Homeless policy in the US has long been a man-made disaster. In 2024, the most recent estimate, had a record number of 771,480 individuals experiencing homelessness—and that’s believed to be an undercount.
But there’s a reason many of the tech elite are often referred to as accelerationists: the techno-capitalists specialize in taking our broken institutions and burning them to the ground, trying to erase any sense of community that remains in the US. One of their many pet projects is the remaking of homelessness policy, which is being transformed from a national disgrace to a dystopian system more closely resembling an open embrace of slavery and eugenics.
Let’s examine who’s behind the Trump administration’s policies on homelessness, what the accelerationists are proposing, and what it means for Americans.
The Cicero Institute
One could argue that US homeless policy began taking a more dystopian turn four to five years ago when localities began outlawing “unauthorized street camping,” in effect making it illegal to be homeless.
Behind that push was a little known think tank called the Cicero Institute. It was founded in 2016 by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded Palantir with billionaire Peter Thiel. Cicero has also been backed by other billionaires like the Kochs. Its board is composed of Lonsdale, his Silicon Valley investment connections, and a few DC insiders.
As part of a national push to outlaw homelessness, Cicero hired lobbyists in several states to push for the crackdown on sleeping in public while unhoused and also offered model legislation that was eventually adopted by several states and localities.
The Lonsdale outfit also advanced its arguments through litigation that contributed to City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the 2024 Supreme Court decision that expanded the authority of local governments to criminalize homelessness.
With the arrival of Trump 2.0 and the accompanying DOGE bandits, Cicero’s blueprint went to DC.
Cicero Overlap with Trump Admin Policy
Cicero’s model bill for states calls for shifting money away from the housing first model, and toward substance abuse and mental health treatment.
Housing First was adopted as the national model under the George W. Bush administration (!) and was expanded under both Obama and Trump I.
Simply put, Housing First prioritizes getting a homeless individual into housing and then assists with mental health care, addiction treatment, and other support if needed and when available (Wait times to access services can be excruciatingly long and difficult to access. People must wait an average of 48 days to access mental health or substance use services, and many struggle to afford needed services that are inaccessible without insurance. Not everyone can afford the $600,000/week rehab on a superyacht.)
Several randomized controlled trials find that people stay housed at far higher rates and reduce their use of emergency services when the basic stability of a home comes first.
The biggest challenge for Housing First, however, has always been finding enough funding to get enough people into housing to keep up with the growing number of unhoused people.
That’s why aside from an overhaul of the American economic system that would cut off the flow of people becoming homeless, housing first is largely viewed as the most successful strategy to help unhoused people get back into steady housing.
Under Trump II it is being done away with altogether.
The new policy, pushed by Cicero’s billionaires, is the opposite of housing first and demands that homeless individuals, as one Utah businessman now running the state’s homeless board says, save their souls before they get help for housing.[1]
Last July, Trump’s executive order directed HUD to shift federal homelessness funding away from housing first and toward encampment enforcement. The agency has done so, and it has caused chaos in housing departments across the country, disrupting services.
Federal contracts running through this year were axed. A November notice gave local agencies a few months to effectively redesign their entire systems. Lawsuits, preliminary injunctions, revised HUD orders have followed. A final decision is still pending in a Rhode Island court, but the effects are already being felt across the country as a broken system is bombarded.
Shelterforce recently spoke to 64 administrators from 55 Continuum of Care (CoC) programs across the country about HUD’s notice of funding opportunity (NOFO), and they painted an ugly picture:
Everyone I spoke with was concerned about the NOFO’s imposition of a 30 percent cap on permanent housing. With most service users in permanent housing, the new limit threatened to push 170,000 people who rely on CoC assistance back into homelessness.
“We’re not against transitional housing. We’re not against substance use treatment programs. …We are concerned about taking money from permanent supportive housing and switching it to transitional housing without an opportunity to navigate that change more responsibly,” another provider said.
Cicero functionaries and their partners from the Discovery Institute argue that it’s time to shake things up and that Housing First has failed. As evidence they point to the rising number of homeless.
They always fail to mention causes like the rise in housing costs, an estimated 7.3 million unit deficit for the lowest income renters, housing cartels, homebuilder cartels, stagnating wages, the abrupt end of Covid protections, healthcare costs, and the list goes on and on.
They also ignore the fact that the federal housing first program only offered assistance to those who have been unhoused for at least 12 months and have a documented disability, and it was a resounding success with more than 90 percent of people in the programs staying housed.
Simply put, the federal program didn’t put a serious dent in homeless numbers because it wasn’t intended to. And even if it did, it would still be a struggle to keep up with the rising number of homeless without addressing the root causes.
The techno-capitalists aren’t really concerned with the data, though, nor are they with getting people into housing. It’s not even sma
So what are they aiming for?
Counterproductive But That’s the Point
Even if we discount the human cost of such policies, it’s not fiscally wise either. According to Eric Tars, senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center, “studies have shown it actually costs two to three times more to keep people churning through the jail system, through law enforcement, the courts, all of that, than it does to simply provide housing.”
So what does Cicero-Trump policy do?
