Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday with a blunt message for city leaders, taking aim at L.A.’s homelessness response and calling it a costly, taxpayer-backed system that has failed to move people out of encampments. He warned that the Trump administration is prepared to pull federal funding from programs that cannot show they are actually reducing street homelessness.
“We cannot solve homelessness by funding systems that perpetuate it,” Kennedy told the crowd at the LA Dream Center.
He said federal dollars would be directed toward efforts that move people “off the streets, into treatment and recovery, and back to self-sufficiency.”
Then Kennedy made the administration’s position unmistakably clear.
“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,” he said.
Kennedy also turned his criticism toward former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, alleging that Becerra weakened federal oversight and left major government spending vulnerable to abuse.
According to Kennedy, Becerra reassigned 76 of the 80 oversight employees tasked with tracking roughly $2.2 trillion in yearly HHS payments.
Kennedy argued the move amounted to “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.
