Step One: Rhetoric as Weapon
The words come first. Repeat the lie 560 times that immigrants are dumped from jails and mental institutions into the U.S.
Never mind the evidence. PolitiFact calls it Pants on Fire, AP finds nothing. Doesn't matter.
The association sticks. Foreignness equals madness. Vulnerability equals threat.
Pile on with the insults: low IQ, deranged, mentally disabled. Call political opponents monsters and promise to make scum disappear.
Advocates call this sanist language. It isn't careless talk.
It builds a political logic. If they're monsters, they don't deserve rights. If they're insane, locking them up isn't punishment, it's public safety.
Step Two: Policy as Coercion
The Executive Order tells you what's coming. Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets.
Not homelessness. Not mental illness. Disorder.
The text drills in the point. Vagrant individuals, endemic vagrancy, sudden confrontations. Crime and menace, not poverty and disease.
Then the machinery turns.
Lower the legal bar for involuntary commitment, despite decades of precedent that call it a massive curtailment of liberty.Shift funding away from Housing First programs. These programs keep over 80% of participants stably housed. Replace them with high-barrier treatment-first schemes that fail by design.
Mandate data sharing between service providers and law enforcement.
The clinic becomes an arm of surveillance.
Step Three: Demolition of Capacity
Now gut the system.
Cut $1.1 billion from mental health programs. Shutter SAMHSA into a mega-agency, its mission dissolved. Fire 20,000 HHS staff.
NIH budget cut 40%, from $47 billion to $28 billion. One-sixth of its workforce gone. NIMH loses 22% of its staff in one sweep.
Then cancel the knowledge.
694 grants worth $1.8 billion killed in 40 days. Nearly half focused on LGBTQ+ health. Termination letters explicitly declare it is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research on vaccine hesitancy.
It's not just austerity. It's erasure.
A data desert engineered so no future administration can easily reverse course.
Eliminate Housing First. Criminalize survival behaviors like sleeping outside. Cut research and crisis services.
Then watch homelessness remain visible. Use that persistence to justify more coercive sweeps and lockups.
The failure proves the need for more failure.
The results surface quickly. Trevor Project crisis calls jumped 700% the day after the 2024 election. On Inauguration Day, calls rose another 33%.
By mid-2025, the administration killed the specialized 988 suicide lifeline for LGBTQ youth. A service that had fielded 1.5 million calls.
Remove the response at the very moment the crisis explodes.
Meanwhile, RFK Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again reorients health policy toward diet, exercise, and wellness farms.
Medication-assisted treatment for opioids gets downgraded. Mental illness gets reclassified as lifestyle. A 21st-century public health system gutted and replaced with farm therapy and sermons on clean living.
Remove people from public view. By jail, by institution, or by pushing them into tent cities far from the capital.
Starve the evidence that might challenge it. Leave future governments with a gutted infrastructure.
The numbers tell the story. $31 billion cut from HHS. 20,000 jobs gone. 694 grants erased. A suicide line serving 1.5 million calls terminated.
Not failure. Success. Success measured not in treatment or housing, but in disappearance.