The Trump administration’s battle over Los Angeles homeless funding sharpened Tuesday, with top officials warning that the city’s main homelessness agency could lose federal support after years of rising street homelessness and heavy spending. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, joined by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., made the case at the faith-based Los Angeles Dream Center that Washington should stop backing what they described as a broken system.
Turner said the administration will not keep financing what he called a “homeless industrial complex,” arguing that Los Angeles has received nearly $1 billion in federal homelessness funding over the past five years, more than any other jurisdiction in the country. He said homelessness in the city doubled over the same decade that HUD funding nearly tripled. Federal figures show homelessness funding to Los Angeles has risen 178% since 2013, while homelessness increased 100%. Los Angeles counted 45,194 homeless people this year, including 29,115 who were living without shelter.
The criticism centered on the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA, the city and county’s primary homelessness agency. The group operates with an annual budget of roughly $845 million. Turner said LAHSA could not verify the existence of 2,300 housing units it was supposed to oversee, and he pointed to a 2023 finding that the agency could not determine how much it had spent on empty hotel rooms because it did not properly track when people left motel housing. He also cited federal conflict-of-interest findings involving the agency’s former chief executive and more than $2 million committed to her husband’s employer.
Turner also tied LAHSA to other examples of alleged failure in the region’s homelessness network. He referenced the federal fraud case involving Abundant Blessings, a LAHSA contractor whose executive director was charged in an alleged $23 million scheme. He then criticized PATH, or People Assisting the Homeless, saying the nonprofit had received $2.5 million in HUD homelessness funding since 2021 for plans to convert the former Ramada Inn on Washington Boulevard into homeless housing. During the briefing, Turner displayed a bag he said nonprofits hand out to homeless people and removed drug paraphernalia from it.
