The National Press Foundation’s “Federal Action, Local Impact” journalism summit in Washington, D.C., struck a bleak tone. Over three days last week, a stacked roster of policy experts and public officials, plus journalists and PR pros conveyed a grim message to roughly 30 reporters who’d flown in from across the country: This is not the America we know.

Certainly none of us NPF fellowship recipients expected to hear that everything’s fine — it isn’t — but I left sobered by just how much the Trump administration has upended bipartisan norms and imperiled the federal programs that so many Americans rely on, especially for housing.

Seasoned Beltway policy pros told us that the federal government no longer adequately values evidence-based policymaking, housing-related or otherwise. Instead, they said, the White House and Congress are in the grips of a hard-right ideology that threatens to dismantle the social safety net that people facing housing insecurity and homelessness have long relied on and replace it with policies that punish and even criminalize poverty.

In response, local governments must innovate and adapt, advised Day Manoli, a Georgetown University economist and data scientist. He urged local governments to go ahead and pilot programs that stress-test solutions to ideologically driven federal directives and funding cuts  while studying the policy issues, instead of delaying action until they’ve gained a perfect grasp. 

Some municipalities forget they can simultaneously confront a problem while studying it, Manoli added.

“When you get into the weeds of what is actually going on, the pathway of ‘Let’s test what strategies work’ has been somewhat untethered to ideology,” Manoli said.

That is a point well taken here in Atlanta and across Georgia, where too often politicians balk at testing solutions to our statewide housing crisis, claiming they need more evidence before acting.

Case in point: In the last legislative session, Georgia lawmakers considered a suite of bills to regulate institutional landlords’ behavior in local housing markets. Georgia State University geographer Taylor Shelton confronted state representatives with daunting data on investors’ alarmingly high level of home-buying across the state. (“There are over 300 census tracts across metro Atlanta alone where these companies own upwards of 50% of the single-family rental market,” he told the House Governmental Affairs Committee at a Feb. 25 hearing.)

But every proposal to curb investors’ stranglehold on the single-family property market faltered. Instead, Republican legislators decided they needed to review more data before passing any legislation to regulate home-buying by institutional investors.

Atlanta City Hall has responded to the issue of homelessness in similar fashion: When a city operation to clear a homeless encampment near the King Center left an unhoused man dead in January, the mayor and city council launched a task force to determine how to remove homeless people from the streets more humanely. It took until June for it to present vague new protocols to prevent another such tragedy. 

Meanwhile, activists with the local nonprofit Housing Justice League proposed a simpler option: “Stop the sweeps” until the city has housing units available for everyone living in a tent city.

Manoli’s advice to local governments? Just do it. Pilot something, gather data, and refine it, if it doesn’t produce the desired results. 

But to tackle the national homelessness epidemic, the Trump administration is pushing a very different kind of experiment: An executive order in July urged local and state governments to jail or institutionalize drug-addicted or mentally unstable people who are unhoused. 

Nevermind that experts in the field have long recognized that a housing-first approach — based on decades of data showing people are more likely to get sober and mentally healthy only after they’re stably housed — has proven far more effective than criminalizing unhoused people or requiring they receive substance use or mental health treatment to qualify for housing assistance.

Policing and homeless policy

The NPF fellows also heard from former Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, who made the difficult decision to call on the National Guard in 2020 to quell rioting after George Floyd’s murder by police. He views the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops to Democrat-run cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, ostensibly to crack down on crime, as backward thinking.

The best way for the Trump administration to actually combat crime and reduce the homeless population, Arradondo said, is to confront the national housing crisis and produce more housing and supportive services for people who need them.

“If you have to worry about where you’re going to lay your head tonight, that is a public health and public safety issue,” Arradondo told Atlanta Civic Circle. “[Housing stability] absolutely impacts public safety and public wellness, and if we miss that — or if we just discard that as an amenity that just some people need and some people don’t — it’s going to impact our communities.”

Could data-driven federal housing policies negate the supposed need for National Guard troops in purportedly crime-ridden American cities? “It absolutely would help,” he said.

Housing-first in D.C.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser is facing that reality today, running a city inundated with National Guard soldiers who’ve at times been relegated to janitors, raking leaves and picking up trash at National Park sites. 

Bowser told the NPF fellows that Trump’s executive order encouraging local governments to jail or institutionalize unhoused people is at odds with DC’s more successful, evidence-based tactics. 

“We’ve transformed our homelessness system, especially for families, where we’ve been able to drive down homelessness, and we’re starting on our single-person system — on building better, more dignified, more humane shelters for people so that they will come inside,” she said.

The city has done that by reinforcing tenant protections, fast-tracking transitional housing, and remediating blight, Bowser said. “Our traditional approach wasn’t working, and their approach won’t work. Locking people up won’t work.”

In Atlanta, city officials and nonprofit leaders have pledged to maintain a similar housing-first policy, but their resolve will be tested by the Trump administration’s threats to cut federal funding to municipalities that don’t adopt its punitive stance on homelessness.

Fog of misinformation

A firehose of misinformation blasting from the White House, not actual data, is at the core of these unorthodox federal policies, former federal public information officers told the NPF fellows. 

For housing, that means the White House myths about the dangers unhoused people pose to their communities and the burden they place on taxpayers.

“News organizations have to recognize and react to the fact that these are not normal times,” said David Lapan, a former communications officer for the US Departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and Defense.

Journalists, he said, must increasingly rely on unnamed government sources, instead of federal public information officers, for accurate data and information — which has further strained the nation’s trust in the media.

Despite the bleak federal outlook, what I saw in that D.C. hotel conference room was resolve — from journalists committed to accurate reporting, from city leaders trying to innovate under unprecedented new pressures, and from data-minded policy experts urging experimentation over paralysis. 

The hope in this moment lies in the willingness of local governments, communities, and reporters to keep testing new responses to federal edicts and funding cuts, sharing reliable, factual information, and fighting for what America could be.