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A homeless woman sets her tent up in an encampment in Skid Row on July 25, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. The U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order for changes to make it easier for states and cities to remove outdoor encampments get people into treatment for individuals struggling with mental health issues or addiction.
Getty Images, Apu Gomes
Homelessness and Mental Illness: How Trump’s New Executive Order Could Backfire
Aug 06, 2025
In late July, President Trump signed an executive order urging local authorities to find ways to force homeless individuals with mental illness into hospitals. On its face, some observers might find this move appealing. Homelessness has skyrocketed across American cities, generating headlines about homeless encampment waste and public substance use. And mental health care, which many of these individuals need, is difficult to access—and arguably easier to obtain in a hospital. But Trump’s order may in fact undermine its own aims.
Research shows that psychiatric hospitalization has little impact on “Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” as the executive order puts it, and which it purports to address. Instead, while the order and other Trump Administration policies may remove homelessness from public view, they neither house nor heal those suffering from it.
In a cross-national study, for example, one of us found that levels of institutionalization were unrelated to mass shooting events. In fact, people experiencing homelessness are more likely to be victims of violent crimes than perpetrators, including assault and sexual violence. If Trump is concerned about violence caused by homeless individuals, it’s unlikely that hospitalizing them will reduce it.
Moreover, the executive order advances measures that can make homelessness worse and only superficially address mental health. These measures include criminalizing homelessness, such as arresting or fining people for sleeping in public, even when there are no shelter beds or housing available. In addition, the administration aims to defund programs that oversee the safe use of substances—which primarily focus on drug addiction and are often a primary contact for people with substance use disorders—while also diverting resources to mental health and drug courts, whose long-term benefits are unclear. These are Band-Aid solutions to problems that require more comprehensive attention.
What would it really take to address homelessness? For one, more and better housing, offered alongside comprehensive medical, social, and psychiatric care tailored to clients’ individual needs, and provided regardless of an individual’s sobriety, employment, or other behavior-change prerequisites. Known as the “Housing First” model, decades of research from around the world confirm that this approach is one of the most effective tools to end homelessness, particularly for people with severe mental illness, long durations of homelessness, and complex medical needs.
The executive order says the Department of Housing and Urban Development should end support for some “housing first” programs. This threatens successful housing programs and risks increasing homelessness, especially for high-risk groups. The Veterans Affairs is one example of this success: long-term investments in housing with comprehensive medical and mental health services have seen a 55% reduction in homelessness among veterans since 2010.
The federal government could also do more to help state and local governments implement Housing First policies. In a national study, one of us found that although the homelessness crisis typically occurs on public property, local governments often aren’t involved with designing or implementing the type of supportive “Housing First” policies necessary to end homelessness. Instead, those tasks are delegated to local non-profits, which may lack the authority or resources needed to create effective policies, and which often face pushback from local governments.
However, evidence shows that improving resource capacity for nonprofits helps them to better coordinate with, or even become part of, local governments in order to implement supportive Housing First policies. The federal government can play an important role here too. In 2023, for instance, the Department of Health and Human Services took steps to allow states to use Medicaid to pay for non-traditional services like housing costs and medical respite beds.
The federal government can also do more to improve access to public mental health care, the second piece of the puzzle. Over the past several decades, the United States has systematically divested from mental health care. The federal government has played an important role in incentivizing these divestments. But it could change track by eliminating major payment restrictions on inpatient mental health care, such as Medicaid’s IMD exclusion and Medicare’s 190-day lifetime cap, which limits the government funding available for inpatient mental health care. Expanding that funding would help expand needed mental health care services.
The federal government could also require state Medicaid programs to cover comprehensive mental health services and regulate insurance programs so that safety-net providers—who deliver care to low-income, homeless individuals—are reimbursed at sustainable, market rates. Such policy changes would go a long way towards expanding access to behavioral health services for these individuals, who badly need these services to maintain stable housing.
This executive order appears to be but one more blow to Americans at risk of and experiencing homelessness. Combined with the “Big Beautiful Bill’s” severe Medicaid cuts, food assistance work requirements, and expansions to military and police capacities, the executive order is more likely to penalize than to prevent homelessness and mental illness.
To tackle the root causes of homelessness, real reform will require a policy approach that treats people experiencing homelessness like humans—not trash to “clean up.”
