President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions attended a panel discussion on opioid and drug abuse in March. | Getty Trump’s new opioids strategy ‘devastates’ advocates A proposal to slash funding for the drug control office is the latest worrying sign, advocates say.

President Donald Trump campaigned across the country promising to fix the opioid crisis, but public health advocates say his early moves are poised to make it far worse.

The newest development — a proposed 95 percent cut to the office leading the opioid fight — sparked concerns from within the agency and longtime addiction advocates.


"It’s devastating," said Kevin Sabet, who worked in the decades-old Office of National Drug Control Policy, advising the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations. "It’s the biggest cut I’ve ever seen or had to deal with."

It's the latest item in the Trump agenda that addiction advocates fear would erode the government's ability to fight an epidemic killing more than 47,000 Americans per year. Since taking office, the Trump administration has fought to pass an Obamacare repeal bill that would result in millions more without coverage; fired a surgeon general who led an unprecedented study of the opioid crisis; proposed billions of dollars of cuts to public health funding; and signaled a return to the tough-on-drugs approach to fighting addiction.

“These moves fly in the face of President Trump’s promise to address the nation's opioid epidemic,” said Rafael Lemaitre, who was a senior official with the drug policy office across three administrations. "This is an epidemic that steals as many lives as the Vietnam War took during the entire conflict, and Trump's moves remove some of the most effective tools."

The planned cut to the drug office, reported by POLITICO on Friday, would reduce funding from $388 million to $24 million next year and end the office’s drug-free communities and high-intensity drug trafficking programs. Both initiatives have bipartisan support in Congress.

The office's acting head, Rich Baum, described the proposed cuts as "frankly heartbreaking" in an internal email obtained by POLITICO. "I don't want to see this happen," wrote Baum, who was tapped by the Trump administration to lead the office in March.

The office's staff of 70 would essentially be cut in half and help support a temporary White House opioids commission led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Public health advocates have warned that Trump's new commission is duplicative, given that the surgeon general's office in November released a months-long study on how to combat addiction. But former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, an Obama appointee who led the addiction report, was frozen out by the Trump administration and fired last month.

A White House budget official declined to comment, stressing that the proposal is still under review and that the administration remains committed to "winning the war on drugs."

But staff within the drug control office say they've been told that they may lose their jobs and that the proposal is essentially awaiting Trump's review. “We have [three days] to change OMB’s mind,” one staff member said.

The plan to effectively eliminate the drug control office likely won't gain much traction in Congress, where there's bipartisan support for tackling the opioid problem. But it's sending worrying signals to Capitol Hill's most vocal addiction advocates.

"President Trump is clearly not committed to combating the opioid crisis if he plans to essentially abolish ONDCP," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told POLITICO. He added that Trump "needs to present a comprehensive strategy … that includes more than gutting critical federal agency budgets and building a border wall.”

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Advocates have warned that the Obamacare repeal bill passed by the House this week would only exacerbate the addiction problem. The bill would cut Medicaid funding by $880 billion, reducing program enrollment by 14 million below initial estimates. It would also reduce insurance protections that allow Americans with drug addictions to get mental health counseling, and it contains other cuts — like a 12 percent reduction in funding to the CDC — that are worrying public health advocates.

The bill "single-handedly threatens to kill insurance coverage for millions of people enrolled in life-saving treatment and mental health services,” said Grant Smith of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Efforts to end the opioid crisis will be put in grave jeopardy."

Some Republicans in states ravaged by the opioid crisis are trying to save Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has argued that his state's expansion has helped people with addictions get counseling and job training that make the difference between relapse and recovery. "If we don’t do that, people will be clogging our jails and our emergency rooms and all of us will pay more in terms of the cost of those institutions, which are not equipped to handle it, and the cost of crime," Portman said in an interview last month.

Sabet says advocates are already gearing up to fight the proposed cut to the drug control office. "We’re assembling the largest number of anti-drug groups ever to mobilize against this plan," he said, sharing a list of more than 200 organizations that have already signed on within hours.

The White House has internally framed the planned cut to the office as a part of its broader plan to streamline the administrative state. "The president and his Cabinet are working collaboratively to create a leaner, more efficient government that does more with less of taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars," one administration official told POLITICO. Another said that the office would be redundant, given the new White House opioids commission.

"You know what’s redundant and a waste of time, effort and money?” a longtime drug policy official countered. “The commission.”