By Erica C. Barnett

Freaked out about the Trump Administration’s latest executive order, which calls for “ending crime and disorder on America’s streets” by ending Housing First, arresting people with addiction and mental illness, and punishing people for sleeping outside?

Our guest on Seattle Nice this week, Lisa Daugaard, says people should read past the scary headlines and the tough-guy hyperbole of Trump’s press release and look at what the executive order actually does. Daugaard, the co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action (formerly the Public Defender Association), is a longtime proponent of housing first—the theory that stable housing is a prerequisite for long-lasting recovery. After reading the order, she told us she believes it was written by people who knew what they were doing.

For one thing, the order doesn’t explicitly call for defunding anything, except (entirely theoretical—that is, nonexistent) federally funded programs whose purpose is “only [to] facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm.” Although the order does call for more civil commitment, it doesn’t change the law in places like Washington State, which already has laws allowing involuntary commitment in some circumstances. In some circumstances, Daugaard said, the order holds out the possibility of more funding for evidence-based programs.

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“They’re certainly trying to accomplish some turning of the ship, and I think in most respects … this is not terribly problematic, if maybe not problematic at all, and maybe holds out the prospect of increased resources in areas where we really need those,” Daugaard said. “So I think in general, people are responding to the politics and not to the language of the actual order, and that that’s understandable, but maybe not wise.”

I pushed back a bit on Daugaard’s apparent optimism—which, to be clear, does not apply to the entire Trump Administration and its policy apparatus—noting that even if smart people who care about health and human services wrote it with the intention of making it as harmless as possible, the Trump Administration is unpredictable and has a history of not following the law. Sandeep added that right-wing activists are already portraying the order as a devastating loss for “the homelessness industrial complex.”

Daugaard said left-leaning activists and leaders shouldn’t take the bait. “We need to define ourselves as largely aligned with the values that this order enunciates and lower the temperature by saying that’s the [what the order calls for is] the work we want to do,” she said. “We don’t want to leave people camping in public. We don’t want to foster lifelong drug use with a low ceiling on people’s recovery capacity. And we need additional resources to make that a reality.”