To Elon Musk, the word “homeless” is a “lie” and “a propaganda word”.

“Homeless is a misnomer. It implies that someone got a little bit behind on their mortgage, and if you just gave them a job, they’d be back on their feet,” he told former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson in October. “What you actually have are violent drug zombies with dead eyes, and needles and human feces on the street.”

The more money spent combating homelessness, “the worse it gets”, according to Musk.

Musk — who funneled more than $250m into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — is now directing lawmakers and the White House to make drastic, potentially devastating cuts to federal agencies that support millions of vulnerable Americans, including thousands of people experiencing homelessness.

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The world’s wealthiest person has repeatedly suggested that he believes the government he will be assisting is behind a global conspiracy to make more people homeless in order to enrich the organizations working to end homelessness.

“The ‘save the homeless’ NGOs are often paid according to how many homeless people are on the streets, thus creating a strong financial incentive for them to maximize the number of homeless people and never actually solve the problem!” he wrote on December 10.

“The more homeless there are, the more money these organizations get, so their incentive is to increase, not decrease, homelessness!” he said in September.

Trump, meanwhile, says people experiencing homelessness should be forced into treatment or mental institutions “or face arrest”.

His campaign has promised to “end the nightmare” of the “dangerously deranged” with a plan to “open large parcels of inexpensive land, bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists, and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified”.

He wants to “bring back mental institutions to house and rehabilitate those who are severely mentally ill or dangerously deranged with the goal of reintegrating them back into society.”

Musk and Trump are not alone.

Influential billionaires and right-wing think tanks have been advancing legislation that criminalizes homelessness in Congress and at the Supreme Court, “and they all share this backwards, incorrect view that if we punish people enough, they will choose not to be poor”, according to Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director with the National Homelessness Law Center.

“People are really struggling to afford basic needs in this country, like rent and food. But I don’t expect Musk or the other billionaires to know anything about that,” he told The Independent.

“Instead of focusing on solutions to homelessness, Musk and his billionaire friends think the solution is to arrest homeless folks and send them off to detention camps,” he said.

“He could single-handedly provide and pay for every houseless person in this country to get the housing and support they need to stay housed,” he added. “But he doesn’t care, and he and his billionaire friends are using homeless people as political footballs, and it’s wrong and it’s disgusting.”

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In January 2023, the last year for which the full data is available, more than 650,000 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in the U.S., marking a 12 per cent increase from 2022, and the most ever recorded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in nearly 20 years.

Nearly three out of every 10 people experiencing homelessness are part of a family with children, and 17 per cent of all unhoused people were children under the age of 18, the report found.

In New York City, more than 130,000 people — including more than 45,000 children — were sleeping in shelters in October. It’s a figure that has been steadily increasing since 2022, when mayor Eric Adams began welcoming migrants into the city after they were sent north by Republican-led states protesting president Joe Biden’s approach to the US-Mexico border.

But that figure excludes the untold thousands of people sleeping on the city’s streets and subway systems each night, nor does it include the estimated 300,000 people who have lost their homes and are now tenuously living in so-called “doubled-up” housing with other people and families.

The primary driver of homelessness, particularly among families, is a lack of stable affordable housing, with evictions, overcrowded housing, domestic violence and job losses sending homeless families into shelters and onto the streets.

A full-time worker earning minimum wage cannot afford to rent a two-bedroom home at market rate anywhere in the country. An hourly wage worker would need to make at least $15 an hour working for 104 hours a week to afford an average one-bedroom home at fair market rent.

While Musk describes people experiencing homelessness as “violent”, they are more likely to be victims of a crime than perpetrators. The Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, calls it a “hidden epidemic” that it says is fueled by a series of policy failures that have forced more than half a million Americans onto the streets each night.

Meanwhile, state and local governments are increasingly criminalizing homelessness, from “public camping” bans to laws prohibiting where you can sleep or sit or whether you can sleep in your car, loiter or ask for money. Nearly every state has at least one law on the books criminalizing homelessness.

In June, the Supreme Court determined that cities can enforce so-called camping bans to prevent homeless people from sleeping in public spaces — even if those cities don’t have shelter space for them.

More than 100 cities have enacted camping bans in the wake of that decision, and dozens of others are currently pushing through legislation.

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Musk and billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy are co-directing a newly created advisory group to work with Congress to identify ways to cut trillions of dollars in federal spending, including cuts to health insurance and food programs long considered a third rail in Congress.

Ramaswamy has suggested putting $1bn on the chopping block for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, one of the most critical safety net programs for poor Americans. Roughly 75 per cent of recipients are in poverty, and more than 20 per cent have reported having no income other than those benefits.

Musk and Ramaswamy are also reportedly mulling cuts to federal healthcare programs for lower-income Americans and children — programs that homeless Americans also are entitled to.

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During his first administration, Trump appointed a self-described “homelessness consultant” to lead the agency overseeing the federal response to homelessness. Robert Marbut, who directed the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness from 2019 to 2021, abandoned the standard “housing first” framework that has been the driving force behind policies to address the crisis for years, widely supported by homelessness and housing agencies and services across the country.

But Marbut endorsed what he called “housing fourth”, or using housing as an incentive to get people enrolled into supportive services.

“Housing first” was adopted as federal policy more than 20 years ago during President George W. Bush’s administration.

“It is a Republican policy, but they don’t actually care about folks who are poor and people who are experiencing homelessness,” Rabinowitz said. “Now they’re poised to other people to the point where they are rounding them up and putting them into camps. We have seen that before and we know how it ends.”

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Trump has vowed to “ end the scourge of homelessness”.

In the final year of his last presidency in 2020, the number of people experiencing homelessness had grown for the fourth year in a row. On a single night in January 2020, two months before the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic, roughly 580,000 people — or about 18 of every 10,000 people in the country — were experiencing homelessness.

The rate of homelessness among veterans also did not decline for the first time in more than a decade.

But homelessness among veterans fell by 7.5 per cent between 2023 and 2024, cutting the rate of homelessness among former service members by more than 55 per cent since 2010.

“The secret to this decrease is not a mystery,” according to National Alliance to End Homelessness CEO Ann Oliva. “Ending homelessness comes down to three things: using person-centered and evidence-based policy and program design, providing key resources at a scale necessary to get the job done, and showing the leadership and public will to keep a long-term commitment to our goals. Our leaders have honored that commitment to veterans. It is now time for them to honor it for the rest of the nation.”

Nearly three-quarters of Americans support taking the same approach to end all homelessness, according to polling from Morning Consult.

“Most people in this country know that it’s hard to pay rent, it’s hard to afford groceries … but I don’t expect billionaires to know about the struggles that poor and working-class Americans are going through,” Rabinowitz said. “I wish they could see how out of touch they were and realized that maybe they don’t actually know what they’re talking about.”

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