"The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development "does not even count most homeless children in their statistics because they exclude most children who are not living in shelters or on the streets. The HUD statistics allow the agency to claim it is making progress on reducing child homelessness when the opposite is true, but worse, HUD's definition fails to help hundreds of thousands of children in need. In fact, a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that HUD's definition exacerbates problems for kids."