Ending Crime and Disorder, or Ending the Evidence?

01What the Order Actually Does

Read the order yourself. Here is what it directs:

The order calls itself “humane.” But notice what's missing. There is nothing in it that raises a wage, builds a home, or lowers the cost of care.

02The Web Around It

No single policy devalues a people. It takes a system. Look at what surrounds this order:

1. 2024

   Camping bans become legal.

   In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that cities can punish people for sleeping outside, even when there is no shelter available. Being homeless in public can now be treated as an offense.

2. July 2025

   Healthcare is cut.

   The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut nearly $1 trillion from federal Medicaid spending over ten years. The Congressional Budget Office projects about 10 million more Americans will be uninsured by 2034. Medicaid is the main way people with serious mental illness get treatment. So the same government promising “treatment” for people on the street cut the program that pays for it.

3. Late 2025 – 2026

   Permanent housing is defunded.

   HUD moved to cap permanent housing in its Continuum of Care program at 30% of funds, down from roughly 90%. A coalition of states sued, and a federal court blocked it. HUD tried again with a 2026 notice that set aside about $1.3 billion for transitional and service-only projects instead. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates at least 97,000 people living in federally funded permanent housing could lose their homes. That notice was also challenged in court and, according to reporting, vacated in August 2026.

   Think about that. People who already escaped the street, already housed, already rebuilding, put at risk of being pushed back onto it.

4. June 18, 2026

   Disability rights are reinterpreted.

   The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion reinterpreting Olmstead v. L.C., the 1999 Supreme Court decision that said people with disabilities have a right to live in their communities instead of institutions when that's appropriate. The new opinion argues there is no mandate to provide care in the most integrated setting, and blames community care for rising homelessness. DOJ then said it would stop relying on its prior enforcement guidance.

5. 2009 – today

   Wages frozen.

   The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour for more than sixteen years.

Put it together:

1. 1.Freeze wages.
2. 2.Let housing costs soar.
3. 3.Cut the healthcare that treats mental illness and addiction.
4. 4.Defund the housing that gets people off the street.
5. 5.Make sleeping outside punishable.
6. 6.Weaken the legal rights that keep people out of institutions.
7. 7.Then institutionalize the people this produces, and call it compassion.

03Follow the Money

Whenever people are converted from citizens into “beds,” someone gets paid per bed.

Look at the poster for this post. A man sits against a fence with everything he owns beside him. Down the road, buses wait, labeled Detention, Treatment, and Profit. That is a picture of how the pieces connect.

1. STEP 1

   The sidewalk

   A person with nowhere to go.

2. STEP 2

   The sweep

   Belongings cleared, camp removed.

3. STEP 3

   The bus

   Moved out of sight.

4. STEP 4

   The bed

   Detention, commitment, or a cell.

5. STEP 5

   The invoice

   Someone bills for every step.

At each step, someone gets paid. The only person in this pipeline who never sees a dollar is the person being moved through it.

I'm not claiming every one of these companies wrote this order. I'm saying the system is arranged so that when a human being loses their home, their health, or their freedom, someone else's revenue goes up. That's the design, and it's worth asking who it serves.

04What Would a Foreign Adversary Do?

Imagine a foreign power that wanted to weaken the United States without firing a shot. What would its playbook look like?

Now read that list again and compare it to the last ten years of American policy.

These corporations and policymakers are not foreign agents. That's what makes it worse. We are doing to ourselves exactly what an enemy would wish on us, and some are getting rich from it.

05How a People Learns to Hurt Its Own

No one wakes up wanting to cage a sick neighbor. A society has to be taught to accept it.

It starts with words. The order calls people “vagrants” and their existence “disorder.” Language like that turns a person into a problem, a problem into a nuisance, and a nuisance into something to be removed.

Then the system makes it convenient not to look. The encampment is cleared. The person disappears into a facility. The street looks clean. And the citizen walking by feels relief instead of grief, without ever learning what happened to the human being who was there.

That is how ordinary people come to support harming their own. Not through hatred, but through invisibility.

When you can no longer see someone's suffering, you can no longer see their value.

And make no mistake: the line of who is “removable” never stops moving.

• Todaythe person in the tent
• Tomorrowthe worker who lost a job
• the veteran who can’t sleep
• the elder who outlived their savings
• the young person whose illness went untreated because the clinic closed

Any of us is one bad year away from being called “disorder.”

06Ending the Evidence

Policy only gets better when we can see whether it works. And right now, the evidence is getting harder to see.

The federal government's annual homelessness report is normally released in December. The report on the January 2025 count came out on May 29, 2026, roughly five months late. Advocates called it the latest a national count has ever been released. When it finally came out, the breakdown by gender that past reports included was gone.

When you remove an encampment, you also remove the most visible proof that rent, wages, and healthcare have failed. When you commit a person instead of housing them, they leave the street count and enter a facility count that few people ever read. When health records flow to police, people stop going to the doctor, and the illnesses that were never treated stop showing up in any chart.

The streets look cleaner. The numbers look better. Nothing has been solved.

Case not closed

You cannot end a crisis by ending the count. You can only end the public's ability to hold anyone responsible for it.

07The Honest Counterpoint

08What Works, and What We Build Instead

We know what works. Since 2010, veteran homelessness has dropped by more than half, largely through Housing First approaches. Communities that pair stable housing with voluntary treatment get people healthy, working, and whole.

So here is the alternative:

Judge any policy on homelessness by one test: a year later, does the person have a home? If the answer is “we don't know,” the policy wasn't built to help them.

09The Question

The order is called “Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets.”

But when you freeze wages, cut healthcare, defund housing, criminalize sleeping, weaken civil rights, and pay companies to hold the people this creates, what are you really ending?

Not the crisis. Just the evidence of it.

So ask yourself honestly:

And if the answer is no, then the next question belongs to all of us: what are we going to do about it?