- It accelerates the police state. For example, after Georgia passed a Cicero-inspired law that required enforcing camping bans, an audit found the Marietta Police Department estimated 50 percent of its officers’ time was spent dealing with homeless issues. This inevitably leads to more police funding.
- More surveillance. As this study in Policing and Society finds, street-level digital technologies in urban spaces is reshaping policing practices in relation to homeless populations by providing digital surveillance tools to identify and police individuals in data augmented urban spaces and by shifting urban policing towards predictive and pre-emptive controls made possible by enhanced cooperation with private technology companies. Ka-ching!
- More prisons. The criminalization of homelessness accelerates the homelessness-incarceration complex. From the University of Cincinnati Law Review:
People experiencing homelessness are 11 times more likely to be arrested than those who are housed…These individuals face increased barriers with respect to court appearances, inability to pay bail, citations, and fines, elevating their risk of conviction.[28] The system is set up to criminalize a person’s status of homelessness rather than helping to address the root causes…
Criminal justice involvement in this issue perpetuates a negative cycle of homelessness and jail, further complicating an individual’s chance of breaking that cycle.[29] Once released from jail, individuals experiencing homelessness prior to jail often return to the streets, only this time facing increased difficulty in finding stable housing.[30] The presence of a criminal record greatly complicates an individual’s chance of securing gainful employment, as many employers may outright disqualify applicants or discourage application by requiring disclosure of criminal history.[31] Additionally, homeless individuals lack access to reliable transportation, suitable clothing, and identification documents to secure employment, making it increasingly difficult to successfully navigate the labor market and break the vicious cycle.
Failure to appear in court or pay low-level citations for quality-of-life offenses associated with homelessness, such as camping outside, public urination, or loitering, can often “indirectly result in arrest and jail time.”
- More slave labor. Worth Rises’ The Prison Industry: Corporate Database lists over 4,000 corporations and investors that profit off mass incarceration, including those using labor paying slave wages.
There are also vultures there every other step of the way. Private equity plays a large role, owning extended stay hotels which those who are evicted often turn to as an expensive last resort shelter. And PE is heavily embedded in prison healthcare—its dream setup of virtually no oversight, a captive audience, and a steady revenue stream. PE is also spreading its tentacles through psychiatric hospitals where some homeless could be involuntarily committed under the Cicero plans.
Perhaps most of all, though, and surely this appeals to the techno-capitalists’ dream of AI replacing labor which would create an untold number of homeless, is it shifts the narrative from affordable housing, wages, cost of living, etc to alleged personal failings of the homeless.
What Cicero and the laws passed and the Trump administration policy announce is that people aren’t homeless because of a rapacious economic system with no safety net; they’re homeless because they’re mentally ill and/or substance abuse.
And no, Lonsdale, Trump, and the rest of the techno-capitalists do not actually intend to help unhoused people with mental illness and addiction. Always look at the funding. Consider this STAT piece from last year, “Trump cuts have decimated the federal addiction and mental health agency.”
There’s a reason the Los Angeles County jail system the largest “mental health care provider” in the country. Thanks to the bipartisan tough-on-crime consensus, all the social problems created by the techno-capitalist crowd gets funneled into the criminal justice system. From the Vera Institute:
While waiting lists for community-based psychiatric and mental health services grow longer, jails and prisons fill up with people experiencing treatable mental health conditions. Nonviolent behaviors associated with mental illness that could be avoided with adequate support—like loitering, disorderly conduct, and trespassing—are criminalized, resulting in the incarceration of people who need treatment, not punishment.
These trends are only set to accelerate while the human wreckage enriches Cicero investors and their broligarchy pals.
Bipartisanship
In case you believe this is just a Trump problem that will magically disappear once he leaves office, it’s worth pointing out that Cicero plans are not all that different from what has been enacted in the Democrat super majority Golden state under Governor Gavin Newsom, and Democrats have spent their time since the 2024 election plotting on how to win back Silicon Valley.
They’ve largely settled on an “Abundance” agenda that makes the techno-capital case for shrinking government and allowing the “good billionaires” to work their magic.
In turn, Lonsdale (is he a good or bad billionaire? It’s hard to keep track) and friends are signaling they’re open to financially backing the good Democrats.
In the California governor’s race, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan has raised the maximum $39,200 donations from Lonsdale, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. According to CNN, “some of the biggest donors to an independent expenditure committee supporting Mahan, California Back to Basics, include venture capitalist Michael Moritz, who has given $3 million, and former Y Combinator Startup Accelerator CEO Michael Seibel, who has contributed $1 million.”
As San Jose mayor, Mahan is trying to cut affordable housing while criminalizing homelessness. He says as governor he wants to expand involuntary commitment.
Alas, Mahan is still polling in single digits, but the message from Lonsdale and friends is clear, as is their vision for society.
Notes
- Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, says that “success is not permanent housing — success is human dignity. We are in the business of lives, of humans, of souls.” Success for Shumway, on the other hand, is measured by how many homeless people he can corral into his surveillance network. His firm is pushing data collection software, called Know-by-Name, used in homeless case management, and the state homeless board he now heads wants it to be used statewide.
By
