Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought a flamethrower to Los Angeles Tuesday, blasting the city’s homelessness system as a taxpayer-funded failure and warning that the Trump administration will cut off federal cash to programs that don’t get people off the streets.
“We cannot solve homelessness by funding systems that perpetuate it,” Kennedy said at the LA Dream Center.
“We will fund programs that get people off the streets, into treatment and recovery, and back to self-sufficiency.”
And then he delivered the bottom line:
“If a program’s metrics show they are just maintaining people on the streets instead of curing the underlying dependency, their federal funding stops immediately.”
Kennedy also unloaded on former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, accusing him of dismantling federal oversight and opening the door to massive fraud.
Kennedy claimed Becerra transferred 76 of the 80 oversight workers responsible for monitoring $2.2 trillion in annual HHS payments.
That, Kennedy said, was “an invitation for the fraudsters to come in and steal everything.”
He blamed the lack of oversight for allowing scammers to bill the government tens of billions of dollars in Los Angeles alone through fraudulent autism services, fake medical equipment and phony hospice accounts.
“He let the people steal the money” and “looked the other way while fraud, waste, and abuse exploded,” Kennedy said of Becerra.
The HHS secretary vowed the Trump administration would tear up what he called the status quo.
“We are going to bring a complete halt to the business-as-usual approach that treats homelessness as a permanent industry.”
Kennedy appeared alongside Housing Secretary Scott Turner as the administration threatened to pull roughly $240 million in federal homelessness funding from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
“Our aim is that LAHSA does not receive another dollar until it has accountability,” Turner said.
The administration suspended LAHSA from submitting applications due Aug. 26 for roughly $240 million in federal homelessness funding for service providers across the region.
HUD has instead told those providers to apply directly to the federal government.
LAHSA is challenging the suspension before US District Judge David O. Carter.
The Trump administration is also pushing to shift federal homelessness spending toward recovery-focused transitional housing and away from the “housing first” model, which provides permanent subsidized housing without requiring treatment or other conditions.
Kennedy and Turner pointed to the LA Dream Center, a former hospital now operating as a faith-based residential treatment center, as an example of the recovery-focused approach they want Washington to support.
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Turner also displayed a brown lunch bag he said was being handed to homeless people with taxpayer money.
“This is a bag that I learned they’re giving our homeless neighbors with American taxpayer dollars,” he said. “This is drug paraphernalia that’s in this bag. This brown bag that’s handed to people, homeless people addicted to drugs.”
“The playbook that they’ve been running, that’s a bad playbook,” Turner said.
He also cited a federal indictment accusing a homeless-services provider of fraudulently billing $23 million.
The administration’s funding push faces a separate court hurdle.
A federal judge in Rhode Island has blocked the funding shift for now, finding HUD changed its 2025 funding offer without completing a required review process.
On Friday, the judge also set aside HUD’s 2026 funding offer.
