(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will invest $100 million in President Donald Trump’s recovery initiative in hopes of ending addiction and assisting in recoveries.
Trump’s Great American Recovery Initiative is meant to be a White House–led coordination effort to end addictions, which are currently a national health crisis affecting nearly one in six Americans.
According to HHS, homelessness reached record highs under the Biden administration, claiming the system encouraged people with severe mental illness and addiction to cycle endlessly between sidewalks, emergency room visits, jails, mental hospitals and shelters rather than providing proper care.
Trump estimated 48.4 million U.S. citizens struggle with addiction, and few receive treatment, which the initiative is intended to address.
“Over the past year, we have made incredible progress in stopping the inflow of illegal drugs that threaten American communities. We must now supplement that work by furthering a national effort to prioritize addiction treatment and recovery,” Trump said.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., HHS secretary and co-chair of President Trump’s Great American Recovery Initiative, estimated that substance use disorders annually cost $93 billion a year in direct costs and nearly $920 billion socially to the economy.
“But the real cost manifests in broken families, lost potential, and communities pushed to the brink. This is a crisis that affects every American family,” Kennedy said.
The secretary also discussed the setbacks HHS experienced in past attempts to address addiction issues, pointing out how addictions have contributed to mental illness issues and homelessness, which HHS was unable to address properly under former President Joe Biden. However, with Trump’s new initiative, HHS is approaching addiction at a new angle.
“We are grounding our new policies on the hard learned lessons of experience and of gold standard science. We’re using evidence and not ideology, and we’re treating prevention as our first responsibility, because stopping addiction before it starts is the most effective intervention,” Kennedy added.
