AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Trump administration sent shock waves through the country's mental health and addiction response system today. A key federal agency abruptly canceled federal grants that public health experts say amount to about $2 billion. This money supported front-line responders and health programs nationwide. NPR addiction correspondent Brian Mann broke this story and joins us now. Hi, Brian.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, so let's start at the beginning. How did you even learn about these cuts?
MANN: Yeah. Last night, I started getting texts and emails from sources who work on the front lines helping people in severe addiction or with mental health illness. They'd started receiving these termination letters, which are effective immediately, and they came out of the blue. And these people were just voicing devastation. I spoke with Ryan Hampton. He runs one program educating people about how to save lives after a drug overdose. His group was stripped permanently overnight, he says, of roughly half a million dollars in grant funding.
RYAN HAMPTON: We're going to have to scale back and cancel a lot of our overdose prevention work that we do in the state of Nevada and across the country. It's catastrophic for us.
MANN: And again, Ailsa, it's not just addiction. Mental health groups that support people in independent living and do wellness checks, they're also being cut. The U.S. operates with kind of a crazy quilt of nonprofit groups and local agencies grappling with all of these really difficult social challenges. And now I'm hearing from group after group, people saying their budgets have just been blown up. The National Association of County Behavioral Health and Developmental Disability Directors sent a letter to members saying they believe over 2,000 grants nationwide, totaling more than $2 billion in federal funds, are affected. And that $2 billion estimate matches what I'm hearing from other sources.
CHANG: Wow. Well, has the Trump administration explained why it even is making these cuts?
MANN: The agency that sent these letters is the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, known as SAMHSA. They're part of the Department of Health and Human Services. We've reached out through multiple channels, asking for clarification or details from them, asking why this happened without advance notice. And we've had no answer. NPR has been able to review some of these termination letters, and they all say pretty much the same thing. They say the Trump administration wants to focus on, and I'm quoting here, "promoting innovative programs and interventions that address the rising rates of mental illness and substance abuse." They say the programs being defunded are not in alignment with the Trump administration's agenda.
CHANG: Not in alignment. What does that even mean?
MANN: Yeah, in executive orders, President Trump has been making the case that the U.S. needs a new approach to helping people. One example, he wants to scrap support for programs that focus on housing first. That means getting people off the streets into safe housing, even if they're not yet ready to quit using alcohol or drugs. The Trump administration is also pivoting away from programs that focus on harm reduction, things like clean needle exchanges and wound treatment programs that help people avoid the worst health outcomes of drug use.
Administration officials have spoken repeatedly about focusing on this kind of treatment and recovery first. But people I've been talking to today say the administration is defunding the old safety net without building this new one first. Andrew Kessler is a consultant who works with mental health and addiction groups nationwide. He thinks a lot of people who are really sick are going to lose help.
ANDREW KESSLER: These are boots on the ground services that people rely on for behavioral health care. These are sometimes, quite often, really acute conditions. People need help right away. And if you say, come back once we get this sorted out, odds are pretty high that that person is not coming back.
MANN: Again, we've asked the Trump administration for comment on these concerns with no response. Programs all over the country scrambling now just to keep their doors open. And I want to say, Ailsa, people I've been talking to say many of these programs have been saving lives, one program that distributed free naloxone that helped people reverse fentanyl overdoses. Now those programs are going away.
CHANG: That is NPR's Brian Mann. Thank you so much, Brian.
MANN: Thanks, Ailsa.
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