Welcome back to the City Journal podcast.

I'm your host, Charles Van Lehmann, senior editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the panel today are, as always, perennial guests, Jesse Arm, director of external affairs, whatever that means, the Manhattan Institute, Tal Fortgang, who is rejoining us because you couldn't get enough of us and who works on domestic extremism, legal things in Manhattan Institute, and John Ketchum, who is solely responsible for cities at the Manhattan Institute. He's the only person who thinks about cities.

Nobody else thinks about cities.

Thank you all, gentlemen, for joining us today.

Let me take us right into the exciting news from last week when we heard from the Trump

administration that they have issued an executive order on homelessness, mental illness,

and public disorder.

It's a big W for the administration. They're targeting public order. Among other things, they target federal funds

for inpatient and outpatient treatment, promote camping bans and public order statutes,

cut funding for harm reduction. It's really just like, you know, not to not not to play my hand

too strongly, but it's kind of a suite of everything you could have wanted out of an executive order. So you know, I want to talk to this a little bit because it's, it's, it's big news for those us to pay attention to these issues. What do you all make of this? What, uh, what's going on with this executive order, how should we be responding to it?

Yeah, got to give credit where credit is. make of this, what's going on with this executive order? How should we be responding to it?

Yeah, got to give credit where credit is due. And a lot of credit is due. The executive order is a

political and policy triumph for the Trump administration. For years, the left has insisted

that these public encampments and open-air drug markets, untreated psychosis,

are somehow expressions of dignity. And this CEO calls that bluff. It treats public disorder

as not a social inevitability, but as a failure of public leadership and then backs it up with

policy that has teeth. And I think this is the most significant federal action. John will correct

me if I'm wrong, but in decades to challenge the dogmas of deinstitutionalization and the fantasy

that harm reduction alone can solve homelessness.

So I think this is the president calling on agencies to fund inpatient treatment, revive civil

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