SEATTLE — President Donald Trump’s executive order issued Thursday that calls for punishing homeless people living outside, forced treatment for people with substance use and mental health issues and an end to data-proven solutions to getting people into housing has drawn near-unanimous rebuke among local officials and organizations serving homeless people.

Trump campaigned on tougher policies toward visible homelessness and street disorder.

Homelessness is at a record high locally and nationally. King County recorded 16,868 homeless people in its 2024 Point-in-Time Count. Across the country, the number was 771,480 people.

Homelessness and mental health advocates said Thursday’s order, Trump's first aimed at homelessness since taking office in January, would not only infringe on human rights and be difficult to enforce, but it would likely be ineffective at reducing homelessness or addressing mental health and substance use issues. Those who work in those fields said forcing people into treatment rarely works unless accompanied by other services that can help support them long term.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell called the order bombastic and said it drove a false narrative on homelessness that ignored prevention or meaningful solutions.

“If Trump were actually interested in helping cities, he’d stop cutting the social safety net, maintain investments in (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) and housing vouchers, and challenge Washington, D.C.’s status quo by funding affordable housing development and treatment options at scale,” Harrell said.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson called it “another misguided and harmful executive order from the Trump administration.”

“Washington will be focused on evidence-based approaches, not playing politics with people’s lives,” Ferguson said.

Trump took aim at “housing first” policies, challenging the dominant theory held within Seattle and much of the nation’s homelessness response systems. There is significant research that shows that providing housing to people with physical, mental or substance use issues helps them address those issues more effectively and helps them stay in housing longer than requiring someone to go through treatment before moving indoors.

Recently published data showed that after about 1,000 homeless people moved into hotels King County purchased during the pandemic, they visited hospital emergency rooms 17% less often and spent about one-third fewer days hospitalized in inpatient care.

Some argue, however, with Republicans pushing most forcefully, that this approach means tax dollars are being used to enable people with addiction.

On Thursday, Trump ordered the federal housing agency to increase requirements that homeless people with behavioral health issues obtain treatment as a condition for receiving housing or services. And he said the U.S. attorney general should pursue legal action against any homelessness or behavioral health services provider that allows drug use on their properties.

Organizations that work with homeless people say that those who have been on the streets the longest and suffer from severe mental health and substance use issues are often unwilling or unable to address those issues immediately and wouldn’t agree to conditions to move into housing.

“It’s a lack of trust, paranoia, people don’t feel safe,” said Derrick Belgarde, executive director of Chief Seattle Club, a Seattle homeless service provider for Native people.

The executive order also promises to move people who have serious mental illness off the streets and into forced mental health treatment. But it’s unclear whether that’s even possible without significantly more funding for those treatment centers.

Washington has a set of laws known as the “Involuntary Treatment Act,” which permit the “civil commitment” of people who haven’t been charged with a crime but are found to have a severe enough mental illness to need forced treatment. For decades, the state has struggled to keep up with those laws, and has never had enough beds to treat all the patients who need care. And even as the state has built new facilities over the past few years to house these patients, officials have faced hurdles implementing the laws, finding enough staff and coordinating between the agencies that work with those patients.

Mental health advocates say pushing more people into involuntary treatment could stretch resources even thinner at the already overwhelmed facilities.

“So what’s going to happen to these people? They’re going to end up going to jail,” said Anna Nepomuceno, the director of public policy for Washington’s National Alliance on Mental Illness chapter.

Trump also directed federal agencies to support states and cities that punish people who use drugs or camp in public spaces.

In the last few years, cities have already been tightening their laws prohibiting homeless camping and public drug use, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. Grants Pass last year that cities could punish people for sleeping outside even if there aren’t places for them to go. For example, Seattle removed homeless encampments three times as often in 2024 as it did in 2022 or before the pandemic.

Outside Seattle, cities have gone further. Burien prohibited anyone from living in public, essentially making it criminal to be homeless and unsheltered.

“The United States Supreme Court, in the Grants Pass case, shifted the national narrative towards a criminalization approach to homelessness,” said state Rep. Nicole Macri, a Democrat. “This is just a flavor of the same thing here. And these are old approaches that we know are not effective.”

Public officials and nonprofit organizations serving homeless people are still figuring out what to make of Trump’s order, how much of it will actually come to pass and how much of it is bluster.

One thing is clear — there is a lot of money on the line.

King County receives about $66 million in federal homelessness grants. There’s more that passes through cities and the state, and many formerly homeless people rely on federal housing vouchers to pay rent.

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority said the impacts of the executive order would become clearer once the federal housing agency releases its criteria for homelessness grant applications this year. Trump has previously indicated his intent to cut funding for that department.

Organizations that receive federal funding are straddling a thin line. While many vehemently disagree with Trump’s approach to homelessness, they are looking into what changes they would need to make to get in line with Trump’s order so they can still provide services.

“If unjust, obscene policies and orders like this come through, we have to make sure we're there for the next administration,” said Belgarde, at Chief Seattle Club.

Like Belgarde, other organizations and officials have not been shy about denouncing Trump’s approach and how harmful it could be toward the goal of reducing the number of people experiencing homelessness.

“Harmful policies like banning encampments without offering housing, scaling back harm reduction that keeps people alive until we can get them connected to services, and abandoning a Housing First approach that stabilizes people’s living situation to make those connections possible run counter to our county’s values and contradict what we know works,” King County Executive Shannon Braddock said in a written statement.

Plymouth Housing, one of Seattle’s largest providers of permanent supportive housing — housing with wraparound services for formerly homeless people — said it was extremely concerned to see the federal government move away from evidence-based best practices like harm reduction.

Regardless of who is in office, Plymouth won’t back down from doing the life-saving work our community needs to help people exit homelessness successfully, Danie Eagleton, an interim vice president at Plymouth Housing, said in a statement.

Threatening funding to community providers could in turn put more pressure on local hospital systems — which are already anticipating major fallout from Medicaid cuts.

“The less they have to serve them and put them in stable housing, the more folks show up in our emergency department,” said Ian Goodhew, UW Medicine’s associate vice president for Medical Affairs. “Then when they come to us for care, that’s where the Medicaid cuts kick in. It’s a pretty vicious cycle.”

Alison Eisinger, executive director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, called the order “cruel, stupid and terrible.”

“An attempt to treat people with mental illness as criminals and ignore the basic truth that hundreds of thousands of people have nowhere to be but our public spaces is not based in reality, it is not based in evidence, it is not safe, and it is not going to work,” Eisinger said.

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