NYC could lose billions if it ignores Trump’s homeless orders

New Yorkers are fed up with having to climb over drug-addled zombies and avoid mentally deranged vagrants on the streets and in the subways.

But the city’s far-left politicians insist the homeless should be catered to on their own terms: We must care for them wherever they choose to sleep and even give them clean needles to support their addictions — the public’s fears and disgust be damned.

Last week President Donald Trump took the people’s side.

His new executive order aims to pull federal funding from the “failed programs” that facilitate the use of illegal drugs and permit the mentally ill to roam the streets and subways.

“The overwhelming majority” of the homeless, Trump stated, “are addicted to drugs or have mental health disorders or both. We want to take care of them. But they have to be off our streets.” 

Trump wants civility.

The president can’t force New York to follow his order, but his funding threat sets up a clash with city and state officials.

In 2024, federal cash — $7.2 billion in all, according to NYU’s Furman Center — accounted for most of the money spent by the city’s two housing agencies, and a significant share of the Department of Homeless Services’ budget.

Under Trump’s edict, federal funds will go only to housing programs that require addicts and the mentally ill to receive treatment — and can’t be used to facilitate drug use.

He’s boldly declaring that law-abiding people deserve safe neighborhoods and transit.

Trump is discarding orthodoxies that the homelessness industrial complex and its political allies have insisted on for decades.

Like “housing first” — the ubiquitous blue-state policy that offers the homeless permanent housing without making them enroll in addiction or mental-health treatment.

Billions have been spent on “housing first,” and yet the number of homeless people is higher than ever.

And like “harm reduction,” another orthodoxy — providing clean needles, and even supervised injection sites, to make drug addiction slightly less deadly.

Gotham was the first city to open drug-use centers where addicts can shoot up under the supervision of medical personnel, who intervene in case of an overdose. The perfect addition to any neighborhood.

Voters need to weigh in, making it clear they want a livable city, not sidewalks strewn with syringes and subway stations swarming with the mentally ill.

Start with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and the stark electoral choice between Republican Maud Maron and incumbent Democrat Alvin Bragg.  

On a recent July day, Bragg could be seen painting watercolors in Washington Square Park, totally content with the reality his policies have allowed: The park has become a dangerous drug den, with addicts shooting up just a few feet away from his easel while social workers passed out free syringes for  “harm reduction.”

Maron, Bragg’s November challenger, calls out harm reduction for what it is —“Orwellian doublespeak.”

“It is harm amplification,” she told me, “trapping addicts in their addiction and ruining public spaces for everyone else.”

Even before Trump’s new executive order, Mayor Eric Adams had indicated his support for involuntarily hospitalizing violently mentally ill vagrants.

But in the upcoming mayoral election, leading challenger Zohran Mamdani is clearly on the side of the vagrants, not the public. 

He insists the city should provide “outreach” and services to the unhoused wherever they choose to flop, including in the subways.

Mamdani wants to turn empty retail stores in subway stations into drop-in hubs for vagrants, a reckless proposal.

Creating magnets that draw more homeless people into the subways would be a gut punch for New Yorkers who must ride the rails to get to work or school. 

Mamdani has been pushing this proposal throughout his three terms in the state Assembly — elected each time with no Republican opponent in the general election to question him. 

One-party rule greased the skids for Mamdani to rise to the mayoral race.  

Adams succeeded in getting Gov. Kathy Hochul to include in this year’s state budget a change in the state’s involuntary commitment law, expanding it to apply to those incapable of meeting their own basic needs, not just those who are deemed dangerous. 

That’s a step in the right direction — but Mamdani would take the city backward, ceding the streets to the crazies.

The American Civil Liberties Union bashed Trump’s proposal to hospitalize the severely mentally ill, saying it “displays remarkable disdain” for “vulnerable people.” The National Alliance to End Homelessness condemned it as “undignified.”

But having to hug the subway wall for fear of getting pushed onto the tracks by a crazy person is undignified, too.

Compassion for the homeless must be balanced with the safety and orderliness the rest of us deserve. 

Bragg and Mamdani overlook that imperative. Voters be warned.

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City.