarantee the income that they expect. That’s kind of based on basic business.”

“Basic business” in the US also includes the widespread availability of low-wage and easily exploitable laborers for American capital. And Trump’s order helps ensure it will continue to be in abundance—one way or another.

In conclusion, not good.

Notes

1. For a detailed breakdown, here’s Erin Hatton, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo with some numbers showing where the situation is today:

In the United States today, more than 2 million people are incarcerated in prisons and jails, another 4.5 million people are under supervision via probation or parole, and 70 million people have some type of criminal record. The carceral state has thus exerted its grip on nearly half of the U.S. workforce. In fact, the combined prison and jail population of the United States roughly equals the number of employees that Walmart, the world’s largest employer, employs across the globe.

Hatton breaks the types of jobs in US prisons and their effects on “free” labor:

The first category is facility maintenance, also known as “regular” or “non-industry” jobs. In these roles, incarcerated people work to keep the prison running; they sustain its operations. The vast majority of incarcerated workers perform this type of labor…Because wages for this work are invariably minimal—ranging from no pay at all in many southern states to $2 per hour in Minnesota and New Jersey—this form of labor saves prison operators untold sums of money by supplanting free-world, full-wage workers.

The second category is “industry” jobs, which are positions in the government-run prison factories that were launched in the 1930s. These account for just under five percent of state and federal prisoner employment. People who labor in these factories produce a wide range of goods and services for sale to government agencies: office furniture and filing cabinets; road signs and license plates; uniforms, linens, and mattresses for prisons and hospitals; wooden benches and metal grills for public parks; even body armor for military and police. In Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas state prisons, incarcerated workers receive no wages for this labor. On average, state and federal prisoners earn $0.33–$1.41 per hour for this work (as compared to an average of $0.14–$0.63 per hour for the facility maintenance jobs described above).

The third category of incarcerated labor is for private-sector companies that set up shop inside U.S. prisons. Such jobs employ just 0.3 percent of the U.S. prison population. These are the highest paid prison jobs, because private-sector companies are legally obligated to pay “prevailing wages” in order to avoid undercutting non-prison labor. However, incarcerated workers do not actually receive these “prevailing wages.” Private employers often pay only the minimum wage, not the prevailing wage, and legal loopholes allow them to pay even less. Moreover, incarcerated workers’ wages are subject to many deductions and fees, which are capped at a whopping 80 percent of gross earnings. In other words, U.S. prisons seize most of the workers’ wages in these jobs. Further, some states have mandatory savings programs that take away an additional portion of the pay. Thus, even though regulations mandate free-world compensation for private-sector jobs in prison, prison rates prevail.

The final category is work that occurs outside of the prison, through various labor arrangements such as work-release programs, outside work crews, and work camps. While no concrete data are available, reportssuggest that such jobs are more common than both public and private industry jobs, though not as common as facility maintenance jobs. This category is highly heterogeneous, including work for public works, nonprofit agencies, and private companies. In work-release programs, prisoners typically maintain free-world jobs—at free-world wages, though subject to prison-world deductions—and then return to the prison after work hours. In prison work crews, incarcerated workers leave the prison or jail facility during work hours to perform public works, or “community service” jobs, such as fighting fires and cleaning highways, park grounds, and abandoned lots. Such workers typically return to prison at the end of the workday, unless their labor—as in the case of wildfires—is far from the prison; in those cases, they are typically housed in prison-like facilities, such as fire camps. In one instance, incarcerated women who labored for a multi-million dollar egg farm in Arizona were relocated to company housing so that the farm could retain its low-wage and reportedly “more compliant” incarcerated labor force despite the COVID-19 lockdowns that would halt the prison’s work-release program.