In her Senate testimony, Dr. Martha Burt identifies the federal policy commitments that have brought homeless assistance systems throughout the nation to their current status: the passage of the McKinney Act of 1987, the Department of Housing and Urban Development's initiation of the Continuum of Care process in 1996, and the federal government's 2001 commitment to end chronic homelessness. She reviews aspects of S. 1801, the Community Partnership to End Homelessness Act of 2005, that would strengthen and advance current trends, and then focuses on four aspects of S. 1801's provisions.