The Trump administration’s cuts to federal addiction programs are striking a blow to the U.S. economy, not just public health, according to a report released Wednesday by the Addiction Science Defense Network. Alcohol and substance abuse drain over $740 billion a year in the U.S. alone.
Since January 2025, nearly two-thirds of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration staff have been eliminated, and over $588 million in addiction-related research grants were canceled at the National Institutes of Health, according to the report. The NIH has been the largest global source of funding for addiction science over the past 50 years.
“The administration has reset national priorities in ways that have dramatically weakened the systems used to track, understand, and respond to endemic psychoactive substance abuse,” the report says. “The precipitous changes … threaten the viability of a network that has proven to be a cost-effective response to one of the most serious health problems facing American society.”
The Trump administration has advocated for a “drug-free” America and launched a National Drug Control Strategy plan, but it’s mostly focused on “enhanc[ing] border security” and fighting “foreign terrorist threats.”
Trump wants drugs out of the country, so he’s cracking down on immigration. Then why cut addiction programs?
The Trump administration has advocated for a “drug-free” America and launched a National Drug Control Strategy plan earlier this week. The strategy claims it will focus on efforts to ensure “treatment for addiction to all types of drugs” and increase “the number of state and local recovery-ready workplace programs.” But it’s mostly focused on “enhanc[ing] border security” and fighting “foreign terrorist threats.”
“The administration doesn’t seem to be aware of the history of the war on drugs,” Tom Babor, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health Sciences, told HuffPost. Babor was one of the contributors to the ASDN report.
“These seizures at the border, or attempts to stop the supply from coming in, are very expensive and relatively ineffective because once the supply chain gets set up, even going after the high-level cartel leaders — assassinating them one by one — they have the capacity to rapidly regenerate because the supply chain is very flexible,” Babor said. “We spend a lot of money seizing supply on the street, which is easily replaced.”
Addiction science is a field that took over 50 years to build and has proven itself to be a cost-effective response to addiction. Tackling other elements, such as trying to prioritize blocking the border from cartels, is not helpful. The Trump administration has stated that the cuts to SAMHSA and its grants are to “better prioritize agency resources” toward addressing “the rising rates of mental illness and substance abuse conditions, overdose and suicide,” CBS News reported.
However, government funding of addiction science does yield economic benefits: Publicly funded research has proven to drive future economic growth and cuts down on negative social costs that happen from addiction, such as crime, the ASDN report argues. Numerically, the ASDN report estimates that NIDA and NIAAA grants that were terminated in early 2025 could now cost the economy over $87 million in lost economic activity.
Researchers say you can’t prioritize addiction treatment while eliminating the science behind it.
“We’re still having substance abuse crises in this country, and we need to figure out how to get better,” Diana Fishbein, the president and director of the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives, told HuffPost. Fishbein has spent the last 40 years on addiction-related research, largely funded by the NIH. “Treatment, harm reduction and prevention are all based on the research.”
Instead, these federal funds are being directed to theories like “the link between autism and vaccinations or Tylenol,” Fishbein added. “I mean, it could go down pathways that have absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever.”
HuffPost reached out to the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, neither of which responded before this story was published.
Fifty years of research — gone.
Since the 1960s, the federal government has supported scientific research on medical and social problems associated with substance abuse, which has ensured that all treatment, prevention and harm reduction policies are shaped by scientific evidence.
This research has saved a lot of lives. According to a 2020 report from the Office of the Surgeon General, “there are now more former cigarette smokers than current cigarette smokers in the United States,” a shift attributed to “evidence-based treatments” developed through addiction research, including individual, group and telephone counseling. This research has also helped develop programs to educate and dissuade young people from substance use; create medications to help people reduce substance use; and build public health policies to help reduce crime, suicide and overdoses.
But the elimination of thousands of NIH grants and the layoffs of thousands of scientific and technical staff over the past year have interrupted years of research and studies, according to the ASDN report. Substance abuse disorders remain at historic highs, and while overall overdose deaths declined in 2025, experts warn that progress could be at risk, the American Medical Association reported in January.
“It doesn’t really serve our scientific community very well when they’re under threat of defunding,” Robert Vincent, a former associate administrator for SAMHSA’s alcohol prevention and treatment policy, told HuffPost. Vincent also contributed to the ASDN report. “The data in the end tells us what’s working and what’s not working, and that is really reliant on scientific integrity, and there’s been a lot of interference, especially in the last year.”
The damage from all the financial and job cuts is permanent, according to Vincent.
In terms of long-term longitudinal studies that were in the process when the cuts and terminations happened, “you’ve lost that data,” Fishbein said.
“You can’t have a one- or two-year hold in that data and still get out of it what you want,” she said.
“What the administration has been doing is more than tinkering with the way that data is collected to monitor the emerging epidemics and changes in the patterns of substance use,” Babor said. “They’re going into the data systems of national samples that have been on for 20 or 30 years, and taking them offline.”
The U.S. is in ‘a really dire situation.’
Part of the reason the ASDN study was published is to emphasize to the average American that “this is a really dire situation,” Fishbein said.
Babor anticipates that the U.S. may repeat mistakes it made in the past, before a lot of the addiction research was conducted. He pointed to when the pharmaceutical industry was looking for a new idea for pain medications, and “based on flimsy scientific evidence,” Babor said, opioids were introduced and promoted for chronic pain. This led to opioid use disorder, which killed approximately 806,000 people from 1999 to 2023.
“We had a huge epidemic, which continues, of opioid overdoses. It took 25 years to put that system in place, and we’re beginning to take it apart,” Babor said. “You can see where this could go if you don’t have the surveillance techniques and research in place, and appropriate medications, as well as treatment. ”
Without the research infrastructure to detect and respond to emerging drug trends, experts warn that the U.S. now has no early warning system for the next crisis.
