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A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.

It was their third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails. “We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that,” a Republican state senator, Ron Alting, said last year, urging a more caring approach.

But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump’s, had made its initial efforts. Mr. Trump had issued an executive order on homelessness that so fully reflected Cicero’s agenda it was hard to tell where the group stopped, and White House policy began. The sponsor of the Indiana law was fresh from a Cicero conference, Cicero lobbyists worked the bill, and three Cicero analysts testified that the threat of arrests would push homeless people into treatment for mental illness or addiction.

The ban passed just before the legislature adjourned.

With homelessness near record levels, Republicans have embraced tough measures to clear the streets, and no group has led the way more than the Cicero Institute. Mr. Lonsdale formed the institute eight years ago with vague goals — to promote “liberty, accountability, and transparency” — and no mention of homelessness. Now it has commandeered Republican homelessness policy, upending debate over an intractable problem with life-and-death stakes and showing how rich donors can shape the safety net.

Twenty-one states have considered camping bans or other Cicero-backed homelessness laws in recent years, and 16 have passed them. But the group’s sway goes further: It is working with the Trump administration to transform federal homelessness aid away from housing subsidies and toward the forced treatment of substance abuse or mental disorders.

Echoing Cicero’s thoughts and at times its very words, the administration says federal policy, called Housing First, neglects the root causes of homelessness by providing rental subsidies but leaving treatment optional. Opponents of Mr. Trump’s plan, which is blocked in court, say that forced treatment fails and housing aid gets people off the street.

Substantial evidence shows that Housing First succeeds in getting the chronically homeless housed, at least in the short term. But it is expensive, and the evidence also shows it has not consistently improved mental or physical health or lowered death rates. The treatment-first approach that Cicero favors has not been rigorously studied.

For many years, Housing First enjoyed bipartisan consensus; the first Trump administration took office embracing it. Cicero has helped make it a conservative epithet. “Obviously, our work has been one of the main influences” in shaping administration views, Mr. Lonsdale said in an interview.

The White House and the Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment on Cicero’s influence.

A co-founder of Palantir, the data-mining firm, Mr. Lonsdale, 43, is an unlikely force in homelessness policy. He brings to it vast wealth but no experience with homeless services and a distrust of conventional expertise. He argues that his outsider’s perspective gives him and the young generalists he hires a fresh view.

A pugnacious presence on social media — he recently called for public hangings of repeat violent offenders — Mr. Lonsdale said he is fighting in part to defend “capitalist society.” He argues that a corrupt “homelessness industrial complex” dominated by liberal social service groups wants to increase homelessness to discredit society.

“Some of them are cynical Marxists who clearly want mayhem and want to show that our civilization is broken,” he said.

Many on the left return the scorn, calling Mr. Lonsdale an emblem of the inequality that creates homelessness — a billionaire fighting a reverse class war to preserve an unjust order.

“He’s using the homelessness crisis to deflect attention from the broken economic system that both causes homelessness and enables people like him to become billionaires in the first place,” said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center, a progressive advocacy group.

As Mr. Lonsdale taps his fortune to shape views, it is easy to see a story of money and politics. But it is also a story of public fatigue. With unsheltered homelessness up more than half in a decade to about 266,000 people, Cicero succeeded in part by putting the status quo on trial.

A signature Cicero line is that there is “nothing compassionate” about leaving people on the street. Echoed by Mr. Trump, it may send an army of marginalized people down an untested path.

Banning Public Sleeping, State by State

Asked why he focused on homelessness, Mr. Lonsdale often begins by saying that a homeless person harassed his wife as she pushed their child in a stroller in San Francisco. “She just got screamed at, multiple times, and threatened by someone who has clearly lost their mind,” he said in an interview.

But Mr. Lonsdale’s conservatism took root much earlier. He cites Ayn Rand and Austrian free-market economists as teenage influences and used his perch as editor of The Stanford Review, a conservative publication, to assail “political correctness.” He blasted a student movement to raise custodians’ pay, warning it “destroys incentive for them to improve themselves.”

The magazine’s alumni include Peter Thiel, the libertarian investor who helped start PayPal, where Mr. Lonsdale landed an internship and found a mentor. They helped start Palantir in 2003 when Mr. Lonsdale was 21. He left after six years and became a tech investor. Forbes now estimates his fortune at $3.5 billion.

The subject of homelessness never arose in 2019 when Mr. Lonsdale hired Cicero’s first analyst, Judge Glock, who tackled technocratic topics like zoning laws and published into a vacuum.

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Joe Lonsdale, founder of the Cicero Institute, is an ally of President Trump’s whose group has commandeered Republican policy on homelessness. Credit…Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters

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