NASW Responds to President Trump’s Executive Order on Homelessness

By Laetitia Clayton

President Donald Trump’s July 24 executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” targets individuals who are unhoused by framing homelessness as a public safety threat.

“The overwhelming majority of these (unhoused) individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both,” the order states. “Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes. An equally large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions.”

NASW responded with a blog post and a news release strongly opposing the executive order, which includes language in direct conflict with social work’s purpose and ethics, including the approach of “meeting people where they are.”

“This order criminalizes poverty and does little to address mental illness, economic distress and other issues that cause homelessness,” NASW stated. “Social work is rooted in the belief that every person, regardless of mental health, addiction or housing status situation, deserves dignity, compassion and the right to thrive. Homelessness is not a crime. Mental illness and addiction are not moral failings, and systems-level solutions must be grounded in care, not punishment.”

The executive order also takes aim at “harm reduction” or “safe consumption” efforts, as well as “housing-first” policies, saying the latter deprioritizes accountability and fails “to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency… .”

Housing First

The Housing First model, which began in the U.S. in the early 1990s, is “a homeless assistance approach that prioritizes providing permanent housing to people experiencing homelessness, thus ending their homelessness and serving as a platform from which they can pursue personal goals and improve their quality of life,” according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “This approach is guided by the belief that people need basic necessities like food and a place to live before attending to anything less critical, such as getting a job, budgeting properly, or attending to substance use issues.”

Housing First differs from other approaches in that it “does not require people experiencing homelessness to address all of their problems, including behavioral health problems, or to graduate through a series of services programs before they can access housing,” the Alliance says.

“Housing First solves housing, but housing alone doesn’t solve the issues mentioned in the executive order,” says NASW-Wisconsin member Emily Kenney, MSW, LCSW, director of strategic initiatives and transformation at the Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services and an expert in housing and homelessness issues. Housing First ideally includes housing “plus really intensive client-centered services,” she says.

Kenney said there was a push against Housing First initiatives even before Trump, so the executive order was not a complete surprise. One reason for the pushback on Housing First is that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which has funded Housing First programs, focused only on the housing part and not on services—so the funding there was lacking.

“The criticism is if you’re doing Housing First, you’re neglecting the service part,” Kenney says. “Communities were implementing Housing First, but not good enough.”

She says the executive order names many of the same issues she would name, but the solutions it offers “are less effective overall and definitely more expensive—for all of us.”

For example, the order mentions “civil commitment,” which involves admitting someone to a psychiatric hospital or other treatment facility against their will. The primary care doctors and other providers at these hospitals are paid for by taxes, Kenney said.

Her main concern is that HUD “will shift what it funds from permanent housing dollars to transitional housing dollars,” which is a temporary solution that will cause more despair and desperation among those who are unhoused, Kenney said.

The Social Work Workforce

Kenney says the executive order does not reduce overall dollars, but does redirect where those dollars will go. This could impact social workers working in other systems who are trying to access housing for clients, she said. Ethical challenges may be the bigger issue, she added, causing some social workers to leave the profession. But she stresses that every social worker can choose to operate from a place of empowerment, whether they’re working at the macro, mezzo or micro level.

“I think that it is our responsibility as social workers to hold true to the evidence-based practice we know that works, like Housing First,” Kenney says. “We should maintain Housing First principals. We don’t have to call it Housing First.”

“We can still advocate for the services people need and want, even if it feels like there’s a lot of opposition,” she said. Though it’s a challenging time to be a social worker, it’s also an important one. “We still have a lot of power, and we should claim it.”