The Trump team has axed funding for addiction and mental health care
The Trump Administration Restructures the National Institutes of Health, Cuts 20,000 Jobs, and What Are They Meanting for the Public Health Sector?
“While public health declines, a few isolated divisions are neglecting public health altogether and seem only accountable to the industries that they’re supposed to be regulating,” he said, without naming the divisions or industries he was referencing.
Occasionally reorganizations of HHS are good for the organization. But, this is also about big staff and program reductions,” Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan health research organization KFF wrote on social media.
And one of Kennedy’s allies in the Make America Healthy Again movement, writer and entrepreneur Calley Means, wrote an X post praising the restructure: “The insane spending and staffing in healthcare is actually the cause of our bad health outcomes.”
Three current National Institute of Health employees who do not want to be identified because of fears of repercussions, said the cuts are scaring staff at the agencies.
Jeremy Berg was the Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011, and said it was impossible for him to believe that cuts would not affect functions negatively. This represents an assault on the ability of the National Institutes of Health.
There will be a public meeting on Friday where people will find out if they are losing their jobs. If the new director of the National Institute of Health orders a reorganization, the employees of the institute are bracing for more cuts.
The restructure also moves the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response — which handles medical responses to natural disasters and public health emergencies — from reporting directly to the Health Secretary to being housed under CDC. O’Connell said the move could limit its scope. “It’s curious to me that they would put us into CDC at a time when they want CDC to focus on infectious disease work.”
O’Connell says that under the Biden administration, an operating division was created to respond more quickly to emergencies.
Source: The Trump administration restructures federal health agencies, cuts 20,000 jobs
The HHS Restructuring: What do we really want to see from the U.S. Department of Health? A representative of the National Treasury Employees Union and the American Public Health Association
I’m notgrudge the new administration trying to figure out if we got it right. She says that the idea of losing the progress that we have made will put them back.
The American Public Health Association says that the HHS restructuring, with an $11billion cut in funding to state and local health departments, runs counter to the goal of improving health in the U.S.
“This is a nonsensical rearrangement of the agencies under their charge and an excuse to devastate the workforce for financial reasons,” said Benjamin. “It will increase the morbidity and mortality of our population, increase health costs and undermine our economy.”
The National Treasury Employees Union said in a statement that they will fight back after condemning the cuts.
The impact on public health services will be devastating if the plan is carried out, says the NTEU president.
Do you know of information you would like to give about the changes in federal health agencies? Reach out to these authors via encrypted communications: Selena Simmons-Duffin @selena.02, Pien Huang @pienhuang.88 and Rob Stein @robstein.22.
He described little fiefdoms that were so insulated and territorial that they were able to collect and sell patient medical data for profit to each other.
More than 100 communications offices are located in the HHS and there are more than 40 IT departments and dozens of procurement offices. In many cases, they don’t even talk to each other.”
“When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don’t even come to work,” he said. (HHS did not immediately respond to a question about whether the employees were in approved teleworking arrangements, placed on administrative leave or something else.)
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is also being merged into a new organization, called the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), as part of a restructuring of HHS that’s expected to eliminate 20,000 federal employees.
HHS is the umbrella agency that includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other smaller divisions.
The restructuring will include the creation of a new Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), which is intended to “more efficiently coordinate chronic care and disease prevention programs.” It will concentrate on primary care, maternal and child health, mental health and HIV/AIDS.
There are more than 3000 employees who have been cut at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the CDC and the FDA according to an HHS fact sheet. It states that the new job cuts at the FDA will not affect drug, medical device or food reviewers or inspectors. The reorganization will not impact Medicare or Medicaid.
These cuts align with President Trump’s vision of drastically reducing the size and scope of the federal government — an effort that has been led so far by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Addiction experts told NPR they are now bracing for what many believe will be deep cuts to Medicaid funding, which provides the largest single source of insurance coverage for drug and alcohol treatment nationwide.
In a statement to NPR, HHS officials downplayed the effects of the cuts and said some of the grant programs that have been withdrawn are related to the flu.
“This is is chopping things off in the middle while people are actually doing the work,” said Keith Humphreys, an addiction policy researcher at Stanford University, who also volunteers doing harm reduction work with people in addiction. He warned the move could lead to layoffs and treatment disruptions.
The grant funding was scheduled to end in September. In a statement sent to NPR, a spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it made sense to freeze the program immediately.
The statement said that the Trump Administration will re-focus funding on America’s chronic disease epidemic after noting that the COVID-19 epidemic was over and that HHS no longer would waste money responding to a non-existent epidemic.
Drug overdoses are down thanks to a surge of funding for addiction treatment during the Biden administration. But street drugs still kill more than 84,000 people in the U.S. every year, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
President Donald Trump has made fentanyl smuggling a top concern during the opening weeks of his administration, extending an emergency declaration linked to the powerful street opioid.
A tech mogul convicted of building a dark web platform used to traffic drugs was granted a pardon by Trump and his team slashed the number of researchers focused on addiction.
The move to rescind funds that include addiction-care grants drew criticism from experts who warned progress reducing overdose deaths could be reversed.
“DOGE is now clawing back money from states that are funding overdose death reduction programs in order to cut down on the number of fatal overdoses,” said an expert on drug policy at Georgetown University who worked in the Biden administration. “With overdose deaths still above 80,000 yearly, is it time for DOGE to claim victory?”
The spokesman for Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine said they are waiting to hear more about the cuts.
“We need to protect families from infectious diseases like measles and bird flu, and help people get the mental health care and substance use treatment that they need if we’re going to keep our economy thriving,” said Senator Murray.
She claimed that the loss of federal funds in her state could cost 200 jobs in public and non-profit health organizations.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said her state would lose roughly $300 million in funding, much of it earmarked for county health departments in rural areas.
A spokesperson for Colorado’s Behavioral Health Administration said $250 million in federal cuts to her state would affect as many as 60 programs and could put patient at risk.
“In so many cases these are life-saving programs and services, and we worry for their wellbeing when they rely on this support,” wrote her in an email to Colorado Public Radio.
Tom Wolf on the pace of change: What is needed to save lives in the U.S. opioid crisis? A rebuttal to Wolf
Tom Wolf, an addiction activist in San Francisco who has been critical of Democratic approaches to address the overdose crisis, said he remains broadly supportive of Trump’s policy ideas.
He expressed concern that the pace of change could jeopardize effective addiction treatment programs, which are still needed to save lives in the U.S.