The Trump team withdrew millions of dollars for addiction and mental health care
The Trump Administration Restructures the Health Agency: Cuts 20,000 Jobs in the Nation’s Health Service and Implications for NIH
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.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in the news release that the organization is being realigned with its core mission and priority in reversing the chronic disease epidemic. The Department will do more at a lower cost to the taxpayer.
The restructure has been praised by one of Kennedy’s allies in the Make America healthy again movement, writer and entrepreneur Calley Means.
The cuts are rattling staff at the health agencies, according to three current NIH employees who did not want to be identified because of fears of retribution.
People are tired. More than worried for their own livelihoods, people are scared for the future of the NIH One employee said that it had its science. “I’m hearing people express some tepid hope they’ll be spared, some resignation that they’ll likely be fired, and lots of people not even sure that NIH will be a hospitable place to be even if they survive the RIF Reduction in force.
The person said that the people will find out on Friday whether they’re losing their jobs or not. The employees of the institute are bracing for possible cuts if the director orders a reorganization of the institute.
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. Dawn O’Connell, former head of the office, toldNPR that 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 Aspen was elevated into an operating division under the Biden administration so it could respond quickly to emergencies.
Source: The Trump administration restructures federal health agencies, cuts 20,000 jobs
What Do We Have to Say about HHS Restructuring and the Workforce of the United States? The American Public Health Association Replys
“I don’t begrudge a new administration coming in to figure out whether we got it right. But this idea of wholesale losing the progress that we made and fought for is going to put them back,” she says.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, said in a statement that the HHS restructuring, paired with an $11 billion cut in funding to state and local health departments announced earlier this week, 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 morbidity and mortality of our population, increase health costs and undermine our economy.
The union representing many federal workers, the National Treasury Employees Union, issued a statement Thursday condemning the cuts and saying it will “fight back.”
The impact on public health services across the country will be devastating if this disastrous plan is carried out, said the NTEU president.
Have information you want to share about the ongoing changes across federal health agencies? You can reach out to Selena Simmons-Duffin, Pien Huang and Rob Stein with incomprehensible communications.
He said that little fiefdoms within HHS are so insulated and territorial that they’re actually hoarders of patient data and sell it to each other.
More than 100 communications offices, more than 40 IT departments, and dozens of procurement offices are part of the HHS. In many cases, they don’t even talk to each other.”
Over half of their employees don’t come to work, according to him. HHS did not respond to a question about teleworking arrangements for employees and whether they were on administrative leave or something else.
HHS states that the job cuts will save $1.8 billion. The agency currently has a budget of nearly $2 trillion, the majority of which pays for benefits for Americans covered by Medicaid and Medicare.
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 create a new Administration for a Healthy America to better coordinate chronic care and disease prevention programs. It will consolidate several existing agencies, with a focus on primary care, maternal and child health, mental health and HIV/AIDS.
The cuts include 3,500 full-time employees at the FDA, 2,400 at the CDC, 1,200 at NIH and 300 at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 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. Medicare will not be impacted by the reorganization.
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).
The budget framework created by Republicans is hard to imagine a scenario other than Medicaid being cut severely. “It’s a frightening prospect. It will be hard for families facing addiction.
State and county public health departments and non-profit groups are reeling after the Trump administration announced abrupt cancelation and revocation of roughly $11.4 billion in COVID-era funding for grants linked to addiction, mental health and other programs.
“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 trigger layoffs and treatment disruptions.
The federal grant funding had been scheduled to run through September 2025. The program should be halted immediately, according to a statement sent to NPR by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The statement said that the Trump administration will not waste billions of dollars responding to a non-existent epidemic that Americans have moved on from.
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 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 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 actively cutting funding aimed at reducing overdose deaths by clawing back money from states,” wrote Regina LaBelle, an expert on drug policy at Georgetown University who served in the Biden administration in a post on social media. Is the DOGE declaring victory with overdose deaths still over 80,000 each year?
The spokesman for Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine was vague about what they knew about the cuts.
“Senselessly ripping away this funding Congress provided will undermine our state’s ability to protect families from infectious diseases like measles and bird flu and to help people get the mental health care and substance use treatment they need,” said U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, in a statement.
She said the loss of $160 million in federal funds designated for use in her state could cost “more than 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.
As many as 60 programs in Colorado could be at risk because of $250 million of federal cuts, says a spokesman for the Behavioral Health Administration.
“We worry for the wellbeing of those who have come to rely on this support, as many of these programs and services are life-saving,” she stated in an email to Colorado Public Radio.
Tom Wolf: Opposing Trump’s Policies for Addiction Treatment in the U.S. Overdose Crisis: An Analysis of an Oakland Activist
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 was concerned about the pace of change and the risk that effective addiction treatment programs could be defunded at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are dying from overdoses in the U.S.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has cut 20,000 jobs in the Health and Human Services (HHS) department, as it restructures the department. The department includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other smaller divisions.