Trump fulfills threat, begins federal government layoffs
President Donald Trump’s administration made good on a threat to fire thousands of federal workers, with agencies sending “reduction in force” notifications heading into the weekend.
- The Trump administration has significantly cut funding for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA).
- Disability Rights Wisconsin, a watchdog group that investigates abuse and neglect of disabled individuals, sees its work threatened by the cuts.
- Federal funding for other Wisconsin initiatives, including mental health in schools and crisis services for people struggling with addiction, is also on uncertain ground.
After 25-year-old Brandon Johnson died while in custody at Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex in 2012, his family relied on Disability Rights Wisconsin for justice.
Johnson’s death was one of six in 2012 at the mental health institution. Disability Rights Wisconsin hired an independent doctor who found that care at the facility was so poor it should be closed. The nonprofit advocacy group later helped plan how best to transfer residents to other programs when the troubled institution shuttered its long-term care units.
Now, the group — federally mandated to act as a watchdog for the state on behalf of disabled youths and adults — could lose much of its funding. And the federal office that oversees the group and similar programs in 57 states and territories, called Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness, has been reduced to a single employee.
The cuts are part of the Trump administration’s overall gutting of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services administration, known as SAMHSA — the federal agency focused on mental health and addiction treatment.
Formed in 1992 during Republican President George H. W. Bush’s term, SAMHSA is tasked with making progress in the treatment of addiction and mental illness. Its budget in 2024 was about $7.5 billion.
So far this year, under the guidance of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency has terminated more than $1.7 billion in grants to state health departments. It also cut $350 million from addiction and overdose-prevention funding and $588 million in drug-related research. Its staff went from 900 people at the beginning of the year to less than half that as of early November.
An additional $1 billion in SAMHSA programs would be cut under the proposed spending bill for 2026.
The cuts threaten to erase three decades of advances to improve mental health and addiction, experts and former SAMHSA employees say. And it comes at a time when drug overdoses and severe mental illness continue to overwhelm clinics and hospitals.
Wisconsin has felt the effects in rural schools, where growing access to mental health treatment may be stymied as federal funding runs dry; in the shuttering of crisis services across the state; and in the destabilization of Disability Rights Wisconsin.
The Trump administration did not respond to questions from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In previous responses, then-Health and Human Services press secretary Vianca Rodriguez Feliciano told the news organization in an email the cuts are necessary to “streamline operations, enhance responsiveness to the American people, and ultimately improve the nation’s health as part of the Make America Healthy Again initiative.”
Feliciano offered no specifics on how the cuts would improve the nation’s health.
A diminished watchdog group
Disability Rights Wisconsin is a private, nonprofit organization, but it’s been designated as Wisconsin’s protection and advocacy group for individuals with disabilities. That means it gets special access to prisons and mental health institutions — and also has meant that it gets $1 million per year from SAMHSA for its nine legal advocacy programs, as well as support from the federal agency’s watchdog team.
SAMHSA funds allow staff to investigate neglect and abuse taking place in institutional settings, whether restraints and seclusion are being overused, and whether deaths within these facilities are the result of medical neglect. The group also advises people on their rights and works to return people to their communities and lives when possible.
Now, SAMHSA’s Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness program is expected to lose more than 60% of its budget in 2026 if President Donald Trump’s spending bill holds.
The team has gone from five program officers to a lone program officer tasked with not only managing grants across 57 states and territories, but also ensuring programs are running effectively across every state Disability Rights agency.
Without robust funding and support, Executive Director Jill Jacklitz said, it will be more difficult for Disability Rights Wisconsin to challenge a child getting expelled from school for behavioral health issues, or go into correctional facilities to investigate whether medications are being distributed to people, or get a person stuck at Winnebago Mental Health Institution the resources they need to get home.
“The work is congressionally mandated, but without the staffing and funding infrastructure, how are we going to continue to do that?” Jacklitz said. “How are we going to make sure that people are safe and their rights are protected?”
Federal funding has injected mental health experts in Wisconsin’s highest-need school districts
The layoffs and cuts at SAMHSA have hollowed out some of the federal agency’s oldest programs, including grants for Children’s Mental Health Initiative and Project AWARE, the latter of which was created in the wake of the Columbine shooting and rebranded after Sandy Hook.
Through those programs, Wisconsin schools have received about $35 million for mental health programs since 2014. The funds have given hundreds of rural students access to counseling and even free family therapy sessions.
Districts like Crandon and Wabeno in Forest County have been the focus of Wisconsin’s latest five-year grant through Project AWARE, said Jessica Frain, project director for Wisconsin’s local arm. Forest County was selected because it ranks 71 out of 72 in terms of health outcomes and access to resources.
The $9 million project, which runs through 2028, has put four additional mental health professionals to work in schools in the two districts. And it’s helped train a quarter of Wisconsin’s school districts on the mental health needs of young people.
Frain and her team have seen progress — and promise for the future. But she said it looks more and more unlikely that Project AWARE will continue long-term.
Wisconsin’s arm won’t have to apply for full renewal until 2028. In a multi-year grant like this one, Frain said, it was pretty much a given grantees would get the same amount of funds each grant year, so long as they kept SAMHSA up to date on its achievements. Applying was almost procedural. Now, there’s less of a guarantee the project will receive the same amount each year.
Frain said she’s also concerned that language related to social-emotional learning, an important process to help children regulate emotions and build positive relationships, may get flagged by the U.S. Department of Education as an agenda-driven ideology that could result in them losing funding entirely.
And even the money Project AWARE has already received isn’t guaranteed to stick around. It used to be that so long as you provided a strong rationale for why you didn’t use all the grant dollars, funds would carry over to the next year. Now, if the agency doesn’t use its total funding in a year, it’s gone, Frain said.
“That shakes up the programming that we’re setting up,” she said.
Frain also said that she hasn’t seen any openings for future Project AWARE grants, which normally would be opening around this time of year.
Other Wisconsin efforts on shaky ground as federal adjustments continue
In Wisconsin, federal funding cuts have already stymied suicide and crisis prevention work.
In late March, Uplift Wisconsin, the state’s mental health helpline, went dark. Parachute House, Milwaukee County’s only respite home for people struggling through addiction and mental health symptoms, closed briefly and now faces an uncertain future.
Wisconsin had begun reversing record-high years of overdose deaths and, as of January, was predicted to see a decrease in deaths of more than 35% by the end of the year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now, programs that distribute overdose-reversing kits and train first responders in how to administer naloxone are slated to lose $56 million in annual grant funding under the federal spending bill.
It’s unclear how operations at the 988 Wisconsin Lifeline, and the national hotline, will be affected by a diminished SAMHSA. The Wisconsin Lifeline has responded to more than 200,000 calls since July 2022.
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Paolo del Vecchio left SAMHSA in February after working for the agency for more than 30 years. He didn’t like the direction things were going, especially when at-risk populations such as LGBTQ+ youth and other marginalized groups were being denied services.
Del Vecchio watched with increasing horror as layoffs struck the federal agency, erasing decades of expertise.
The Center for Mental Health Services, an office he previously directed, had grown from 125 to 200 staff members as demand during the pandemic skyrocketed. After this year’s mass layoffs, it had a staff of 61.
The federal staff know what they’re doing; they have decades of expertise, as well as a wide breadth of knowledge — they can advise on a local program because they have it down to a science after helping hundreds of communities year after year do the same thing. They’re also people who care, who’ve “dedicated their careers to this,” del Vecchio said.
“Those experts have collected data and understand it well enough that we can find areas with the greatest needs and target resources accordingly,” del Vecchio said. “All of that is in jeopardy.”
