Arnold Schwarzenegger Thanks President Trump For Combating California Homelessness

Arnold Schwarzenegger attends the Japan premiere of 'Terminator: Dark Fate' at Shinjuku Kabuki-cho Godzilla Road in Tokyo, Japan on Nov. 06, 2019. (Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images)

Actor and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Feb. 14 thanked President Donald Trump for his efforts to combat the homelessness crisis in the state.

The former Republican governor has previously criticized the president on a number of issues, but on Friday thanked him for sending Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson to California to take part in a homelessness summit.

“Everyone knows @realDonaldTrump & I have our disagreements,” Schwarzenegger wrote on Twitter.

“But I want to thank you for sending @SecretaryCarson to our homelessness summit. We’ll only solve this if everyone works together. This issue is bigger than all of us. Now it’s time for action.”

According to a statement from the the Housing and Urban Development website, Carson announced a $20 million investment into nine public housing agencies on Friday.

As per the statement, the money will go towards helping “public housing families increase their earned income and become self-sufficient.”

It follows a report issued by the Housing and Urban Development Department last year which said that the homeless population in California increased by 16.4 percent from 2018 to 2019, while 53 percent of all recorded homeless people in America lived in the state as of January 2019.

In December, Trump said that California Governor Gavin Newsom was doing a “really bad job” on the issue of homelessness.

“Governor Gavin N has done a really bad job on taking care of the homeless population in California,” the president wrote on Twitter, adding “If he can’t fix the problem, the Federal Govt. will get involved!”

In the same month, Newsom announced $1 billion in funding on programs to fight homelessness, including $650 million in emergency homeless aid to cities and counties.

“California is doing more than ever before to tackle the homelessness crisis but every level of government, including the federal government, must step up and put real skin in the game,” Newsom said in the announcement.

“California is making historic investments now to help our communities fight homelessness. But we have work to do and we need the federal government to do its part.”

Newsom blamed “politicized roadblocks put up by the Trump administration,” for previous delays in the release of the funding, adding that state law requires the final funding allocations be based off federally-approved 2019 Point in Time Count (PIT) homelessness data, which he said had “historically been quickly reviewed, approved, and distributed by the federal government to every state in the nation.”

The Governor said that while local governments had submitted this data to the Trump administration “months ago,” the federal government had refused to release it, leaving cities and counties waiting for the money to be approved.

However, instead of waiting, Newsom said his administration had created an “interim solution” by collecting preliminary homeless data from California communities, and that based on those numbers, the state would be able to start applying and spending funding while the rest of it would be distributed once the Trump administration released its finalized PIT count data.