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The Administration Tries To Bring Order to Cities

It's time to bring vagrancy laws back.

There are two big reasons for this, each of which would be sufficient on its own.

The first, of course, is that the homelessness problem in big American cities (and not just big American cities) has become a nightmare and a global embarrassment, which makes lives impossible for normal people. It's a threat to public order. We cannot count, and we're sure you cannot count, the number of horrific stories and experiences you've had with homeless people in public places, whether it's in DC or LA or San Francisco or even in cities you think might be immune like Austin and Nashville.

As we say, this would be sufficient reason on its own to bring back vagrancy laws. But there's another reason: these are good for the homeless themselves!

Our takeaway from reading about the policy on this area and talking to experts is basically this. People who end up on the streets, especially if they have a drug problem but not only, are, by definition, people who are not very good at taking charge of their own lives. And so, while all sorts of programs to provide them with positive support may be good, none of the carrots work if they are not also accompanied by the stick of "And if you don't do this, you go to jail."

At this point, all this stuff is so well-known that we don't feel the need to belabor the point. This has been going on for years, decades even for those who have lived in places like San Francisco or Portland. When you give a drug addict homeless person an apartment, he doesn't turn his life around, he trashes the apartment by inviting his drug addict homeless buddies in and getting high. The blue states and jurisdictions that spend the most on homelessness are the ones that get the most homelessness because handing out goodies without strings attached just incentivizes more of it, and because it has become a feeding trough for an NGO complex whose real occupation is looting the public treasury.

Anyway, all of which is a long-winded way of saying that the Trump Administration published a new EO on homelessness, and that it's excellent.

The order recognizes that the current system has failed, with homelessness reaching record levels of over 274,000 individuals despite tens of billions in spending on programs that don't address root causes like mental illness and drug addiction, and therefore proudly trumpets a shift to an approach focused first on public safety and treatment.

Rather than leaving mentally ill and drug-addicted individuals on the streets, the order directs federal agencies to work with states to develop flexible commitment standards that can move people into appropriate treatment facilities.

Furthermore, it ends support for "housing first" programs that don't require treatment participation, instead emphasizing connecting individuals with serious mental illness or addiction to mandatory treatment services as a condition of receiving assistance, as well as so-called "harm reduction" policies which just enable drug use.

Most importantly, it actually has some teeth.

As you know, the Federal government doesn't directly have purview over homelessness policy, but it does have a great deal of influence through funding mechanisms.

The EO directs the DOJ, HHS, HUD, and the DOT to immediately review their discretionary grant programs and prioritize funding for states and municipalities that meet specific enforcement criteria. The criteria are: actively prohibiting open drug use, urban camping, loitering, and squatting; implementing civil commitment or assisted outpatient treatment for individuals with serious mental illness or substance abuse who can't care for themselves; and properly tracking homeless sex offenders through registry compliance.

Communities that demonstrate "substantial implementation" of these policies would move to the front of the line for federal funding.

The Attorney General is also empowered to make Emergency Federal Law Enforcement Assistance funds available specifically for "encampment removal efforts" when local resources are inadequate and public safety is at risk. This provides direct federal support for the most visible and immediate enforcement actions.

And, most importantly, and probably most consequentially, the EO creates negative consequences for non-compliance. HUD is directed to freeze assistance to any recipients operating drug injection sites or allowing illegal drug use on their property, while DOJ is directed to pursue civil or criminal actions against such facilities

This is just great stuff.

This is exactly what America needed, and it's what we advocated in our "Quality of Life Agenda" series.

SEE ALSO: The Quality of Life Agenda

Policy News You Need To Know

#NEPA — NEPA NEPA NEPA NEPA. Now that we're done with the OBBBA and with rescision, as you know, this is the next big agenda item. Today, House Natural Resources Committee Chair Bruce Westerman and Rep. Jared Golden, a moderate Democrat from Maine, introduced their attempt at NEPA reform. It's called the SPEED Act (nice). Westerman has previously said that overhauling NEPA would be a top priority of his chairmanship.

#Housing — Senators Scott and Warren, respectively chairman and ranking member on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, have released their housing package, dubbed the ROAD to Housing Act of 2025. Of course, Federal power in this area is limited, but the bill is full of good things, like lifting regulations on housing development, promoting manufactured housing, and even…NEPA reform!, specifically making NEPA review easier for small and infill housing projects.

#NEPA — Hey, speaking of NEPA! The Breakthrough Institute just launched a cool little microsite, called Navigating NEPA, which includes their analysis and an open source database of "over 2000 District-level judicial NEPA opinions." That could be very useful to the right person who needs to use such a tool, and we know at least a few of them are reading this right now.

#VibeShift #FreeSpeech — Very interesting: Alliance Defending Freedom, which of course you know as one of the most impressive legal groups on the right, just published their new 2025 Business Viewpoint Diversity Score, rating how big American corporations are doing when it comes to respecting free speech and religious liberty. And, it turns out, the picture this year has changed significantly! Wonder why?

#Nukes — The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) officially reauthorized the operating license for the Palisades Nuclear Plant, which is the first time in U.S. history a previously shutdown nuclear facility has been approved for restart. A good piece of news and a harbinger of good things to come with the Administration's pro-nuclear regulatory approach.

#Immigration — A new and very good bill has been introduced by Rep. Tom Tiffany to close a H-1B visa loophole we didn't even know about, but which is of course egregious: it turns out that higher education institutions are exempt from the H-1B visa cap. Well of course they are.

#BigTech #Addiction — Important commentary from the American Institute for Boys and Men, an institution which as you know we are happy to support: Smartphone gambling is a disaster, particularly for boys and young men.

#Politics — Echelon Insights, one of our favorite polling firms, has published its latest analysis of its "political tribes," its frameworks where instead of slotting voters simply in the buckets of Republican, Democrat, and independent, they instead identify eight different political tribes.

Friday Essays

The takedown book review is a dying genre, perhaps because both the magazine and the book are dying genres, but thankfully it has been revived by Commonplace, where Jude Russo skewers James Comey's new crime novel where "a gaggle of racially and sexually diverse federal prosecutors (…) come together to lock up a far-right podcaster who is inciting his followers to attack people." Oh yes, it's that bad.

You should read this week's National Review cover story, by the distinguished historian Arthur Herman, on the new boom of defense and manufacturing startups and how they can rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy.

Very interesting: The New Atlantis is publishing a series of articles by Charles C. Mann on "How the System Works," in a very real and literal sense, the technological systems that make modern life possible and that we rely on every day. Fascinating stuff. Latest edition: "What Keeps the Lights On."

Presumably you didn't need convincing, but just in case: John Spencer, who is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the War Institute at West Point, wrote a very good article explaining why Israel's attack on Gaza does not qualify as a genocide.

In First Things, John Duggan reviews the evidence for the proposition that the originators of concepts such as human rights were not Enlightenment philosophers but canon lawyers of the Middle Ages.