Charley E. Willison is Assistant Professor of Public Health at Cornell University and author of Ungoverned and Out of Sight: Public Health and the Political Crisis of Homelessness in the United States.
Isabel M. Perera is Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University and author of The Welfare Workforce : Why Mental Health Care Varies Across Affluent Democracies.
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Native American reparations are designed to remedy the U.S. government’s historical treatment of indigenous tribes, ranging from monetary compensation to land redistribution and recognition of cultural rights.
Getty Images, anilakkus
Understanding the Debate on Reparations for Native Americans
Aug 06, 2025
Native American reparations are designed to remedy the U.S. government’s historical treatment of indigenous tribes, ranging from monetary compensation to land redistribution and recognition of cultural rights.
Hallmarks of Support for Reparations for Indigenous Peoples
- Human rights: The U.S.’s treatment of indigenous tribes not only violates civil rights but also international human rights. Even prospective development of reparations requires creating protections against the systems that enabled the US’s atrocities against indigenous peoples, informed by international law.
- American values: America’s founding legitimacy rests on popular sovereignty and liberal values—values that the US’s territorial expansion and conquest of indigenous tribes violated. Reparations reflect the U.S.’s commitment to secure these values once again.
- Compensation for Boarding School Policies: The policy of indigenous child separation constituted a cultural genocide. Many records from the boarding schools are still not public. In order to help heal those targeted by the boarding school policies, reparations entail truth commissions like the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy Act, which release these records and potentially provide monetary assistance.
- Land rights: Monetary reparations for land expropriation have historically acted as bribes to prevent indigenous tribes from pressing for redistribution. Land reparations help return indigenous lands of cultural, historic, and economic significance to indigenous tribes.
The legislative inertia that helped pass federal reparations has dwindled in the last ten years, with the last settlement over the management of federal indigenous lands occurring in 2012. Since then, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy Act has failed to pass in Congress. However, the Department of the Interior did renew the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which provides a systematic process for repatriating cultural burial objects. Recent reparations programs have concentrated on the state and local level. In California, legislators created a statewide reparations fund to help indigenous tribes in 2022, in addition to a land reparations bank in Oakland.
Resistance to Reparations
Opponents of reparations have centered their resistance on the economic or legal feasibility of maintaining or transferring land.
- Concerns about Qualifications: Some fear that capitulating to demands for indigenous reparations would spur other disadvantaged groups. New claims from different groups would raise questions of qualifications for reparations and the risk of exacerbating intragroup inequality with redistribution. Supporters of reparations argue that they do not necessarily have to focus on remedying past historical injustices, which is a complex issue, but on focusing on the needs of tribes today and one-time returns of land.
- Concerns for the Practicality of Land Reparations in National Parks: Opponents of returning National Park ownership to indigenous tribes question their capacity to maintain parks relative to the federal government’s fiscal and administrative capacity. By contrast, many indigenous scholars, such as historian David Treuer, contend that tribal nations’ experiences managing their land and negotiating with the federal government create a unique capability to manage national parks.
- Violating the Statute of Limitations: Some legal scholars contend that raising indigenous land claims in American courts may conflict with the statute of limitations, making their claims non-justiciable. However, legally classifying the federal government’s treatment of indigenous peoples as genocide would refute this argument. Genocide has no statute of limitations under federal law.
The slack in federal support for reparations will likely continue under the current administration; however, state and local reparations efforts have continued to gather and expand support. Nevertheless, the issue still swings between the type of reparations that should be used and their effectiveness.
Understanding the Debate on Reparations for Native Americans was originally published by The Alliance for Citizen Engagement.
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Climate change isn’t a distant threat. It’s an everyday expense. And for millions of Americans, the costs are already piling up.
Getty Images, Andriy Onufriyenko
The Climate Bill Is Here—and Republicans Just Handed You the Check
Aug 05, 2025
Introduction
Donald Trump ran on fighting inflation. Instead, he’s helped push prices higher—and made life more expensive for everyday Americans. As climate disasters disrupt farms, raise food prices, and strain household budgets, GOP leaders are attacking the science and policies that could help us adapt. From wildfires in California to droughts in Arizona and floods in Texas, extreme weather is turning climate denial into a hidden tax on working families.
By gutting climate programs, pressuring central banks, and shielding polluters, Republicans have shifted the costs of a warming world onto the very people they claim to defend. While former and current officials point fingers elsewhere, these policies—driven by ideology and donor interests—are making the squeeze worse.
