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Yesterday’s news that the Trump Administration has plans to cut federal funding for health and human services and to zero out finding for federal behavioral health (SAMHSA) and disability services and supports (ACL) makes our need to have the best information, alliances and strategy available to deal with these very ominous times ever more essential!

We hope and believe that next week’s Alliance Annual Execute Seminar’s program can explore how these threats might directly affect ���������� State and ���������� City service systems and citizens and suggest actions that we can take to protect and promote who and what we hold most dear, including:

• national panelists the National Council’s Chuck Ingoglia, the Bazelon Center’s Jennifer Mathis (formerly of the Department of Justice), Paolo del Vecchio (former director of SAMHSA’s Office of Recovery, Mental Health America’s Caren Howard and the Alliance’s Luke Sikinyi as well as our
• NYS/NYC panelists OMH and DOHMH executive deputy commissioners Moira Tashjian and Dr. H. Jean Wright, Medicaid Matter’s Lara Kassel, disability rights leader Ruth Lowenkron and InUnity Alliance’s Jihoon Kim.

Take a look at the attached program for details about those and the entire program.

We know some of you have already be faced with funding cuts and we anticipate that more might be on the horizon:
that’s why we’ve cut our program rate down to $99 for the 2-day program.

The Seminar will be held at the Albany Mariott this coming Thursday-Friday (April 24-25)

Register for the conference here and for the Marriott Hotel .
See you next week!

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Alliance April 17^th Alert: The following summary was developed from information provided by a number of outlets, most notably the Washington Post and Politico.

HHS Budget Facing Possible 1/3 Cut; SAMHA and ACL to be Eliminated
Alliance for Rights and Recovery     April 17, 2025

The Trump administration is seeking to deeply slash budgets for federal health programs, a roughly one-third cut in discretionary spending by the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a leaked draft that is under analysis by a large host of media outlets.

See the draft at .

The HHS budget draft, known as a “passback,” offers the first full look at the health and social service priorities of President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget as it prepares to send his 2026 fiscal year budget request to Congress. It shows how the Trump administration plans to reshape the federal health agencies that oversee food and drug safety, manage the nation’s response to infectious-disease threats and drive biomedical research.

Deep HHS Cuts

• The Trump administration is seeking to deeply slash budgets for federal health programs, a roughly one-third cut in discretionary spending by the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS would be asked to absorb a $40 billion cut, about one-third of its discretionary budget. HHS had a discretionary budget of about $121 billion in fiscal 2024, but under the Trump administration’s preliminary outline, it would see a decrease to $80 billion.
• The overall cutback in HHS funding would be driven by zeroing out the budgets of several smaller agencies and programs, including those focused on substance abuse and services for low-income and older Americans, to shift a slimmed-down selection of their activities into a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America.

Mental Health, Substance Use, Disability Focused Agencies and more…

• The proposal suggests eliminating funding for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Health Resources and Services Administration, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Administration for Community Living, along with a handful of other smaller programs.
• Services for people with disabilities were particularly affected when HHS announced its reorganization, including the gutting of the Administration for Community Living. The remaining bits of the agency — which served as a federal hub for disability education, policy and grantmaking — will be divided up elsewhere. Not every program will survive the move, however. The preliminary budget eliminates several programs that supported seniors, including chronic disease management, fall prevention and assistance for people struggling to navigate Medicare.

More Details of the Proposed Cuts

• The proposal would reduce the more than $47 billion budget of the NIH to $27 billion — a roughly 40 percent cut. It would consolidate NIH’s 27 institutes and centers into just eight. Some of its institutes and centers would be eliminated, including the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and the National Institute of Nursing Research.
• The proposal would cut the CDC’s budget by about 44 percent, from $9.2 billion to about $5.2 billion, and would eliminate all of the agency’s chronic disease programs and domestic HIV work. The chronic disease programs being eliminated include work on heart disease, obesity, diabetes and smoking cessation.
• Money for the Head Start program, which provides early child care and education for low-income families and is funded by HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, would be eliminated. “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations and performance standards for any form of education,” the document says.

Administration for a Healthy America

• A new, $20 billion agency named the Administration for a Healthy America would be created. AHA would include many pieces of other agencies that are being consolidated — such as those focused on primary care, environmental health and HIV.
• AHA would have $500 million in policy, research and evaluation funding to be allocated by Kennedy to support “Make America Healthy Again” initiatives, including a focus on chronic childhood diseases. But many specific programs would be eliminated under AHA, according to the document, including programs focused on preventing childhood lead poisoning, bolstering the health-care workforce, advancing rural health initiatives and maintaining a registry of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

NEXT STEPS

• While Congress often ignores the president’s budget request, this has not been a typical transition to a new administration. Trump and his allies in Congress have made clear they want to smash the status quo by drastically reducing the size of the federal government and scrubbing it of programs and research efforts seen as wasteful or contrary to administration priorities.
• It is unclear which proposed cuts will stand in the budget proposal to Congress — and whether lawmakers will accept them. During the first Trump administration, Congress rejected some of the administration’s proposals, including a.
• The proposal is still subject to change as the White House prepares to send a formal budget proposal to Congress. An HHS spokesperson referred questions to OMB. OMB spokesperson Rachel Cauley said that “no final funding decisions have been made.”