Mental health organizations have expressed concern that staffing cuts at HHS and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration could upend progress made on mental health challenges.
In March, HHS announced plans to layoff 10,000 employees and eventually cut the agency’s staff from 82,000 to 62,000. The department also plans to restructure many of its agencies. Under the proposed restructuring, SAMHSA would be eliminated as a standalone agency and folded into the new Administration for a Healthy America.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said up to 20% of HHS layoffs may be reversed.
Here are five things to know about how shakeups at HHS could affect mental health and substance use services:
- SAMHSA is one of five agencies being consolidated into the new Administration for a Healthy America. The other agencies being consolidated are the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
- Transferring SAMHSA to the Administration for a Healthy America will “break down artificial divisions between similar programs,” according to a March 27 news release from HHS.
- In an April 2 statement, the National Alliance on Mental Illness and 11 other mental health organizations said the layoffs at HHS raise questions about how “vital, lifesaving” work” on mental health and substance use conditions at SAMHSA, CDC and the NIH.
“Unfortunately, the immediate reduction in force means these agencies will lose staff with years of experience and expertise, and the pathway for the transition of their knowledge and the critical services they operate is unclear. This has the potential to jeopardize years of work and recent progress, like reducing overdose deaths,” the groups wrote. - SAMHSA has already lost around 10% of its staff, according to The New York Times. In February, the Trump administration ordered all federal employees in their probationary period, usually those in their first year on the job, to be fired. All of SAMHSA’s staff in regions 4 and 5, which oversee parts of the Midwest and South, were terminated, according to the Times.
- The entire staff of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual survey monitoring mental health and substance use disorders, were laid off as part of cuts at HHS, The Hill reported April 2. The survey is the “single, historic measure” of substance use behaviors in the U.S., Thomas McLellan, PhD, an emeritus professor at the Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia and a scientific adviser to addiction medicine advocacy group Shatterproof, said in an April 4 statement.
