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Trump's War on Mental Health
With all of the blinding detail in the 1,116-page “Big Beautiful Bill” and the attention to the legislative jousting between the House and Senate, it’s too easy to lose sight of the devastating budget cuts in the bill. The major ones, such as Medicaid and food stamps, have gotten a lot of notice, but many more have received too little attention.
One is mental health.
A notable achievement of the Biden years, thanks to smart public policy, has been a sharp reduction in drug overdose deaths. You would think this would be of interest to Trump, since he used fentanyl smuggling and related deaths as his excuse to punish Canada (a trivial source of fentanyl) with high tariffs.
As of the end of the Biden administration, there was a large amount of money provided to the states via the Mental Health Block Grant and the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant. According to Al Guida, longtime behavioral health policy strategist, on a recent episode of the No Notes podcast, when Biden left office about $1.3 billion in unspent funds was still available to the states, which had until September 30 to spend that money. But the Trump administration terminated all those resources on March 24. The proposed budget would eliminate 42 more programs.
On May 14, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reported that, in 2024, there were 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the U.S.—down 27 percent from 110,037 in 2023. The number of annual drug overdose deaths is now projected to hit the lowest level since 2019, according to the CDC.
One is mental health.
A notable achievement of the Biden years, thanks to smart public policy, has been a sharp reduction in drug overdose deaths. You would think this would be of interest to Trump, since he used fentanyl smuggling and related deaths as his excuse to punish Canada (a trivial source of fentanyl) with high tariffs.
As of the end of the Biden administration, there was a large amount of money provided to the states via the Mental Health Block Grant and the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant. According to Al Guida, longtime behavioral health policy strategist, on a recent episode of the No Notes podcast, when Biden left office about $1.3 billion in unspent funds was still available to the states, which had until September 30 to spend that money. But the Trump administration terminated all those resources on March 24. The proposed budget would eliminate 42 more programs.
On May 14, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reported that, in 2024, there were 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the U.S.—down 27 percent from 110,037 in 2023. The number of annual drug overdose deaths is now projected to hit the lowest level since 2019, according to the CDC.
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-06-02-trumps-war-on-mental-health/