Alliance Alert: The Alliance for Rights and Recovery joins advocates across the country in strongly opposing the White House’s recent executive order, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” which dangerously conflates homelessness and mental illness with criminality and promotes involuntary commitment over housing, recovery, and rights-based supports.
As Mental Health Weekly reports, this order represents a dramatic rollback of decades of progress, threatening to:
- Expand forced institutionalization;
- Undermine Housing First programs—despite overwhelming evidence of their success;
- Withdraw support from community-based providers; and
- Reinforce harmful stereotypes that criminalize people experiencing homelessness, mental health challenges, and substance use.
As the National Alliance to End Homelessness put it: “This order represents the most harmful policy proposal on homelessness in my career.”
— Ann Oliva, CEO
This top-down directive calls for reversing legal protections that ensure people with disabilities live in the community—directly challenging the Supreme Court’s 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. decision, which affirms the right of people with disabilities to live outside of institutions with appropriate supports. This is adirect attack on disability rights, recovery, and civil liberties.
New York Must Not Follow This Path
We are especially alarmed that New York State has recently mirrored elements of this federal approach, with increasing support for involuntary commitment as a tool to address homelessness. This is the wrong direction. It is a dangerous validation of the false narrative that forced treatment and institutionalization are humane solutions, when in reality, they are costly, ineffective, and often traumatic.
At the same time, federal budget cuts to Medicaid and behavioral health programs will make it harder for individuals to access the very services—housing, peer support, outpatient services, harm reduction—that actually prevent homelessness and promote recovery.
We cannot ignore this contradiction: You cannot slash funding for community services while pushing more people into institutions and expect people to get the supports they need in the community.
The Alliance’s Commitment
At the Alliance for Rights and Recovery, we remain committed to:
- Voluntary, community-based services that empower individuals—not punish them;
- Peer-led supports and housing models like Housing First that are proven to work;
- Defending the rights of people with disabilities to live in the least restrictive setting possible.
We will not allow a return to the era of large institutions, long-term confinement, and systemic neglect.
Join Us to Push Back
We invite advocates, peers, providers, and allies to attend our Annual Conference this fall, where we will offer:
- Workshops on addressing harmful federal policies;
- Sessions on advancing equity, inclusion, and voluntary support programs;
- Opportunities to organizeand speak out against forced treatment and Medicaid cuts.
Unbreakable! Harnessing Our Power, Building Our Resilience, Inspiring Hope and Courage
Alliance for Rights and Recovery 43rd Annual Conference
Villa Roma Resort and Conference Center | September 29-October 1, 2025
Register Today Here!
This is a critical moment. The future of our homelessness response, our mental health systems, and the rights of millions are at stake.
Homelessness is not a crime. Mental illness is not a crime.
Let’s fight for what works—and what’s right.
Advocates Disturbed by Direction of White House Order on Homelessness
By Gary Enos | Mental Health Weekly | August 3, 2025
Mental health and related advocacy groups are urging state and local governments to strengthen protections for individuals experiencing homelessness, in the wake of last month’s White House executive order to broaden use of involuntary commitment and to de-emphasize “Housing First” strategies.
Mental health advocates are particularly troubled that the July 24 executive order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” appears to couple homelessness and mental illness with criminal activity. The first section of the order states:
“Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe. The number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration — 274,224 — was the highest ever recorded. The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.”
The executive order directs the offices of the U.S. Attorney General and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to seek the reversal of judicial actions that block civil commitment of persons with serious mental illness and homeless individuals, including the termination of consent decrees. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the order defies the legal precedent set in the landmark 1999 Supreme Court decision in Olmstead v. L.C., guaranteeing persons with disabilities the right to live in the community with proper supports.
“This order represents the most harmful policy proposal on homelessness in my career,” alliance CEO Ann Oliva said in a statement issued the day after the order’s release.
Referring to the current climate as “an SOS moment,” Oliva urged state and local governments to consider legislation to mitigate any harms caused by the White House’s direction on homeless policy. “We also call upon the provider community to stay faithful to established best practices in the interests of providing the best possible care for the people they serve,” Oliva said.
Call for dramatic change
The text of the executive order clearly states the Trump administration’s position that current government policies around homelessness have missed the mark.
“The federal government and the states have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats,” the order reads.
The order instructs HHS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to take action to increase accountability in federally funded programs for homelessness assistance and transitional housing, including, to the extent permitted by law, “ending support for ‘housing first’ policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery and self-sufficiency.”
Several provisions within the order emphasize stricter enforcement strategies toward homeless populations, directing federal agencies to prioritize for discretionary grants those programs that, for example, enforce prohibitions on urban camping and loitering as well as open use of illicit drugs.
The tone and direction of the order do not sit well with groups such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). “Mental illness is not a crime, and being unhoused shouldn’t be a crime,” NAMI chief advocacy officer Hannah Wesolowski told MHW.
“We should be investing in people accessing care and better supports,” Wesolowski said, as she criticized recent federal budget actions that advocates say are fraying the social safety net and will only worsen the homelessness crisis.
NAMI does back the executive order’s emphasis on prioritizing funding to expand mental health court and drug court programs, as well as the order’s support for crisis intervention services. But Wesolowski said that doesn’t negate NAMI’s deep concerns over the order and its implications.
She added it is unclear how the administration would execute its stated effort to expand civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose a risk to self or others and homeless individuals who cannot care for themselves, since civil commitment actions are traditionally regulated at the state level. “There is no federal involuntary commitment law,” she said.
The executive order also takes aim at the mental health provider community as part of the administration’s effort to redirect resources toward more effective approaches to the homelessness crisis. It asks HHS to “ensure that federal funds for Federally Qualified Health Centers and Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics reduce rather than promote homelessness by supporting, to the maximum extent permitted by law, comprehensive services for individuals with serious mental illness and substance use disorder, including crisis intervention services.”
NAMI CEO Daniel H. Gillison, Jr., said in a July 25 statement regarding the executive order, “While we agree that homelessness is an urgent crisis in our country, to truly address the systemic causes of this crisis, we should be pouring resources into treatment to improve early access to care and investing in supportive housing and other wraparound services.”
Advocacy focus
Wesolowski said it will be important in ongoing advocacy efforts to ensure that the voices of individuals with lived experience are heard.
“A lot will be determined at the state level,” she said. “Involuntary care should be used only as a last resort, and only when it is in the best interest of the individual.”
The response to the order by the National Alliance to End Homelessness offers a strongly worded rebuke to the administration’s direction, calling it “a broadside threat to the nation’s homelessness response systems, people experiencing homelessness, and the providers who serve them.”
The alliance’s statement reads in part, “Withdrawing support for Housing First would signal a retreat from evidence and established best practice, and unnecessarily upend the daily operations of overstretched providers whose work saves lives every single day. This will cause homelessness to increase.”
The alliance adds, “Coupled with the recent cuts to Medicaid and the already scarce access to quality treatment options that both housed and unhoused people need and want, people with disabilities who often experience long-term or recurring homelessness will be treated as disposable. The alliance calls on the Trump administration to direct its enormous resources to strengthen the availability and affordability of mental health services, rather than treating it as merely a problem to be hidden from public view.”