Climate change is no longer abstract. It’s the reason your grocery bill is higher, your electricity costs more, and your insurance keeps going up. It’s time to talk about who’s responsible—and who’s paying.
The Real Cost of Denial
Climate change is already raising prices. You can see it at the supermarket and in your monthly bills. Research shows that extreme weather between 2022 and 2024 pushed food costs higher across the globe.
Droughts, floods, and fires aren’t rare anymore. When crops fail in one region, prices rise everywhere. And the hits keep coming—from grocery stores to gas stations.
In 2022, a major drought in California and Arizona nearly doubled produce prices in some areas. Insurance premiums are spiking in regions at higher risk of fires or floods. Utilities are charging more as they upgrade aging systems to handle extreme weather.
At the same time, programs that could ease these burdens have been scaled back or dismantled. The Trump administration cut climate data tools, canceled resilience plans, and weakened the federal role in helping communities prepare. These weren’t oversights. They were choices.
Muting the Messengers
It’s not just about policy—it’s about hiding the problem. Under political pressure, government agencies and financial institutions have pulled back from even mentioning climate risk. That’s not cutting red tape. That’s blocking the warning signs.
The USDA quietly removed key climate data, prompting a lawsuit from farmers and environmental groups. That data helps farmers plan and avoid losses. Without it, they’re left in the dark.
At the Federal Reserve, Chair Jerome Powell responded to Republican pressure by saying climate change isn’t part of the Fed’s role—despite mounting evidence that it affects prices and credit risk.
Meanwhile, major banks like JPMorgan and Citibank have pulled back from earlier climate commitments. Fossil fuel-aligned pressure groups have targeted these institutions, making it riskier to speak out or plan.
When warnings are silenced, people can’t prepare. They don’t see what’s coming. And they’re more likely to blame the wrong things when prices rise.
From Climate Denial to Kitchen Table Crisis
Climate change doesn’t always make headlines. Sometimes, it’s just your paycheck not stretching far enough. It’s rent going up, a grocery bill that shocks you, or an energy bill that spikes during a heat wave.
Because the GOP has worked to blur the lines between cause and effect, many people don’t connect these economic pressures to climate inaction. They blame companies, utilities, or bad luck. But behind those everyday costs are policy choices that made the situation worse.
Instead of addressing climate threats, Republican leaders offer scapegoats—immigrants, urban voters, federal agencies—while protecting the industries driving the crisis. Their approach: cut clean energy funding, weaken climate standards, and end oversight.
Over time, the result is slow-motion economic strain. One disaster might not wreck your budget. But years of higher costs and poor planning will.
Who Really Pays
There’s a clear pattern behind these choices. Follow the money. For every rollback of climate protections, there’s often a donor who benefits.
Big oil, coal, and agribusiness companies spend millions lobbying to delay reform. In return, they get more freedom to pollute—and fewer questions asked.
Blocking clean energy protections helps fossil fuel profits. Ignoring climate risk helps developers. Slashing transparency keeps the public unaware. But those savings for corporations come at a cost: higher bills, riskier lives, and fewer tools for the public to push back.
This isn’t just about denial. It’s about business. And working families are left to pay for it.
Conclusion: The Heat Is Already Here
Climate change isn’t a distant threat. It’s an everyday expense. And for millions of Americans, the costs are already piling up.
This isn’t just about rising temperatures—it’s about rising bills. The GOP says it’s fighting inflation, but many of its policies are quietly fueling the very cost increases people feel in their groceries, utilities, and insurance.
Unless voters begin to connect these rising expenses to the political decisions that drive them, the cycle will repeat. Prices will keep climbing. And once again, the check will land in your lap.
The good news? These outcomes are political—and that means they can change. But only if voters look past the noise, see through the blame game, and hold leaders accountable for the real drivers of economic pain.
Robert Cropf is a professor of political science at Saint Louis University.
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Douglas Rissing/Getty Images
Pharma Industry and Ballard Partners Dominate the Lobbying Space in Second Quarter of 2025
Aug 05, 2025
Pharmaceutical and health products companies continued to dominate the lobbying space in the second quarter of 2025, spending $105.4 million to influence public policy. That industry has spent more on lobbying than any other, during every quarter but one, since 2010, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of disclosure reports.
