State and county public health departments and nonprofit groups are reeling after the Trump administration announced abrupt cancellation and revocation of roughly $11.4 billion in COVID-era funding for grants linked to addiction, mental health and other programs.
"This 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 trigger layoffs and treatment disruptions.
"Services will be dropped in the middle. Bang, the clinic is closing. It's a brutal way to make these cuts," Humphreys said.
The federal grant funding had been scheduled to run through September 2025. 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 COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago," the statement said, adding that the Trump administration will refocus funding on America's "chronic disease epidemic."
Drug overdoses linked to fentanyl and other substances have declined sharply in recent years, thanks in part to a surge in 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.
But his team has also rapidly slashed the number of federal researchers focused on addiction and Trump pardoned a tech mogul convicted of building a "dark web" platform used to traffic illicit drugs.
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.