The Trump administration told mental health and addiction service organizations late Tuesday night that it would cut nearly $2 billion in funding, axing grants nationwide from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The following night, the administration said it was reversing the decision, according to national media reports from Washington, D.C., and some congressional representatives.
The proposed cuts sent shock waves through Washington state, with some organizations saying they would immediately have to suspend services for people with mental illness and substance use disorders.
SAMHSA supplies grants to hundreds of organizations across the state — from large state and county agencies, such as Health Care Authority and King County Public Health, to private local and rural facilities. Funding cuts would have meant the abrupt end of programs for youth suicide prevention, addiction recovery services and peer support programs — services that directly help people who are struggling.
According to a data dashboard on the SAMHSA website, Washington organizations received about $197 million in SAMHSA funding in 2025. Since 2014, Washington has received $1.6 billion in funding from the agency — including $613 million in mental health funding and $1 billion in substance use treatment funding. A full accounting of specific threatened cuts or affected organizations in Washington wasn't available Wednesday.
In letters emailed Tuesday to organizations that were threatened with losing funding, Christopher Carroll, the head of SAMHSA, said the agency's current priorities included focusing agency resources on promoting innovative programs and interventions that address the rising rates of mental illness and substance abuse conditions, overdose, and suicide and their connection to chronic diseases, homelessness, and other challenges our Nation's communities face." The letter stated it would be terminating some grant awards to "better prioritize agency resources toward the above-mentioned priorities."
SAMHSA did not immediately return requests for comment about the cuts, estimated to total $1.9 billion nationwide.
On Wednesday night, the administration was said to be reversing the cuts: The New York Times reported that an administration official said the money was being restored but didn't say why. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., told Roll Call there had been an "intervention at the White House" and "it might be a one-day issue," while Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., issued a statement saying Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had "bowed to public pressure" and reinstated funding.
Local and national political and health leaders during the day on Wednesday slammed the Trump administration's apparently short-lived decision to cut services.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said the cuts contradicted Trump's claims that he wants to combat the drug and mental health crises in the United States.
"So much for Make America Healthy Again and saving Americans from addiction and suicide," Murray said in a statement. "This decision is going to mean real people in Washington state and every part of the country do not get the care and treatment they are counting on — and that could save their life."
Abigail Echo-Hawk, the executive vice president of the Seattle Indian Health Board and director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, said SAMHSA told the agency it was cutting $400,000 in funds toward the organization's suicide prevention program for Native youth. That's more than half the budget of that program, she said.
The impacts would have been devastating, Echo-Hawk said, and SAMHSA's stated reasons for cutting the program don't track with the results.
American Indian and Alaska Natives have the highest rates of youth suicide of any group in the nation, she said. The only thing that has been successful in bringing those rates down is culturally based interventions.
"Nothing else has worked in our communities," Echo-Hawk said. "And so to say that we are not doing it in an innovative way and that we aren't using evidence-based practices is just a lie. The administration is lying in order to justify their actions, which, as a result, we will see Native youth continue to die at these high rates and continue to not receive the services they need."
The Seattle Indian Health Board's youth suicide prevention services included giving gun safes to families with firearms, to keep youth from accessing them. The agency wouldn't be able to do that without the funding, Echo-Hawk said. They were also considering canceling a large annual gathering of Native youth next month, focused on suicide prevention.
Echo-Hawk said Wednesday, before news of the reversal, that the Seattle Indian Health Board was hoping to move people who worked in youth suicide prevention to other roles, so they wouldn't have to lay people off.
A Yakima-based youth drug prevention organization, Safe Yakima Valley, was told about one-third of its funding would be cut.
Executive Director Alicia Stromme Tobin said the organization was blindsided, especially after successfully fighting last year to keep funding for prevention programs.
Around 7 p.m. Tuesday, she received a call from a colleague alerting her to a termination letter that said they would lose funding at midnight. More than $400,000 was to be cut across two programs, both for youth drug prevention and treatment services.
Stromme Tobin said two staff positions, a third of the organization's workforce, would need to be eliminated if the cuts went through. The agency's school programs, which include youth mentorship and clubs, would have been cut back, if not eliminated. Safe Yakima Valley also helped coordinate a map that tracks overdoses in the community — tracking deaths and recoveries. That work would need to be scaled back, Stromme Tobin said.
She said she doesn't disagree with preventionists who talk about cutting off the supply of drugs fueling the fentanyl crisis. But solving the problem is not one-sided.
"This administration is so focused on the supply side, they're ignoring the demand side, which is prevention work," she said. "If you poll people in treatment, 95% will tell you they started their substance use on alcohol, tobacco or marijuana. Addiction is an adolescent disease."
The Washington Council for Behavioral Health, a professional association that represents behavioral health agencies across the state, said it had heard from providers in Southwest, Central and Eastern Washington who were notified of funding cuts.
"Some of these grants funded services for behavioral health treatment for people experiencing homelessness, either in shelters or out in the community; others funded recovery supports for youth and their families," said CEO Joan Miller in a written statement. "The effects of losing this funding, especially overnight and without warning, could be devastating to Medicaid providers already operating on very thin margins and will make it harder for them to provide treatment to those who need it most."
Providers said the threatened reductions would have taken away important prevention services that could save lives and money down the line.
"I assure you, what's going to happen without prevention is that substance use disorder rates among youth are going to skyrocket," Stromme Tobin said.
Echo-Hawk said the threatened cuts would have had widespread economic and health impacts beyond the groups that have lost funding — more people will end up in emergency rooms if services are cut for people considering suicide or who are in a mental health crisis.
"By eliminating these kinds of programs, they're actually increasing the overall cost that is going to land on the backs of the American taxpayer," she said.
As a Native youth who first attempted suicide at age 9, Echo-Hawk said the only things that helped her were programs integrating culture, community and spirituality.
"None of the other traditional Western services worked for me," she said. "As somebody who utilized and was affected by programs like this, as a Native youth and one at high risk of dying, I'm both furious and also going to do whatever it takes to ensure the safety of our community. Regardless of what cuts happen, we're going to rely on our community to donate, stand with us and ensure that our youth, particularly those at risk of suicide, are getting the resources and services they need.
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