Hhs Terminates Thousands Of Grants For Substance Use, Mental Health Worth Billions

The Trump administration has notified thousands of organizations across the country that their substance use recovery and mental health grants are terminated as of Jan. 13, according to five sources with knowledge of the matter.

The cuts impact discretionary grants, which come from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, according to one congressional aide and one lobbyist who were granted anonymity to speak candidly on the matter.

They include grants for recovery from opioid use disorder and for drug courts, among others.

About 2,800 grants are estimated to have been terminated through notices that grantees started receiving on Tuesday, amounting to some $1.9 billion.

Why it matters: The cuts are expected to reduce access to services for mental health and substance use disorder nationwide.

“This is a developing situation, and we are still confirming which programs and communities are affected,” said Libby Jones, associate vice president of the Overdose Prevention Initiative at the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, an advocacy group funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, among others. “But one thing is already clear: sudden cancellations of lifesaving services will cause immediate harm,” she added.

The cuts also make it harder for Republicans and Democrats to reach an agreement on the bill funding HHS in 2026, which includes money for SAMHSA, according to the congressional aide. Funding runs out on Jan. 30 unless Congress acts.

HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In termination notices sent to grantees, signed by Christopher D. Carroll, principal deputy assistant secretary at SAMHSA, the agency wrote that it’s “adjusting its discretionary award portfolio, which includes terminating some of its awards, in order to better prioritize agency resources.”

SAMHSA’s priorities “include focusing agency resources on promoting innovative programs and interventions that address the rising rates of mental illness and substance abuse conditions, overdose, and suicide and their connections to chronic diseases, homelessness, and other challenges our Nation’s communities face,” say the notices seen by POLITICO.

The agency is seeking “innovations in grant making — developing grants tailored to states and communities that provide services and supports to effect immediate and positive health changes in the people and communities we serve; and to measure our success,” according to the notices.

Block grants, which SAMHSA awards to states and territories for behavioral health services, were not cut.

The terminations come amid plummeting overdose rates and about six weeks after President Donald Trump signed the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Reauthorization Act, which reauthorized billions of dollars in funding for states and tribes to combat the opioid crisis.

This included funds for the affected SAMHSA grants, said Andrew Kessler, who leads Slingshot Solutions, a consulting firm that works with mental health and addiction recovery groups.

“If these programs were so abhorrent to the White House it makes one wonder why the president signed that legislation,” Kessler told POLITICO.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Democratic lawmakers criticized Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the terminations, saying they threaten American lives.

“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 in the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees HHS funding, in a statement.

Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement that “this administration’s claims about taking on the opioid crisis couldn’t be more hollow”.

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 HHS, called the Administration for a Healthy America. That entity has yet to be formally created amid court challenges against it.

Some drug policy advocates see the cuts as a signal that the administration is adamant about that restructuring.

“By going forward with these impoundments at this time, the Trump administration is making very clear that they are going to proceed with their restructuring, and they're going to continue making these cuts to life-saving services despite the fact that we're in the middle of an appropriations process,” said Hanna Sharif-Kazemi, a policy manager in the office of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, a group that advocates for drug legalization.

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 employs547 people, down from 916 in 2024.