(Daily Signal)—U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in Los Angeles on Tuesday to announce the Trump administration’s latest push to overhaul the state’s response to the homelessness crisis.
California has long struggled with homelessness, and recent scandals involving taxpayer dollars flowing to troubled nonprofits have intensified scrutiny. The Trump administration announced in June that it would cut off federal funding to Los Angeles.
At a press conference held at the Dream Center, a faith-based nonprofit, Turner told the Daily Signal the administration wants to see actual results—people getting off the streets and receiving treatment.
“What we’re looking for is, we’re looking for the Dream Center and places like the Dream Center that are results-oriented, that have a true continuum of care. The Dream Center does not receive funding that’s passed by the Senate. It’s [funded] by friends, family, churches, private people,” Turner said. “What we’re looking for is what you see here, to bring someone in. Bring them in, house them, put the ax to the root.”
He added, “What is the problem? Why are they homeless? [It is] drug addiction, mental illness. To treat that and then get them healed and transform that to a life of self-sufficiency, that’s what we’re looking for. It’s a new paradigm. … It’s not just housing—it’s not housing first.”
Both Turner and Kennedy emphasized that places like the Dream Center are faith-based nonprofits. During his remarks, Kennedy highlighted that under the Biden administration, former HHS Secretary and current Democrat California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra refused to fund faith-based organizations.
That approach has shifted under the Trump administration. Kennedy said faith-based groups like the Dream Center are now prioritized by HUD and HHS because of their results.
“During the Biden administration, the White House made the decision that my agency and Scott’s agency could no longer give money to faith-based organizations. I’m told the states also cut off funding to faith-based organizations, and that was downgraded during the COVID crisis,” Kennedy said. “All the government officials in Los Angeles, including Adam Schiff across the state, were telling people to go to the Dream Center to get meals. The meal burden here went from 1,000 meals a day to 10,000, because there was no place else for people to go.”
“When they went to the government agencies, my agency, and asked for support, my agency told them, ‘We can’t help you because you’re a faith-based organization.’ It made no sense,” he added. “And we have now changed that and put faith-based organizations front and center, because they’re doing it better than the government can do. They’re doing it at one-tenth the price that we’re paying.”
Homelessness in the state rose significantly under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, climbing from an estimated 151,000 people in 2019 to 181,934 in 2025, according to HUD’s latest annual report. Los Angeles’ homeless population also increased this year, with the county’s unsheltered count rising 3.3% and the city’s unsheltered count rising 7.9%, according to data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
In addition to the rising numbers, officials, including Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, have promoted a “Housing First” strategy that focuses primarily on moving people off the streets and into taxpayer-funded housing. Yet, with an estimated $1 billion spent on efforts such as Project Homekey, the city has either stalled on finishing units intended for homeless residents or seen some of those units damaged by occupants struggling with mental illness or addiction.
While the state has spent upwards of $26 billion on the homelessness crisis, questions about where the money is going continue to grow.
“Year after year, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were funneled to LAHSA with little accountability and zero results,” Turner said during the press conference. “The LA Continuum of Care led by LAHSA had received $1 billion in taxpayer dollars over the last five years—that’s $1 billion over the last five years with no accountability and zero results. And despite receiving more federal homelessness funding than any other jurisdiction in our nation, LA remains the epicenter of the nation’s drug-fueled homelessness crisis.”
“During that same decade, the homelessness in LA doubled. HUD funding to LA nearly tripled. How many know that’s a problem? … We’ve got to run a new play. That play is not working.”
Crackdowns on Los Angeles nonprofits and their CEOs that received taxpayer dollars through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority have also come from First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli.
In January, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of South Los Angeles charity executive Alexander Soofer, charging him with fraudulently obtaining $23 million in taxpayer funds intended to combat homelessness while allegedly pocketing $10 million for himself.
Additionally, the Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday that a Southern California nonprofit running domestic violence shelters paid its longtime chief executive, Carol Adelkoff, more than $1.6 million in salary and vacation pay over two years, even though she lived in Hawaii.
With funding to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority halted, the agency has sued the Trump administration over roughly $240 million now in limbo.
A federal judge’s ruling on Friday struck down HUD’s attempt to shift federal funding away from permanent housing. As a result, HUD will have to issue new guidelines for its annual homelessness grant competition, a decision that could affect the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
The freeze on the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority funding and the push for faith-based, results-driven programs mark a clear break from the housing-first model that has dominated California for years. For now, hundreds of millions remain in limbo while the administration insists taxpayer money will only follow programs that get people off the streets and into recovery.
“Under the leadership of President [Donald] Trump and Vice President [JD] Vance, we are rooting out corruption and ensuring that those who need care are truly going to get it. The days of funding corrupt failure are over. The Trump administration will not fund a homeless industrial complex any longer,” Turner said.
“At HUD, we’re only interested in real results,” he continued. “And that’s actually helping our fellow Americans get off the streets, out of addiction, and on the path to self-sufficiency.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
