The Trump administration reversed course just after notifying thousands of organizations across the country that their substance use recovery and mental health grants were being terminated. Democratic lawmakers criticized President Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the terminations after they came to light mid January.
The cuts targeted discretionary grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and included youth overdose prevention and medication-assisted treatment for substance use disorder, among other things.
The cuts were expected to reduce access to services for mental health and substance use disorder nationwide and threatened to make it harder for Republicans and Democrats to reach an agreement on legislation funding HHS in 2026, which includes money for SAMHSA. Funding runs out on Jan. 30 unless Congress acts.
“Kneecapping and defunding the fight against the opioid and mental health epidemics will not ‘Make America Healthy Again,’ it will put American lives on the line,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees HHS funding, in a statement.
Kennedy, who has talked about his own addiction to heroin and recovery, told Senate appropriators last May that HHS would continue to support “the most effective ways” of ending the opioid epidemic.
But he defended his efforts to fold SAMHSA into a new entity at his Department of Health and Human Services called the Administration for a Healthy America. That entity has yet to be formally created amid court challenges against it.
Some drug policy advocates said they saw the cuts as a signal that the administration is still eager to pursue that restructuring. SAMHSA has already lost roughly half of its staff over the last year to layoffs and resignations tied to Trump’s efforts to downsize the federal workforce. Recent data from the White House Office of Personnel Management showed that the agency now employs 547 people, down from 916 in 2024.
