Support for Patients and Communities Reauthorization Act of 2025

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. TONKO. Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for yielding.

Mr. Chair, SAMHSA's stated mission is to lead public health and service delivery efforts that promote mental health, prevent substance misuse, and provide treatments and supports to foster recovery while ensuring access to better outcomes for all.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the public servants at SAMHSA work every day to prevent overdoses and suicides and save lives.

As a longtime champion for behavioral health parity and access to treatment and as co-chair of the Congressional Addiction, Treatment, and Recovery Caucus, bipartisan in nature, there have been a few questions on my mind.

For instance, how many public servants need to be fired at SAMHSA before we say enough? How many suicide prevention trainings need to be canceled before Republicans can speak out? How many lifesaving naloxone trainings need to be canceled for Republicans to say anything? How many lives need to be lost before Republicans tell the Trump administration to stop the decimation of SAMHSA?

I have other questions, too. They are simple ones like: How many people work at SAMHSA currently? What divisions have no staff left at all? What programs have they had to cut in local communities?

In February, following the firing of probationary employees, I started asking these questions. Since the firing of nearly 50 percent of SAMHSA's staff, I have continued asking those questions. To date, I have gotten zero answers--zero.

Currently, we have lost 50 percent of SAMHSA's staff, and it is not HHS or the Trump administration that shared that with Congress. We only have confirmation that SAMHSA lost half of its staff from the press and from the former SAMHSA employees. That simply is unacceptable.

As a Congress, if we say we care about behavioral health and if we say there is a crisis, then we should be ashamed that we are okay not knowing this. For 4 months, we have been asking questions. Instead of answers, we have even more concerning questions.

I shared with our Committee on Energy and Commerce chair that, as the committee that has jurisdiction over SAMHSA, how do we not have these very important answers? This affects every community in the country, and our first action should be finding out these answers.

If the administration refuses to come in, then let's bring in the fired employees. These people are some of the most dedicated public servants who did this work for all of the right reasons, and they served an incredible need.

On behalf of all Americans, I thank all of the fired SAMHSA employees for their service to our Nation. They deserved better. Frankly, all Americans deserved better. Our loved ones should have access to effective addiction treatment, prevention and recovery support, and behavioral health support and services.

The recent actions of this Trump administration are betraying the goal of access to behavioral health treatment and support. RFK and Donald Trump have proposed to eliminate SAMHSA as an independent agency, burying it somewhere in the so-called Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA.

Let's remember that the whole reason Congress moved SAMHSA into an independent agency was to ensure that behavioral health was prioritized despite the longstanding stigma.

Instead, AHA would take us back to the time that behavioral health is tucked away in another agency and deprioritized. When the agency is gutted, the programs and the mission suffer. Ultimately, the individuals we are trying to help with their mental health and substance use struggles will simply not get the support they need. People will die.

I beg my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: Let's reverse course. We have an obligation to protect SAMHSA's mission and all of our constituents who SAMHSA serves. Like many of my colleagues, I support the programs in this package, but it is completely disingenuous and, frankly, outrageous that Republicans are here today trying to pat themselves on the back as doing something meaningful for those struggling with addiction while the entire agency we are authorizing programs for is being dismantled.

The people doing the work we are authorizing have all been fired, and the administration is proposing even more draconian cuts for mental health and substance use programs in the 2026 budget.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. TONKO. Mr. Chair, give me a break. It is like we are trying to heal a bullet wound with a Band-Aid. I am regrettably going to have to vote ``no'' and would respectfully ask my Republican colleagues to pause today's vote and, instead, focus our attention on responding to the actual crisis at SAMHSA.

Let's stop this performance. Instead, let's do the right thing and walk out right now and meet, make calls, and work together to stop this madness. Let's actually do something to meet this moment before it is too late and we no longer have an agency focused on behavioral health.

This is truly a performative vote if Republicans are too scared to say anything when the agency is being decimated and the mission is on the line. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to go home and say they voted for support, but my colleagues won't mention that. It will never be implemented because the funding and staff are gone.

Let's return to my initial question: How many lives need to be lost before Republicans tell the Trump administration to stop the decimation of SAMHSA? If Republicans go forward with this vote today while staying silent as this administration takes the chain saw to SAMHSA, then it is clear that my Republican colleagues are willing to let SAMHSA lose all of its capacity to serve its mission to save lives.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source