Every day, Dora Dantzler-Wright and her colleagues distribute overdose inversion drugs on the streets of Chicago. They hold training sessions on the use of them and help people recovering from drug addiction and alcohol to return to work and families.
They work closely with the Federal Government through an agency that monitors their productivity, connects them with other similar groups and distributes critical funds that continue their work.
But in the last few weeks, the calls and and -mail of Mrs. Wright in Washington have remained unanswered. The federal consultants of the local office of the Agency – who supervise his group, the coalition of the Chicago recovery communities, as well as dependence programs in six midwest states and 34 tribes – have disappeared.
“We continue to do the job without any update of the Federals,” said Mrs. Wright. “But we were lost.”
By the end of this week, the agency staff, the administration of substances and mental health abuse services, could be cut by 50 %, according to the members of the senior staff of the Agency and the congress assistants who participated in briefing by Trump officials.
With just under 900 employees and a $ 7.2 billion budget for great state grants and individual non-profit organizations that face dependence and mental illness, Samhsa (pronounced Sam-Sah) is relatively small. But he faces two of the most urgent health problems of the nation and generally had bipartisan support.
The Agency’s wide mandate includes supervision 988, the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which puts millions of calls through state offices; Adjust the outpatient clinics that dispense drugs for the treatment of opioids such as methadone; direct funds to the drug courts (also called “treatment courts”); and produce annual surveys at national level on the use of substances and on mental health problems.
It provides training and resources for the best practices for hundreds of non -profit organizations and state agencies and helps to establish centers that provide prevention of opiate addiction, treatment and social services. It is also a federal guard dog that closely monitors the shopping of subsidies financed by taxpayers for mental health and dependence.
Both President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Federal Health, whose portfolio includes Samhsa, have been explicit on facing the country’s drug crises. Trump invoked the victims of overdose as a logic for imposing rates on Canada, Mexico and China. Kennedy has often discussed her continuous recovery from heroin addiction. During his presidential campaign, he produced a documentary on the impact of dependence in the United States which also explored several treatment options.
While the rates of US fatal accidents remain high, they are falling consistently since 2023. Many drug experts say that Samhsa is the most directly responsible federal agency.
“Cut Samhsa employees without understanding the impact is extremely dangerous, given the behavioral health crises that have a corner of our nation”, wrote the representatives Paul D. Tonko of New York and Andrea Salinas of Oregon in a letter to Mr. Kennedy, signed by 57 members of the democratic chamber.
Personnel reductions, they supported, could lead to an increase in recurrence rates, a tension on the health system and the scarce health results overall.
To the question about the suspended cuts, a spokesman for Samhsa replied: “The important collaboration facilitated by the regional offices of Samhsa Continua, regardless of the changes of the staff and the staff of Samhsa is diligently sensitive to the partners of the nation”.
Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was reducing its number of regional offices, that the domestic agencies that include Samhsa, from 10 to four.
The proposals to reduce the size of the staff in the government departments are due on Thursday. In the last month, Samhsa’s staff has been reduced by about 10 percent through layoffs of workers in their trial period, a designation that included people recently promoted to new positions. Last weekend, the agency employees and other staff members supervised by Mr. Kennedy received and -mail offering $ 25,000 to those who left their job by this Friday, characterized by “voluntary separation”.
In the interviews, a dozen current employees and former Samhsa, including managers, said that the threat represented by layoffs and political shifts is starting to be warned on sites around the world, from the heart of the troubled neighborhoods of cities to rural outposts. Some more recent Samhsa projects just in progress are in danger, as one to map Chicago’s housing projects to better distribute the Naloxone drug for overdose life -saving, and others to establish systems to quickly transmit the suicide intervention calls to the field response teams.
They said that it was unlikely that funding for centers focused on the treatment of mental health or disorders from the use of substances of specific populations, such as black and LGBTQ communities, would have been authorized.
Regina Labelle, former interim director of the National Drug Control Policy during the Biden administration, defined the staff “short -sighted”.
“It could reduce the numbers, but also reduces supervision and responsibility,” he said, hindering the agency’s ability to monitor subsidy funds and raise behavioral health data.
During the Biden Administration, the agency’s budget and staff have grown substantially, a development that mental health and dependence experts described as an attempt to compensate for persistent subsidies. In 2019, just before the start of the pandemic, Samhsa had about 490 full -time staff members and a budget of about $ 5.5 billion. According to the centers for the control and prevention of diseases, that year there were 70,630 deaths for overdose.
In March 2020, the pandemic was knocked down. Over the next three years, the annual victims of overdose have risen to over 100,000. Mental health problems have increased, including suicide deaths. Samhsa’s budget increases had bipartisan support.
Now it has spread that the Trump administration can bend Samhsa in another health agency or the number of return staff and grant funds at the 2019 levels, even if the deceased rates per overdose remain significantly higher than in 2019. According to the latest CDC update, between September 2023 and September 2024, about 87,000 people died of drug overdose.