That total was down from the industry’s first-quarter total ($121.4 million) but still 38 percent more than the second biggest spender, the electronics industry.
Despite spending falling from the Q1 high, such lobbying totals far outpaced spending from any year prior — the drastic increase coinciding with President Donald Trump’s second term, with spending rising approximately $30 million from Q4 of 2024 to Q1 of 2025.
The pharmaceutical industry spent $22 million more in the first half of 2025 ($226.8 million) than it spent in the same period of the prior year, as the Trump administration and Republican-led Congress pushed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will have a major impact on pharmaceutical companies.
Other industries that anticipate financial implication from Trump’s policies, such as education, health services and the environment, have upped their expenditures dramatically this year. For example, renewable energy lobbying jumped to $21.7 million in the second quarter of 2025 from $16.2 million Q2 of 2024 and $19.1 million in the first quarter of this year.
By the end of the year companies dealing with defense, federal appropriations, homeland security, Medicare and Medicaid, and taxes may spend record amounts on lobbying, with Q1 and Q2 numbers from this year already climbing past the 2024 totals. Each of those issue areas was affected by the OBBA, which poured billions of dollars into immigration control, made significant changes to health-related services like Medicaid, cut funding for green initiatives and extended tax cuts.
Other highlights
Top lobbying firms: Ballard Partners rose up the ranks to become the top lobbying firm of the second quarter, raking in $20 million. The firm, which is led by a top Trump fundraiser, earned $13.9 million in Q1 to lobby on mainly trade, government and health issues — jumping from the firm’s $4.3 million in Q1 of 2024. Both White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Attorney General Pam Bondi worked for Ballard before joining the administration, although that relationship hit some speed bumps earlier this year.
The previous quarter’s top firm — Brownstein, Hyatt — remains among the most active, earning $18.5 million for lobbying in Q2.
Top clients: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent the most on lobbying in Q2, at $19.8 million, up just $10,000 from the quarter prior. The National Association of Realtors spent the second highest amount on lobbying, funneling $16.2 million into legislation affecting housing affordability, disaster relief programs and other issues.
Biggest issue: The primary issue addressed in Q2 of 2025 was the federal budget and appropriations, which saw 4,396 organizations deploying lobbyists on the issue. In comparison, throughout all quarters in 2024, federal budget and appropriations saw 4,526 clients. The second largest issue in the second quarter — taxes — involved 2,118 clients, less than half the number working the spending issue.
Biggest legislation: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by Trump on July 4, precipitated a windfall of lobbying spending, both for and against the legislation’s passage. The Trump administration’s sweeping, almost-1,000-page bill was, by far, the most actively lobbied legislation of the quarter with 2,145 clients working the legislation. Blue Cross/Blue Shield was the most active organization, followed by the American Hospital Association.
The OBBBA added more than $150 billion to military spending and approximately $70 billion towards border wall construction, immigration detention centers, Immigration and Custom Enforcement hiring initiatives and technologies to monitor immigration. Another $75 billion was allocated to support ICE deportation programs. It will add trillions of dollars to the debt, despite cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP and environmental programs.
Biggest increases: The real estate industry increased its lobbying spending the most in the second quarter, in terms of raw dollars. It spent $34.1 million on lobbying in April-June, up $6 million from the first three months.
As a percentage of spending, the biggest increase came among organizations trying to influence abortion policy, with spending jumping 186 percent in the second quarter, to $827,000. Lobbying on abortion issues shot up to $702,000 after Trump won re-election in 2024.
UnitedHealth Group increased its lobbying activity to $3.7 million in Q2, up from $1.5 million in Q2 of 2024. America’s Health Insurance Plans also grew its lobbying expenditures from $2.4 million to $4.1 million in the same period.
The American Clean Power Association spent $630,000 on lobbying in Q2 of 2024 with such expenditures remaining stable until last quarter, when they jumped to $3.8 million. Environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy bumped up their lobbying efforts from $840,000 in Q2 of 2024 to $2.3 million this quarter, and jumping 230 percent from Q1 of 2025. Such increases reflect the industry-wide effort to fortify sustainability-focused legislation, which has been heavily rolled back by Congress and the Trump administration.
Pharma Industry and Ballard Partners Dominate the Lobbying Space in Second Quarter of 2025 was originally published by Open Secrets and is republished with permission.
Natalie Jonas is a freelance investigative journalist.
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