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The entire staff of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) has reportedly been placed on leave at the behest of DOGE, the government cost-cutting arm inside the White House led by billionaire Elon Musk. This is according to reports published by Bloomberg and NPR.
The move reportedly occurred on April 15, with all 13 USICH staff members being notified by its acting director that they will be placed on administrative leave effective immediately. Bloomberg cited three people familiar with the matter and the agency was also included in a further whittling of the federal workforce in an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on March 14.
That order also included the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.
“The irony here is that [USICH] is designed for government efficiency,” said Jeff Olivet, the council’s executive director under President Joe Biden, in an interview with NPR. “[Congress established USICH in 1987] to make sure that the federal response to homelessness is coordinated, is efficient, and reduces duplication across federal agencies.”
Olivet now serves as senior advisor on health and homelessness for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In a Bloomberg interview he called the decision “devastating,” describing it that way “not only for the fine public servants who work at USICH and have dedicated their lives to the work of ending homelessness, but also for federal homelessness policy as a whole,” he said.
USICH’s current acting director is Kenneth Jackson, whom Bloomberg says is an official with DOGE working under Musk. His actions “appear to violate the statutory guidelines that established the agency,” Bloomberg said in its report.
That’s because the federal law that established it in the first place is required to develop a strategic homelessness plan and deliver a report based on it on an annual basis to Congress.
“It comprises the secretaries and directors of 19 different federal agencies, among them the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs,” the report said. “Four times a year, the leaders of those agencies convene to coordinate the government’s work on homelessness.”
Most, if not all, staffers placed on leave plan to accept the government’s renewed deferred resignation offer from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the report added.
