The Federal Debt Relief System recently asked; “At a time when Americans are dealing with rising food and fuel prices, slowing jobs and soaring home foreclosures, is it really possible that homelessness is on the decline? Perhaps, but it depends on your meaning of the word homeless.

The Federal Debt Relief System is dedicated to sounding the alarm while there is still time to do something about it.

According to a report given to Congress on Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), overall homeless numbers, taken from a one-day national count in January, were down 12% from 2005 to 2007, to just under 672,000 people, most of whom were on the streets only temporarily. Chronic homelessness is down even more, almost 30% lower than in 2005, from 175,000 to fewer than 125,000.

There is a rather large asterisk on the new data, however, the result of an ongoing effort to more narrowly define who is actually considered homeless. This is the third annual national HUD count, and in previous years, some cities had been counting families who were living two families to an apartment, for example, or those living in RVs, as homeless. This year, they weren't. This count, say the report's authors, is the most successful to date in tallying only those who were actually in shelters or on the streets — the official HUD definition of a homeless person.

This has advocates like Michael Stoops, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, saying "It's kind of premature to say that there's less homeless people now because of all the great things that HUD and the Bush Administration are doing," he says. "Our grass-roots networks around the country see the rosy numbers as more of a government deception, being produced purely for political effect in an election year.

So why keep these vulnerable families out of the count? It's partially about the power of positive thinking. The number crunchers leading the federal fight believe that as long as Americans continue to perceive homelessness as an implacable problem, they'll never muster the will to help. But if the government can show that the numbers are actually relatively small — like the 125,000 chronic homeless they are now counting — then the public might just be up for tackling the issue.

Positive thinking is key to Housing First, which since 2000 has been the main innovation in President Bush's fight against homelessness. Basically, the idea is to identify the big users of government shelters and services and show voters that you can slowly herd them into permanent housing. With its emphasis on tangible gains and more rigorous data, it might as well be called No Transient Left Behind. And it has proven hugely popular with local politicians, like San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who can boast about their measurable, if small, progress.

Dennis Culhane, the University of Pennsylvania professor who co-authored Tuesday's HUD report, says that Housing First is working. "What these data show," he told me, "is that when we make a targeted investment strategy focused on chronic homelessness, we can actually make measurable improvement."

Culhane says he's against expanding the HUD definition of homelessness. "There's a very large housing problem in this country," he says. "But shoehorning new people into the homeless category isn't going to make a hill of beans of difference. It's only going to dilute what we're doing." He points to the U.S. budget for homelessness, which is just $1.5 billion a year. That's barely enough to help fund the Housing First push; it's not going to bail out families caught up in the nations current foreclosure crisis.

Federal Debt Relief System is at the forefront in the battle to restore the Constitution by arming millions with the sobering information and vital education it’s going to take to wake Americans up to take action to save our nation.

Go to Federal Debt Relief System website now, before it’s too late.